The Engineer
They did a study a few years back. Here's the gimmick: they created a lab where people could do searches on Yahoo!, and searches on Google, but the results from both were switched. The Google results page was actually display results from Yahoo!, formatted to look like Google results, and vice versa. The question was posed: which gave you better results? The answer was about what you would expect. Now, if you visit the Googleplex...
Piracy as a Red Herring
A couple of years ago, my girlfriend and I created a quick video as a present to a friend of mine, featuring a small cardboard cutout of Flat Stanley partying with an assortment of other stuffed animals we had lying around our apartment. Since the setting of the whole video was in a club, we set it to 50 Cent's "In Da Club". We put this video up on Facebook. It was up for a...
Minus
Some brilliant person discovered that Garfield is a whole lot more profound, entertaining, and funny if you just remove Garfield from it entirely.
It's a judicious use of a less commonly used operator. Improve by taking away, not adding.
Waiting in Line
I went into the Apple store and bought something for the first time ever the other day. It was a small purchase, nothing more than a keyboard. In my dealings with Apple as a consumer, I almost always come away with something good to say. (As a developer, it's a slightly different story.) When I told the employee helping me I wanted to check out, he pulled the cash register out of his pocket. It...
Bundling
I'm out of town for Christmas this year, as is my girlfriend. We have absolutely no need for the Internet in our apartment for the two weeks or so that we're going to be gone. But we're going to pay for it, because you pay monthly, and the service can't be turned on and off by request. Phil Spector once said that he hated albums; he described them as being two singles and filler. The...
Gift of Giving
I think I understand the idea: you give someone a greeting card, and inside there's a message that reads, "A donation of $20 has been made in your name to [charity name here]". The problem is, this doesn't work. It makes the giver feel good, twice over, but it doesn't make the recipient feel much of anything. Whatever that powerful feeling is that results from generosity is non-transferable. The best the recipient can hope for...
Mythology
At my last job, our office was on the second floor of a two-story building. The office was on top, and below us was a retail bridal shop. One day, one of the ladies working downstairs came up to talk to us about something. At some point, she asked us, "Have you guys heard the ghost yet?" What ghost, we all asked, eyebrows raised. "Oh, there's a ghost up here. The people who occupied this...
Rule Breakers
Let me preface this post by saying that I know absolutely nothing about the internal workings of public education. I'm not qualified to offer suggestions about how to make how it works better. But I take it on good authority (by that, I mean teachers working in public education) that the tried and true solutions in the business world can't just be applied to public education. I think they're right. And I'll go them one...
Bob Ross
One of the most popular art shows ever to air on television wasn't even really about art. I've watched "The Joy of Painting" dozens or even hundreds of times since I first discovered him in sixth grade. And yet, I haven't picked up a paint brush since I did those paint-by-number watercolor books when I was in elementary school. I bet a lot of his viewers are like me, and have never even tried painting,...
Consumer Electronics
Recently, I thought it would be a good idea to open up a small, independent consumer electronics store. My thinking is that "Wired" magazine is a really compelling periodical that stays on the cutting edge of technology. The audience of the magazine is pretty mainstream, but there's certainly a small segment of people reading it that really geek out over new tech products. A retail chain like Radio Shack or Best Buy serves a mainstream...