Category: Uncategorized

John Cass, who is doing some very interesting work with his Corporate Blog Survey, talked with me about my recent bug reporting stunt:

I recently received some criticism of the blog survey case studies interviews in the marketing and PR forum of SoftwareCEO.com, a forum member had suggested I should not accept statements from large company employee like Microsoft at face value, and that their statements were probably just marketing boosterism. Inspired by this critic I thought I’d contact Ken directly to get his thoughts on the case study.

It was my first interview, and it shows in the quotes. Nonetheless, I had lots of fun talking to John about the bug report and pontificating on the state of Microsoft.

Bob Parsons:

I worked as hard as I did because I loved the idea I was working towards creating. My father told me once (what a wise individual he was!) that for anyone to be excellent at what they were doing, they had to love it. He said that if you didn’t love you job, you would never be better than average. When I asked him why this was the case, he told me something I would never forget. He said, “When you love something, it tells you all its secrets.” This always made a lot sense to me. Those who love what they do, spend the extra time to learn the subtle nuances and all the not so obvious things that overall make a tremendous difference. The secrets I would soon discover were what made Parsons Technology come alive.

(via Randy Holloway)

Nichole L. Torres: “Some of the most successful businesses in the world only came to be after a few serious failures. From prototypes that don’t work to a service that doesn’t sell in your local area, a first business can quickly turn into a first failure. But can you as an entrepreneur come back into the fray and start again—successfully?” (via Dane)

Marshall Brain: “If you can look at your life, your business, your situation, whatever and you can say to yourself, ‘I have a problem, and the problem is ____,’ you are often 80% of the way to solving your problem.”

I Can’t Stop Thinking: “Saving money was never the point — getting a hundred times as much music was! And file-sharing was not an indicator of a generation of thieves — but evidence of a record and radio industry that had been forcing musicians and listeners to walk the plank for one too many years.” (via Steve)

Michael Hiemstra:”If you look at the long tail as a graph, traveling along the X-axis you would see a short period of very high values quickly tapering off to a much longer period of shorter values. For instance, if you record every time you hear your kids screaming for a month and line them up on a graph based on the actual severity of the problem from most severe to least severe, chances are you would end up with a good picture of the long tail. There might be one or two real reasons for concern with the majority of the issues having something to do with a bothersome brother or sister flipping channels on the TV or making the wrong type of face.”

Eric Sink:”In this article, I’m going to surface a few principles of software product competition by drawing comparisons to games.”

The Business Experiment:

The Business Experiment is a site meant to explore three concepts: wisdom of crowds, open-source business, and the distributed nature of work. The goal is to have the registered users of this site collectively start and run a real business. Business plans will be written. Financing will be sought (if needed). Employees will be hired. Systems of accountability will be put into place.

Will Price:

Today’s papers are rife with horror stories of projects failing – from the FBI’s abandoned $170m internal IT project, to EDS’ failing Navy contract, to incredible cost overruns and delays in the Pentagon’s weapons development programs.

What does all this mean for venture capital and for executive teams?

Paul Allen keeps an Internet entrepreneur’s reading list. What other books would you add to the list?