The Fear Factory

CBS sixty minutes really put me in a bad way sunday night. They ran a story on the "infected internet" that turned out to be a 15 minute commercial for anti virus software. The president of Symantec got most of the airtime. You can catch another blog post on it that pretty much sums up my feelings. Nowhere was it mentioned that the star of the show, the conficker virus, can only infect Windows computers. You can come up with any number of reasons why that might be, depending on how much you like a good conspiracy theory. What do we do? Laugh? Cry? I don't know, but I'm just mad. I'm mad that technogists are not responsible enough to tell the truth rather than base their products on lies. I'm mad Microsoft does not bother to re build their operating system to quelch most of the problems. And I'm especially mad that web users will just accept this fear mongering as truth. But really, what choice do they have? I'm not sure how to react to the growing fear factory motivated by greed, but for now we're going to continue to focus on a great user experience, and hope that doing good begets good.

Flying Cars

Why is it that we are so fixated on marginal improvements in our lives. I came across a story in the Register this past week that reminded me of the tunnel vision we often have of the future. The story is a tongue in cheek bit on a "real" flying car. It's comforting to know that there are other people who find the humor in this. A flying car is only a marginal improvement to the car, but is fundamentally the same solution to the transportation problem. One of my favorite quotes of all time is "If I had built what everyone wanted, I would have built a better horse." from Henry Ford. The truth is that we have the ability to think outside the margins as children, but sadly, it gets "educated" out of us, and we grow up to be reasonable adults. I wish everyone would be a little less reasonable. General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler are like a characters in a high school horror movie who step through a broken door. You know there's a guy in there with chainsaw, but no matter how much you scream at them to stop, they keep going. Not even a flying car is going to save them. Not even an electric car for that matter.

Don't forget simplicity.

We hear it so often in the small business and entrepreneurial world, that it has started to lose value. Yes, small businesses and entrepreneurs have an advantage over larger competitors because of our ability to remain nimble and move quickly. Yes, we all hope to capitalize on that advantage. I just returned from a great gathering and open discussion on ideas and best practices in product management in Boston over the past weekend. I got the chance to hear stories and learn from the practices of product managers in large organizations, small organiziations, and start ups. In particular, I noticed the complexity of effectively managing a product from within a large organization. Now, I have never worked for a very large organization, but I can only assume a level of bureaucracy needed to manage a large number of people as being neccessary, like this example. Unfortunately, I also spoke with a lot of people working in small organizations or startups that had intoroduced some very complex methods of product management into their organizations. This is too bad, because by doing this we lose one of our strongest characteristics. While I never promote ignorance, a certain level of nievity can't hurt in a small organization either. While I'm interested in seeing how large production teams manage their products, I can't imagine implementing their methods or best practices into a startup. Nor can I understand how a person would want to introduce such complexity into a small organization abeit for their own job security. "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery In my view we can start a company that is so complex that it must be slow moving, or so simple that it is not possible to be slow. As we work on our organization (and it is always a work in progress), we need make the reduction of complexity our top priority for our business and for our customers.