Today is election day in much of the US. It isn’t a Presidential Election so many people won’t vote. Most municipalities will have a few referendums, some school board officials, and maybe a judge or city councilman on the ballot. Since it is not a big election with a lot of TV time, the turnout was relatively low and so conversations start to theorize about voting online.
The argument goes that I can buy many things if not everything that I need online, why can’t I vote? This is much the argument that CNN made today. Unfortunately one cannot make this comparison and even if that comparison was valid, we still shouldn’t do it.
Microsoft used to be the first follower of the computer software. They used to take all of the good things that were in the OS or software offerings from their competitors and put those offerings into Microsoft offerings. Now Microsoft is so confused, they aren’t even being good followers.
I want to be fair, it is okay to be a first follower. In fact, it is often a great strategy. They can take the great ideas from the computing world and improve them to offer to their consumers at a much lower cost. This has been the modus operandi of Microsoft for decades. This must be a particular trait of Bill Gates that Steve Ballmer just doesn’t have. Since Billy left Microsoft, Microsoft cannot even seem to copy good ideas anymore.
I just read a great article over at The Marketing Tech Blog that I think anyone in sales or marketing should read. In fact, I think everyone in business should pay attention to number 3! I am not going to quote the entire article on this site but I will give the 5 bullet points. You can jump over to the original site and enjoy the full article.
The generic private message
Preemptive Disclaimers
Abuse of carbon copy
The Soft Opt-In
The Random Cause Invitation
Number 3 is most interesting as so many people violate the simple rule:
Only use carbon-copy if you are 100% sure that 100% of the people on the list know each other well AND would appreciate the chance to immediately Reply-All AND would immediately appreciate any Reply-Alls.
Last night I had the opportunity to watch an old movie that I haven’t seen for ages. The movie was “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington” starring Jimmy Stewart. I will comment on the movie in a bit but first a few thoughts on how I watched it.
The rest of my family wasn’t interested in seeing the movie and it was a beautiful late summer evening. So I grabbed a bottle of wine and my iPad and moved to the patio and my hammock. I must admit that watching a streaming Netflix movie on my iPad on a comfortable evening was about as enjoyable as it can get.
A decade ago, I was traveling with one of the founders of the company that I worked for at the time, Timm Martin, and we arrived at the discussion of electronic books (ebooks). I said that I thought ebooks were the wave of the future and I wished that I could figure out how to start a company that was a part of that change. Timm, who was the technology visionary of our company, seemed to cautiously agree with me at the time and I think we both worried that the portable platform had yet to be created that made that prediction a certainty, at least in the near term.
I can attest to occasionally experiencing this problem. It is rather intermittent for me and I can mostly control the problem by not moving the phone from my ear during the conversation.
This is a little frustrating. I get the antenna being affected by my hand but this proximity sensor problem is just bad engineering (either software or hardware).
My thoughts on my new iPhone 4. I just received it yesterday from FedEx (it was fun watching the FedEx package being tracked from China through Hong Kong through Anchorage through Indianapolis and then to Loveland, OH where it was routed to me). I received it one day ahead of Apple’s expected revised delivery date.
I say “revised” because AT&T and Apple screwed up and missed my first delivery date. The unit was supposed to ship on July 2 but they updated their date on July 3 to say that it was going to ship a week or so later. I was upset and I called Apple – the very polite and professional rep apologized but couldn’t change the ship date. He did give me a bumper as a consolation gift – good thing too as it turns out.
I wish the brave aviator and his crew luck on their “around the clock” flight! Stories that show the ingenuity of science and engineering are always interesting and motivating.
Read the entire story here but here is a small excerpt:
An experimental solar-powered aircraft took off from a Swiss airbase here in the early hours of Wednesday in a bid to make history by flying round the clock and through the night. Solar Impulse whirred along the runway at Payerne in western Switzerland, reaching 35 kilometres per hour (22 mph) as lone pilot Andre Borschberg gently lifted into clear skies at 6.51 am (0451 GMT) on a scheduled 25 hour flight,
“This should be a great day of all goes well,” said team chief Bertrand Piccard, who made the first non-stop round-the-world flight in a balloon more than a decade ago.
Apple has recently put out an open letter explaining that they have made a mistake in calculating the signal strength bars on their hit product, the iPhone (all versions up to the latest iPhone 4). I am glad that they Apple code developers have stumbled on this bug and are producing a fix. We all know that there are a few more software bugs in every product, so it is no surprise that Apple has a bug in this portion of their code.
But, is that really the fix? No.
All wireless devices need antennas. If you are as old as I am, there is a chance that your first mobile phone was a “bag phone” or a “car installed phone”. These phones were massive and required a car or, at least, a briefcase to carry them around. The towers were so far dispersed that you needed a BIG antenna that was putting out mega-wattage to reach them. Putting that antenna up to your head would almost certainly turn your brain to scrambled eggs in a couple of weeks or so. These monsters were also analog and all you could do was talk on them (no texting – how in the world did we survive?).
I want to be fair, it is okay to be a first follower. In fact, it is often a great strategy. They can take the great ideas from the computing world and improve them to offer to their consumers at a much lower cost. This has been the modus operandi of Microsoft for decades. This must be a particular trait of Bill Gates that Steve Ballmer just doesn’t have. Since Billy left Microsoft, Microsoft cannot even seem to copy good ideas anymore.
