21
Aug 2010

Double Happiness

Spotted just now in Hong Kong. When single happiness just isn't enough...

12
Aug 2010
09
Aug 2010

Sharpie re-invents the pencil

01
Aug 2010
30
Jul 2010

Campbell Soup to Warholl: Thank you

I love how down-to-earth this is... I can't imagine what Warhol did with the soup. And one wonders: without the help of the pop-art icon, would Campbell Soup still be a household name?

30
Jul 2010

Amazing color photos circa 1900

Oh to have been the guy whose job it was to go around the world and capture all this stuff...

24
Jul 2010

If SharePoint is like Excel, it's like Excel with a rounding error

Earlier today a tweet sent me to this thoughtful article by Josh Greenbaum which argues that SharePoint should be thought of as the collaboration system equivalent of Microsoft Excel. Josh makes some strong points, mostly based on SharePoint's level of market penetration, suggesting that the system is too ubiquitous to be stopped or for other tools to really matter much.

Certainly SharePoint is the market leader, like Excel. And the army of customizers out there, ready to translate dreams of integration and ease of use into income are as happy to push the platform as the IT buyers who see a satisfied feature checklist and a well-known brand. But a better metaphor would be a version of Excel crippled by a calculation error that popped up uncontrollably throughout the system.

Collaboration software requires things like meaningful integration into workflows, intuitive interfaces, and a rewarding experience for end users in order to get people to adopt it in large scale. And large scale adoption is as essential for actual use of a collaboration system as accurate math is for a spreadsheet.

Spaces is designed to offer the capabilities an organization looks for once they've come to realize that the old model of enterprise-software-forced-upon-the-user doesn't work for collaboration systems. In this sense the massive penetration of SharePoint is good news for nGenera and others who try to build stuff people actually want to use, as it means a lot of companies are on the road to that realization. I dare say educating organizations around the importance of adoption issues is one of the few things SharePoint can be counted on to do well.

24
Jul 2010

Clever marketing turns waiting for bags into ad opportunity

Spotted in the Munich airport...

11
Jul 2010

Bianchi blue: the ugly truth

10
Jul 2010

Korean gaming wizards: 300 ADD-infused "actions per minute"

I have no idea what StarCraft is, but man these kids make my mad nintendo skillz look downright circa 1980.