New post up today on Seattle 2.0:

Professionally produced media is undergoing dramatic changes driven by recent major business development deals. Some examples:

• Netflix signed an enormous deal with Relativity Media.
• Hulu is launching Hulu Plus to (finally) get Glee, The Office, and other full seasons of popular TV series to users on demand (rather than just the last five episodes).
• Redbox is planning an unlimited streaming service to compete with both of them.

However, in the rush to disrupt the existing models, people are forgetting the lesson learned in the music industry; aggregation of content provides the best experience for users and the biggest profit opportunity for the owners. Simply said:  aggregation wins. >>

Whenever business model trumps user experience, the end users suffer. And that opens the door to your competitors.

New post on Seattle 2.0 today:

Fanatic users are not as hard to find as you may think. A successful entrepreneur could do worse than spending all day and night recruiting them. Yet, all but a few entrepreneurs fail miserably when it comes to finding, talking with, and winning these incredibly valuable partners. How do you avoid this all too common mistake? >>

There were endless jokes about tea bagging, but I thought I’d take the moderately safe road. I heard an interesting comment the other day about your public persona – either be totally open or create a new persona and stick to it. Kevin Smith has done the former, Jason Calcanis has done the latter, and both are extremely successful. The funny part is that I’m not really trying to hide anything, I’m just not interested in having something vulgar be in the title.

New post up on Seattle 2.0 today:

"The only 'intuitive' interface is the nipple. After that, they’re all learned." – various attribution, most commonly to Bruce Ediger

While there is some debate (especially among new mothers!) how intuitive the nipple is, the nipple is the perfect product. It fits exactly to spec, even without user testing and with a variable user group. It's extremely portable and instantly available in a wide variety of environments (hot, cold, wet, dry, etc). It's (mostly) instant on, and (mostly) intuitive, and works without even thinking, when one or both users are half asleep. But best of all, it was designed with a singular purpose for a very select audience segment, and, for that segment and that audience, it is a wholly complete solution. >>

Marvel as I work even MORE body parts into a single blog post! Plus, I get the chance to mention the OXO cups (again) – man do I love those.

New post up on Seattle20.com today:

Agility, in the world of software, is the focus on iterating quickly on customer demands, releasing regularly, and getting accurate customer feedback to start the process all over again. Instead of spending countless weeks and months gathering requirements and then putting together the absolute perfect product, the idea is that you release a MVP— minimum viable product —as soon as humanly possible and then change it based on what you see people doing with a live version of your product. There's a lot to love about this philosophy: it's creative, it's easy to test, and, best of all, it throws all the old ways of doing things under the bus! More >>

People who look to agile software development as a panacea are just as mistaken as those who think it’s a load of crap. Best part of today’s blog post – did you know that beer is 11,000 years old?

Obviously the big news this week is the iPhone 4. So, without further ado, let me review … the Blackberry Curve 8530!

Basically, I was getting sick of T-Mobile and, worse, the absolutely horrendous G1, and needed to get something. I fully expect to be back on the Smartphone side within a year, so I up and got the cheapest contract I could (1 year) on the best carrier (Verizon) with the best phone that does what I need (e-mail, and minimal browsing).

Here’s what I have discovered, in no particular order.

First, the Blackberry is so undiscoverable and non-intuitive, I have no idea how it ever caught on. Every action is buried under a single ‘magic’ button, with no indication at all what you’re going to get when you hit it. Options? Forward email? About? Just doesn’t make sense.

The keyboard shortcuts are so unexpected that there are literally thousands of pages out there that do nothing else but recount all these hotkeys – which are totally necessary because without them, the phone is basically unusable.

The browser is bad. No, “bad” is the wrong word. Remember cowboy movies from the 40s where everyone good is dressed in white and everyone bad is in dressed in black, and you knew exactly who was really bad based on how much black they were wearing? Now imagine in the middle of the movie, all the people dressed COMPLETELY in black got together in some mountain cave to recount all their evil deeds. The MC of said gathering would be EXTRA bad; he’d likely be a fat banker of some kind, have a mustache and a monocle and fold his hands together when he talked, a la Mr. Burns. Now imagine you got all those mustached bankers together, from all the evil caves in all the world for some networking event in Transylvania. The owner of the castle where they were having their hor d’oeuvres and recounting how much they had swindled out of grandmothers and orphans would be some ULTRA bad guy, potentially even half vampire or something equally evil. Now imagine that guy fucked the devil and they had a baby. And imagine THAT baby fucked Hitler, and THEY had a baby.

That child, roughly speaking, is very close to being NEARLY as FUCKING HORRIBLE AS THE BROWSER ON THE BLACKBERRY CURVE IS.

I say this with no exaggeration whatsoever, I have had a worse browsing experience in the past week than I did in 1992, when all I knew how to use was gopher on AIX 3.2. I have no idea what RIM was thinking, but the quality of the display, the rendering speed, the download speed and the “support” for anything beyond reading a pure text page on your local machine is so bad, I don’t know why you would even bother. In fact, when I accidentally click a link in email, and it opens the abortion they call a browser, it makes me want fly to Ontario and just start punching everyone I see there in the face for being located in the same city as the people who designed this thing. Though, candidly, it’s probably a bit generous to even say “opens” since all the “browser” really does it show me the goddamn loading screen for five fucking minutes. And, Opera Mini, the “solution” is even worse – because all I get to do is LOOK at a screenshot of what may or may not be a web page – it’s so slow, and zooming is so weak as a UI metaphor, why even bother. 

Apps – yee-ikes. Yeah, there are some apps out there. But they are so far behind everyone else in the world, it’s a joke to try and compare them. My browsing experience on the phone or on the Web looking for some simple solutions (a voice recorder, a stop watch, etc) was miserable. I found what I was looking for, but there were so many garbage apps, so many projects that haven’t been updated in years, and so few ratings (to help me figure out which were real and which weren’t) that I wish I hadn’t started looking in the first place.

And with all that bile, it is the single greatest email tool ever created. How and why Outlook and/or the iPhone don’t use these metaphors are beyond me. For those that are unfamiliar -

• U = next unread
• Delete key = delete (is there a way to go to next unread message?)
• R = reply
• L = reply all
• F = forward

I can navigate through an unlimited amount of mail as fast as I can mow down zombies in an FPS. For this purpose, and this purpose alone, it is AWESOME. For everything else, let me tell you, do NOT look into the abyss -- they don’t have enough Bactine in the world to heal your wounds after coming back.

New post up on Seattle 2.0:

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to have a friend of mine stop by, and actually had five minutes free to go out for a cup of coffee. We got to talking about where we were, and the things that were sucking up all our available bandwidth. He had recently helped sell the startup he was working at to a much larger company, worked the minimum amount of time necessary to finish off his responsibilities and has branched out into a new new thing. It's always interesting to speak to someone who has gone round with the full lifecycle of a company and on to the new one. He reflected on his previous ridiculous hours, and his current ridiculous hours, and the fact that, despite his best efforts, the most meaningless stuff fills up all that time. When I asked him what his solution was to getting actual work done, he responded without skipping a beat, "Find a barber." >>

That’s it… I’m shaving my head.

More efficiency talk on Seattle 2.0:

What's that you say? You don't work on an hourly rate? Wrong. You absolutely work on an hourly rate, and if you don't treat your job that way, it's a recipe an inefficient work day.  >>

Now if I could only figure out a way for someone to pay me to watch True Blood…

New post up on Seattle 2.0:

How sexy are you? Rate yourself how attractive you are to the opposite sex (or same sex for non-traditional folks) - be honest. Now take that number and add/subtract 2 from it. There are many who would suggest that you should not marry anyone outside that range - the experiences you have in life, and the type of person that it makes you, will create too big a rift for you to overcome over time (this does not apply to shorter term relationships). A similar guideline applies when deciding who to work with in your business. >>

It’s HARD WORK looking this good.

Answer: lots and lots of people. New post up on Seattle 2.0 :

[T]he fact is that, even with years of (public) neglect, there were hundreds of millions of desktops which required IE working exactly as IE had always been. And this was the blessing and a curse that underlies where IE is today. >>>

In the world of the Web, where people constantly focus on the new new thing, there are worse places to be than majority having hundreds of millions of users as an installed base.

A new blog post up on Seattle 2.0:

Correlation does not equal causality – especially when it comes to running a successful business. If you have suddenly had a breakthrough, and, finally, are making some money, gaining market share, winning customers – be sure you know WHY or else you're likely to have all your success taken away just as quickly as it was bestowed upon you. More >>>

There is no greater force in the world than self-delusion.

New Blog post up on Seattle 2.0:

It is ironic then that the second time around people will make some of the biggest mistakes themselves. In fact, when you take on your next project, whatever it might be, the WORST thing you can do is spend a ridiculous amount of time and energy trying not to make the mistakes you made the first time around. More >>

Go and learn how being a naive fool may not be as bad as you think.

I have a new post out on Seattle 2.0:

Envy the paper boy. When the papers are delivered in the morning, he knows exactly how much work has ahead of him. He knows how long it takes to fold and put a rubber band/plastic bag around each and stuff it in a bag. He knows how much the bag weighs, and where along the journey it’ll be hardest to carry. At the end of their route, he knows when he's done. And when he walks away from his route, he's done for the day, he doesn't have to think about anything work related until the next morning, giving him complete freedom for the day. What white collar worker can say this? We're all tethered to our Blackberries/iPhones/G1s, answering mails, being randomized to the nth degree and working against arbitrary and deadlines every hour of every day – and, more often than not, getting nothing really done. Yes, envy the paperboy. >>

The unquestionably most awesome part of this post was that it gave me the chance to include a screen shot from one of my favorite games of all time – Paperboy:

The game had handlebars for controls … come on! Man that game was cool.

Some three hours after the darn thing launched, here’s the view of the Apple store in University Village (photo taken, with some degree of irony, from my POS G1):

Like it or hate the iPad, like him or hate Steve Jobs – this line is one thing: desire.

Found this particularly funny (thanks TMQ – )

Apparently, marginal tax rate under Reagan was higher than Obama. TMQ’s got it right; it’s borrow and spend that’s the issue – something that’s been true for the last 4 presidents at least.

For those that are attempting to create the awesomest thing ever – you have some serious hurdles to overcome. Exhibit 1.