Blog Yes & Know

Separating "How" from "What:" An open letter to the tech industry

One of the advantages of working as a consultant is that you get to look at the big picture across corporations. You can see trends and common themes that might not be obvious to somebody working in a single company.
One of the themes that’s become very clear lately is our industry’s difficulty telling the difference between “how” and “what” when designing products.

Consumers to Corporations: Where's My Experience?

With a print job deadline looming, I Googled on Kinko’s, figuring I’d get their number and call before I went over. Clicking again for more information, I was faced with the FedEx landing page. Suddenly, my services and solution were reduced to 8-point type–the most subsidiary of subsidiaries–and the services I wanted were nowhere to be found.

We think we know… but we don't

Product Managers and Marketing people often think we know our customers and what they want from us. But let me challenge that thinking. If we knew more about our customers …

Spotlight on HP's Campaign

Great marketing is about demand creation. It’s about filling an unfulfilled need, or creating a need and then filling it. When done right, it’s magical to experience. Marketing has many …

Web 3.0 & the Real Market Requirement

You know the really cool thing about a summit full of smart people is that it causes a dialogue in the room and online. So what’s next on the consumer …

Here's a tip on Silicon Valley insults

I didn’t know I could go to a technology conference and see an insult on stage. But only if you knew the background would you feel a gasp welling inside …

The "Lamest Feature Ever" on a Corporate Weblog

All right, it’s probably not the lamest one ever. But it’s the lamest one we’ve seen in quite a while.
Sprint has a weblog that lists podcasts the company has created. That’s fine. But for some reason the site has a prominent tool to let the user change the background highlight color used in the weblog’s graphics. Not the whole background, just the highlight color. And there are only four choices.

Solving the Puzzle: Pricing, Licensing & Business Models

Today, almost all software vendors are doing something in the SaaS arena. Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Yahoo! and Google are well-know SaaS developers, but IBM, Oracle, SAP, and Symantec are all moving that way too. Single-user desktop applications are under the least pressure, and are moving the slowest.