When Jiro dreams of sushi, you’d hardly imagine him slicing sashimi with an ordinary, dull knife. Nor would you expect Usain Bolt to cross the finish line in shoes you could pick up at an outlet, the London Symphony Orchestra to grab the cheapest violins at the local music store, or Ford to take on…
The problems with email were there from the beginning.
You’d be reading documentation, see something to improve, and wish you could tell the author.
For MIT’s programming staff in 1965, that idea led to the invention of email. “A new command should be written to allow a user to send a private…
Wake up with a great idea for a new widget. Build it, set up a table in front of your house, and sell it for $10 cash.
You just made $10. Pretty good deal.
So you expand your business, start a Shopify store, and sell online. Shopify charges 2% of your sale price, along with another 2.9% + 30¢…
SaaS won. Piracy died.
It’s not that you can’t pirate software today; there are still cracked versions of Office and Photoshop out there.
But today’s best business software can’t be pirated. You can’t torrent Slack, pirate Salesforce, crack Notion to give you more features for free.
“Hardware…
Remember Google Wave?
Gmail had quickly become the most popular email service, enough that invites to the free service were bid up on eBay. Google Docs made modern collaboration possible, spooked Microsoft enough to build free, web-based versions of its Office tools. Google itself had become a…
“The human mind does not work that way,” wrote Vannevar Bush of filing cabinets and alphabetical organization, in his seminal 1945 essay As we may think. He might have as easily invoked today’s computers, 75 years of progress notwithstanding.
Of all the metaphors computers could have used for data…
When the team that built Wunderlist set out to build something new, its whimsically designed landing page got all the attention.
Wunderlist itself was a final hurrah to the skeuomorphic design that the early iPhone popularized, launched only a couple years before iOS 7 decreed flat design was the…
When Wirecutter set out in 2011 to review and recommend the best gadgets, it was only natural they’d send prospective buyers to Amazon. With its promise to stock “everything, from A to Z,” Amazon carries most products Wirecutter recommends. And if you send customers to Amazon, they’re happy to send…
https://twitter.com/awwstn/status/1163206040759857152
A pricing page that only says “Call Us!” isn’t exactly a pricing page, is it?
Almost every day I come across tweets and comments from people who are frustrated with this strategy from software vendors.
Some people simply refuse to sit through…
