Gmail offers surprising innovation lessons for the Fortune 500
If you’re familiar with the story of Gmail, you know – for a fact – that it was a 20% time employee project by Paul Buchheit. A little bottom-up experimentation that grew into something big. Surprise! That story is wrong. It was a desire by Google, the company, to offer its own email. From Harry McCracken’s great piece How […]
10 examples of fabulously flawed product-first thinking
In talking about jobs-to-be-done here, I sometimes think that all I’m doing is stating the obvious. I mean, isn’t it obvious that you’d create something that helped fulfill a need or desire? What else would you do? But I’ve seen in my own work experience, and across a multitude of initiatives in other industries, cases […]
Innovation Through Logo Design
OK, I stole that title from Krish. It’s a telling title, almost as good as this one from Shakespeare: Much Ado about Nothing. Oh, and I really don’t want to write about a logo. Especially about a fugly one. One that the entire world hates. But what can I do, the world is abuzz with […]
Build a profitable business while spending as little as possible (the lesson of Xobni)
It’s not that complicated to build a success startup. Just build a profitable business while spending as little as possible. It’s not complicated, but it’s hard. I recently saw the news that Yahoo! had bought Xobni. Xobni was a noble attempt to tackle the email overload problem (xobni = inbox backwards). According to the stories […]
If Tumblr is worth $1.1 Billion, is Pinterest worth $19 Billion
My friend Adam Rifkin, who runs the awesome PandaWhale (where I get a ton of my news), recently wrote about the Tumblr acquisition for AllThingsD. It’s a smart and well-reasoned essay, which is well worth reading. His basic argument is that Tumble is valuable because it is a massive interest graph: “Tumblr is one of […]
The Corrosive Downside of Acquihires
For the past 5 years or so Google, Facebook and a handful of tech industry giants have been quietly buying scores of early-stage startups for their talent. And to keep up with the Jones’s it seems that Yahoo! has now employed the same strategy. And who cares, right? A couple of tech giants throw millions […]
Marissa Mayer and Yahoo’s telecommuting policy: Right motivation, wrong execution
When Yahoo! hired Marissa Mayer, I supported the move, believing that the board needed to shake things up, and that given the dismal state of the business, Mayer was probably a better candidate than they could ever have expected to attract. I also supported the move on Mayer’s part; she wasn’t ever going to become […]
Only Yahoos Work in an Office!?
Ok, so I think almost everybody has either slammed Marissa Mayer about the new Yahoo non-remote worker policy or said that it’s the medicine they have to swallow. Very few are actually pointing out however, that Yahoo was probably just really bad at managing their remote employees. In the end, I don’t care, that just […]
Why Did Yahoo! Ban Telecommuting for Employees?
If you haven’t heard the recent news, Yahoo! decided to ban telecommuting and is now forcing all employees to physically come into the office to work and if they can’t or won’t then they can find a job elsewhere. At first glance this seems a bit counter intuitive to what many other companies are doing. […]
The Workday IPO and ‘F You Money
The other day, a VC asked me about a founder he was thinking of investing in. He asked me if this founder had, quote, ‘F You Money. {I learned how this was spelled when a Businessweek article this week used the term, btw}. I wasn’t really sure if he meant this as a negative, but […]
Silicon Valley Has A Short Attention Span
Sometimes people ask me why I’m always writing blog posts and speaking at events. “Simple,” I say. “Silicon Valley has a short attention span. If I don’t keep my name in front of people, they’ll forget who I am.” If they don’t believe me, I respond with what I like to call the Yahoo test. […]
Hadoop Looms Big After The Hadoop Summit
Hadoop Summit 2011 was held this week at Santa Clara and it highlighted how Hadoop has matured in the past few years. Hadoop is an open source project under Apache Foundation which aims to solve the storage and processing of big data. Based on Google’s Map Reduce, Hadoop has emerged as a major platform in […]
Open Source, my aaS ?
On February 23rd, Infoworld blogger and cloud expert David Linthicum posted an article that, until today, I had been studiously trying to prevent from playing over and over like the proverbial stuck record in my rather inquisitive mind. My inquisition, and subsequently my inability to let this escape my attention, was not necessarily raised the […]
The Power of Twitter in Information Discovery
It surprises me how many really smart people I meet still doubt the power of Twitter. It seems the urge to be a naysayer of Twitter is really strong for some. I think some of this stems from the early days of Twitter when it was presumed that it was a technology to tell people […]
Three Reasons Google Should Acquire Delicious from Yahoo
So the news is out. Yahoo plans to shutter Delicious, the largest social bookmarking site. Which is shocking, particularly among the tech savvy and socially oriented. Delicious is iconic for its application of social sharing and collective intelligence. Hard to believe Yahoo wants to shut it down. But wait…this doesn’t have to be the end. […]
