Tag: marketing

  • What does Apple have against the English language? (or how to restore a minimized window in Mac OS X with the keyboard)

    Recently, hell froze over and I bought a MacBook Air. As you might expect, between then and now, I’ve spent a lot of time learning about Mac OS X (not hard) and retraining my finger-muscle-memory for Mac keyboard shortcuts (very hard). Who decided that Ctrl-F3 is the keystroke to get to the Dock? Or, who decided…

  • Software only its mother could love

    I’m learning something, or actually re-learning, something fundamental about marketing: a new idea, a true breakthrough, won’t sell. I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been talking to people whose job it is to follow/report/blog about software. And more than one has told me that I once worked on a very original product that, despite…

  • Hell hasn’t quite frozen over: I almost learn to love Microsoft

    I started work on a post two days ago that was tentatively titled “Hell Freezes Over: I Learn to Love Microsoft.” I didn’t get far because, as anyone who knows me knows, I have this thing against Microsoft: I am still smarting from the way they competed with Lotus in the 90’s. They were ruthless,…

  • Email marketing results measured in basis points, and it’s all our fault

    This is post is for all my colleagues in the marketing biz. I want to tell you that we collectively destroyed email. What did we do that was truly stupid? Simple: we have so overdone email that now it’s useless for all of us. Have you noticed that no matter what you do — text…

  • With Alli, my lunch is in my pants

    (Photo courtesy of J. Star, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike) OK, so I know that what you blog about is a more-or-less semi-permanent record of you. Plus, I have clients who read this blog. And I might be just a little more over the top than usual with this post, but there’s a real marketing…