Archive for July, 2008

This is pretty funny…

Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency

Walt has a little “how-to” piece on switching from Windows to a Mac – if anything this piece exposes that there is little difference between the two. Windows matches Apple feature for feature and does more in many categories.

He also fails to point out features in Windows that are pretty neat… for instance, on switching programs – holding the windows key down and hitting tab will give you a visual rolodex of your applications – this is really useful if working on a multitude of PowerPoint presentations. Which, you’d be doing on a lesser version of Office if using a Mac.

And oh, Apple does have a right click button (actually, I know this – have a few macs kicking about). The fact they make it difficult to use is ignored. How about putting a right click button on the mouse?

I also get a chuckle of the misuse of data – “Sales of Apple’s Macintosh computers have been growing much faster than PC sales overall” – ok – off a very small share the percentile number is ok. But lets put that in perspective – Dell’s total increase in notebook sales last quarter – just the increase – nearly dwarfed all Apple notebook sales. I’ll take our increase over there total shipments any day. And the much maligned Vista is out shipping them as well.

Let me see, a PC costs less, same or better features, more applications, is faster… hmmm…. why change?

We’ve been chatting lots about Digital Nomads lately – so reading Steve’s column I wonder if he has our offices bugged 🙂

We are clearly at the tipping point at which notebook sales are going to outpace desktops. And social media tools are going to ignite Digital Nomadism. They are really going to force us to rethink how we communicate.

For instance, email should be decreasing as a communications tool. It’s the last vestige of the opaque. And I’d argue, a productivity hole of unprecedented proportions when compared to the speed and distribution effectiveness of social media tools. The brilliance of social media tools like Twitter and Friendfeed is that I am interested in what I am interested in. The annoying thing about email is that people I assume I am interested in their conversation or what they are sending me. Email is appalling for archival and workgroup productivity – Blogs and Wikis are great. I’d go as far to say that Enterprises that grok and answer the needs of Digital Nomads will be significantly advantaged.

Steve points to a guy I mentioned in my earlier posts on email – Luis Suarez who works for IBM out of the Canary Islands and has virtually eliminated all business email in favor collaborating via social networks. I’m not sure I could go exclusively off the grid – but I do aim to get a long way there.

Interesting post from Richard Edelman on the transformation taking place in media from the second New Media Academic Summit hosted by Edelman and PRWeek last week in Chicago.

Media must become comfortable with the economics of fragmentation, not scale, according to Troy Mastin, media analyst for William Blair & Co. “We will see hyper-local products, targeted at specific suburban populations. Young people will associate based on personal interest, passion and professional affiliation.” Mastin was very bullish on community newspapers, particularly those smart enough to be open to consumer generated content, as “the cross-roads for rural areas.”

and…

Evolution from top-down to open dialogue model—Steve Grove, political director of YouTube, said, “The Hillary Clinton campaign was very much top down communications, with controlled messages. The Obama campaign moved toward a next generation approach of innovation driven by the crowd, such as the Change video produced by Will.i.am.” He noted that 50 million people have watched the 1,100 videos up on the Obama YouTube channel, compared to 4 million who have watched the 200 videos on the McCain YouTube channel. The Fight the Smears site put up by Obama’s campaign to combat rumors about the candidate “shows that you must combat falsehoods aggressively and quickly,” Grove said.

If you take a look at Dell.com today there is a chance you will see a new home page! Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Spain and China will go live today while we are launching a 50% filter of the home page in the US. While a huge number of people visit Dell.com every day without touching this page, millions still do. We felt it was time that it expressed our brand more fully and that the navigation was simpler for all our audiences.

Simplicity was our watchword here – we wanted a clean, easy to navigate look. The redesign of the Dell.com home page began with extensive discovery and research, followed by multiple rounds of design. Early testing on the new design indicates that our efforts will pay off – we have had extremely positive customer feedback.

This is just the start of the reinvention of the largest eCommerce site in the world. Let us know what you think!