While in the process of writing several more substantive pieces, my disk drive crashed. This started a whirlwind of customer service calls.  As I get back to the other pieces, I couldn’t resist a short piece that summarizes an all-too-familiar customer experience. How many times have you called customer service, didn’t get the problem solved [...]

One would think that the big news from Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference was the overdue refresh of the MacBook Pro with a sharper screen or that they’ve dropped Google maps for their own mapping technology. Not so. The developer conference is a leading indicator.  It signals where Apple is heading; where they see the next [...]

When did “new and improved” become innovation? A search of annual and quarterly reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows companies mentioned some form of the word “innovation” 33,528 times last year – a 64% increase from five years before that.  More than 250 books with “innovation” in the title have been published [...]

Facebook Gets a Taste of the Social Consequences of an IPO I go nuts when I click on a friend’s Facebook posting that takes me to yet another Facebook app that wants access to my friends and other personnel data.  Facebook is forever pushing me to go public in a big way. As they say, [...]

What made Apple the most valuable company on earth?  Their relentless focus on creating extraordinary customer experience unveils opportunities others miss.   They attack them using proprietary hardware and software embedded into elegant consumer products that ultimately disrupt long standing business models. Because Steve Jobs told his biographer, Walter Isaacson that he’d finally “cracked TV” many [...]

This piece  offers a proven approach that will dramatically cut the deficit without cutting spending or raising taxes.  Interested? Run the government as a business but not any old business. Certainly we wouldn’t want to run it like the airlines.  Who’s going to advocate that Wall Street take over the remaining parts of government they [...]

Digitization has dramatically changed our world.  From Apple’s retina display which packs 326 pixels in a square inch to encoded keys that let us into offices, breaking the world into finer and finer granules of 1’s and 0’s has changed our lives. But for these devices to work they need a power source, logic software [...]

Steve Jobs was not a quiet presence.  In Walter Isaacson’s biography, colleagues described how one could go from exalted hero to useless zero overnight.  Love him or hate him, Jobs inserted himself relentlessly – with one notable exception. Pixar’s John Lasseter stands out as the one person who Jobs consistently granted far more space. To [...]

Have you ever written a piece that was for internal consumption and mistakenly posted it publicly? Ouch! That’s essentially what Google’s Steve Yegge did last week on Google+ when he inadvertently published “Stevey’s Google Platforms Rant” to the world.  As you’d imagine, it went viral pretty quickly.  And it elicited the expected public apology from [...]

Mark my words, Amazon has just introduced the world’s second successful tablet. Here’s why: Point of View (POV): Amazon designed the product based on what they do best rather than mimicking Apple.  Yes it uses Android and will run Android apps but it’s not an Android trying to be an Apple. Price, price and price: [...]