I was watching Colbert the other night, and caught the very tail end of an interview with author Annie Leonard. She was promoting her new book, “The Story of Stuff.” I didn’t catch enough of the interview to know if I wanted to buy it, but did catch enough to grab my Kindle to order up a sample chapter.
The subtitle of the book is: How Our Obsession with Stuff Is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-and a Vision for Change. Let’s stop and think about that one for a second. The author is railing against how the obsession with consuming, ostensibly, atoms is ruining the planet. OK, I get that.
Imagine my surprise when I could only purchase her book in atom form. Not available on the Kindle. Wha? Look, I get that not everyone has a Kindle, and that reading devices aren’t quite mainstream, but doesn’t this hypocrisy sort of negate her whole message? Dave Ramsey rails against the use of debt for anything. He’s a man who stands by his principles. You cannot use a credit card to purchase wares from his site.
What principles is Ms. Leonard standing by when her book is not available at ship date in any form other than atoms? The lesson here for entrepreneurs is pretty clear. Know what you stand for, and why, and stick to it, lest you ruin your credibility. This is an epic fail.
ABC has an awesome hit show on their hands with Modern Family. While there isn’t anyone who can hold a candle to the sheer personality awesomeness of NPH on How I Met Your Mother, the cast and writing on Modern Family are genius. It’s very rare that I laugh out loud at television, certainly not consistently week to week. Well, except Family Guy.
This week, however, presented some comedy for both the wife and I. A rarity, though this is the only sitcom we watch together. You can view the episode on Hulu, and the scene in question is at 1:00 in to the show. It’s a gem, and basically cured my wife of any thoughts that she might be crazy.
Ty Burrell may be the the nerdy father we all cringe at, but secretly know we are, but Julie Bowen is a real hidden gem in this show. Her timing and delivery are under utilized, though she is often over shadowed by the Sofia Vergara.
There’s a great podcast I have been listening to since 2006 called Keith and the Girl. The content is most definitely NSFW, but discovering this gem was like finding Howard Stern before everyone knew about it. It’s a fantastic show, and they have also done a great job of building community around it. As of this morning, in the 5 years they have been doing the show, they have had 60 tattoos and 2 brandings of their logo. Crazy.
In any event, Keith and Chemda (the “girl”) are publishing a book on Mar 9th called “What Do We Do Now?” They get lots of relationship type questions emailed to them from listeners, answering some on the air, and eventually got a book deal. Awesome.
Here’s the nutty part which I never knew. I’m sure authors are well aware of this, but all pre-order sales for a book count toward your first week sales number. It’s an interesting game you can play as an author, especially one who shows up with an audience, in that you can promote the book well in advance of the release, get the core audience purchases to land you on the best seller lists, and then in store placements which result will likely have a multiplier effect on sales thereafter. I love it.
If you want a good laugh, go read their sample chapter, or pre-order the book. They do the show for free and make money from ads and merchandise sales. Why not buy yourself or someone you know a copy and help get these guys on the best seller lists in the first weeks? I plan to post my video review later in the week, but I just loved this idea of hacking the best seller list and wanted to share.
I have long held that our current system of taxation is a bad one. It’s oppressive, is changed too often, and encourages cheating. Further, the more complicated the tax code, the more likely you are to have to spend more time, and in many cases money, sorting out what you do and don’t owe. It’s onerous and I hate the current system. I want to hack it.
With that out of the way, it was with some interest that I was reading this article about the multitude of tax programs which are being enacted to help students get out of debt post school. When thinking about any program, I view it in the same lens as I would a product that I would take to market. First is who is my customer, but second is how do they become aware of the product. For the average person, staying on top of all of these government programs is challenging at best. In times like these, I prefer to opt for simplicity. With that, let me propose some assertions, and then a potential solution:
1) As a country, we should aspire to have a more educated work force
2) The cost of college, university, and graduate education is rising faster than the rate of inflation, making it more un-affordable with each passing year
3) With the current tax system, a higher paid, and more productive, work force should, ceteris paribus, generate more tax revenues
If we can all agree on those assertions, then I propose this simple tax plan:
Apple released their iPad today and lead with this claim:
There are more than enough bloggers looking to give their opinions on the topic, so I will avoid that morass. I want to reserve final judgment until I play with it, but I did come away feeling like this scene from History of the World was more appropriate.
Any unannounced, but speculated on, Apple product lives at the intersection of Impossible, Inspiring and In-Demand. People may scoff at the notion of “in-demand” being applied to a table, but Bing tells me that there are 22.5 million results for Apple Tablet.
In an effort to save a lot of pain and suffering for those people who don’t want to read an incredibly long blog post, I have a nice little summary table. The predictions run the gamut of my personal and professional interests, so they may not be 100% interesting to all people.
About two weeks ago I had the good fortune to spend some time at an offsite where I met Gary Flake. I remember reading the Wired Magazine cover piece on Gary a few years back, but didn’t didn’t have any idea who he was when I was introduced to him at the offsite. As one of Microsoft’s Technical Fellows, he’s basically one of the 20 or so smartest engineers in the company. Spending time with a guy like that is a treat, and this guy thinks about stuff that gets me excited. Data and systems.
It’s a good thing Gary is so good at his job, because when he gave me the initial pitch for Pivot I thought it sounded about as interesting as a new sorting algorithm [NOTE: the downloads are restricted to token holders, so if you are interested in getting Pivot, hit me up on Twitter and I will get you one]. It wasn’t a great pitch. Only after I saw the software in action, and lifting my jaw off the floor, did I run back over to Gary and offer to rewrite his 25 word pitch. My motives were not all together altruistic. I wanted access to the software, but more importantly I wanted access to the tools to create my own data sets.
The unofficial, not blessed by Microsoft, but how I would talk about Pivot is: a client application to explore user created data sets along multiple criteria in a rich, visual way. In short, it’s Pivot Tables + Crack + WPF. The demo datasets that Gary was showing were interesting, but nothing about the data was actionable. It was informational, but not insight generating. My brain jumped to dumping CRM data into Pivot…or a bug database…or a customer evidence set. Things that were actionable, traditionally hard to search, and would benefit from a visual metaphor. Then, like a ton of bricks, it hit me. What about Crunchbase?
About 1 year ago I was fortunate to be working on the launch of Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform. With the start of our new fiscal year, I was asked to take over a team which was responsible for the technical marketing for our developer platform product management team. It’s been quite a journey, and I have been able to expand the scope of the products on which I am working.
Today, we are announcing the availability of the beta bits for Windows Server AppFabric, our platform for deploying and managing servers in the enterprise. The needs of the enterprise developer now require that they think about not just deploying on the servers that they own, but also to servers that are running in the cloud. The AppFabric technology is also integrated with the Windows Azure platform, allowing for the easy transport of workloads between your servers on-premises and to the cloud.
The functionality around hosting and managing services is critical when deploying new projects. The AppFabric platform makes it easy to get a handle on what is running, and how it’s performing. Additional functionality, which I believe will get lost in the press coverage, is the distributed, high availability cache. Like memcached, our cache enables better performance for data intensive apps. The high availability bit is new and could prove to be a game changer.
If you are already developing services and applications using the .NET stack, you are ready to go. Head on over to the site and get the beta bits. If you want to chat more about AppFabric, feel free to reach out to me.
Here in the developer platform product management team, we have kicked off a new campaign about the .NET Framework. There are so many people doing so many amazing things with .NET, and we want to hear from you. The site linked to above has stories from some of our customers doing some very unexpected things with the .NET Framework.
Those stories were submitted by our field, but now we’re asking you directly. Are you a .NET developer? Have you done something cool you want the world to know about? Great, come share your story and get featured on the wall of fame. Free traffic and visibility is never a bad thing.
For those of you willing to create a demo of your product using DemoMate from Impresys, you could win a car or a 12-day Galapagos Islands trip. You heard me…Bob Barker says “come on down!” We’re looking for interesting and unique solutions build on top of our stack. Bonus points if you interop with non-MSFT technologies. We have a distinguished panel of judges who will select the winner.
Last, if you are going to be at PDC, come to our party. We’re working in conjunction with the great guys at .NET Rocks (who, incidentally, have a great dev focused podcast) to throw a party at 8pm in the Visual Studio/.NET Lounge Theater. Free food, drinks, prizes…good times to be had by all.
I was watching Colbert the other night, and caught the very tail end of an interview with author Annie Leonard. She was promoting her new book, “The Story of Stuff.” I didn’t catch enough of the interview to know if I wanted to buy it, but did catch enough to grab my Kindle to order up a sample chapter.
