Hands up if you use Dashboard on Mac OS X. I said hands up. Hello? As for me, I installed Mac OS X Lion, discovered where they shoved Dashboard, and immediately turned it off. Good riddance. Like iChat AV before it, Dashboard was one of those features in Mac OS X that I loved to… more
Much has been written about employee motivation and retention. It’s written by folks who actively use words like motivation and retention and generally don’t have a clue about the daily necessity of keeping your team professionally content because they’ve either never done the work or have forgotten how it’s done. These are the people who… more
Flat. It’s an organizational meme in rapidly growing teams in the Valley and it contains a couple of noble ideas. Simply put: a flat organization is one with as little hierarchy as possible to encourage the individual voice. What’s not to love? The first challenge to the flat organizational mantra is the inevitable arrival of… more
In an otherwise elegant and well-integrated operating system, the notifications user interface in iOS 4.x feels like a wart — a tacked-on afterthought that offers a bare minimum of usefulness. Competitors have jumped all over this weakness. An early Microsoft Windows Phone ad implies a strategic notifications deficiency by showing users glued to their iPhones…… more
Early on in your mastery of a complex thing you are going to catastrophically overestimate your ability. Your confidence is going to be artificially high. This new job, hobby, or sport is going to appear magically easy. You’re going to feel gifted. Those watching your miraculous aptitude keep saying, “beginner’s luck”, but that’s neither what… more
Dear Summer Interns: Your stock is up — like way up. Ten years ago when I was hiring interns at the mothership, my incredibly flawed and shortsighted policy was to hire as many as they’d let me, dole ’em out to the teams that screamed the loudest, and see what happened. There were successes, we… more
The fifth version of Rands in Repose has been a long time coming, but it’s close. The design is done and the migration of content is mostly complete. The process of learning an entirely new publishing platform is underway and mostly painless. What remains is an ever-growing list of details supplied by the act of… more
Phil’s team is adrift. Phil is smart and meeting-friendly, but he’s a crap people manager and that crappiness is slowly poisoning his team. You know how bad it is because the star of Phil’s team finds ways to schedule meetings with you where the story is always the same: “He’s smart, but he is genetically… more
It started that morning when you actually had time to go to your favorite coffee shop on that Wednesday morning. You, like many of us, had a bunch of time off for Christmas, so you decided, “I never go to that coffee shop and it’s one of my favorite places to think. Fuck it, I’m… more
On my list of horrendously bungled acquisitions, I put Delicious near the top. Since its acquisition by Yahoo in 2005, the biggest user-facing change to the site was a visual refresh in 2008. Even with this rampant feature stagnation, I’d stuck with the site because it solved a daily need for me — bookmarks anywhere.… more