WebWord

“…you essentially worked until you died.”

Read: Retirees back at work, with flexibility

“…technology should be as simple as the box it comes in.”

“…products and services that are easy to experience.”

“Simplicity can be a goal of technology.”

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These things are worth digesting…

“To this day, the majority of stockbrokers are compensated on the number of trades their customers make, not on the returns they generate for them or on the quality of the advice they provide.”

“In the end, analysts have minimal structural incentive to be accurate in their predictions; rather their built-in incentive is to be as favorable to their corporate clients as possible.”

“The problem lies in the fact that analysts have a much greater incentive to focus upon the positive of a company than to root out the risks and the negatives, and their employers value their ability to generate investment-banking income much more than they do proper analysis.”

“The issue here is that the analysts who covered Enron, despite the company’s long-standing policy of withholding key information, and despite knowledge of the fact that there was an unknown level of debt being hidden from them in off-balance sheet SPEs remained nearly uniformly positive on the company until it was clear the company would collapse.”

“The Enron collapse is neither the first nor the most expensive loss of shareholder capital that came while analysts maintained cheery ratings on a company. It’s only by virtue of the fact that the loss on Enron shares has approached 100% for shareholders that made it the most noteworthy.”

“It is our genuine hope that investors seek to buy companies that they truly understand and would be willing to own for a lifetime. If there is one lesson that individual investors must learn from Enron, that is: Buy What You Know.”

Read the entire transcript…

My thinking on stocks? Don’t invest unless you really, really understand the company. Advice from other people is largely useless, financial news is mostly biased, and analysts are not looking out for your interests. Furthermore, diversification is critical; distribute your investments.

I’ve been reading a lot of about how the real estate market bubble is going to burst. But I am curious about the term “bubble” as it applies to the real estate market. When you think about bubbles, what do you think? Thin, fragile, ready to burst? That’s what I think. Doesn’t irrational exuberance make more sense?

Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud is, without any doubt, the best book I’ve ever read on the topic of comic books. It is a masterpiece.

Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki is also an excellent book. While most people would call it a book on personal finance I would call it a book on the philosophy of money, with an emphasis on personal finance. Kiyosaki explains how to think about money and how to use it. Most books in this genre spend too much time talking about how to accumulate money.

Apple vs. Napster

“I had originally considered making a pair of glasses that hung from a bridge piercing for myself about ten years ago. It was just one of those things that seemed so obvious that I was surprised I hadn’t seen it done. I never got around to doing it then, since I wasn’t too keen on getting a bridge piercing. When I got a call from James inquiring if I could help him with some jewelry he wanted to make, and then he mentioned he wanted to do the glasses as well, I jumped on the opportunity.”

Body modification. You’re going to see more and more of it this century. Trust me. Think about how this relates to personalization. What could be more personal than body modification? This is a growing trend, my friends.

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“Many websites out there don’t have a single link to another website. According to Webcredible ( http://www.webcredible.co.uk ), a leading UK usability and accessibility consultancy, this is a bad idea. Ask a webmaster why there aren’t any outbound links, and the answer you’ll probably get is simple enough: “If I link to other websites people might leave my site.” At this point you can break the news that site visitors will leave their site. And there’s nothing they can do about this.”

The article is poorly edited but it does bring up a good point. Many web sites do not link out. Jakob Nielsen, for example, very rarely links out and it drives me crazy.

Read more…

p.s. Here are two old WebWord articles on linking…
Strategic Linking Techniques
When to Link Out of Your Site

“So, if you haven’t got the skill to do something important, leave it alone. If something is urgent or complex, find a simple way to do it. If something going wrong will particularly aggravate you, make certain you know how to do it.”

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Business Week — “Honest corporate managers will tell you that to make offshoring work, you need at least a 300% to 400% wage spread between American software writers, engineers, accountants, and call-center employees and their Indian and Chinese counterparts.
Labor costs have to be very, very low overseas — not just lower — to compensate for time-shifting, managing over such long distances, and decreased productivity. Just think about how many times you’ve had to ask the person on the help line (who is usually in Bangalore) to repeat an answer because you couldn’t understand their accent or because of a communication gap caused by cultural differences. Such friction has a real cost, and companies that have sent services offshore know this.”

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“There are no quick and exciting and easy wins to be made. We know how to make things usable and it involves a bit of work, easy as that. No rocket science just research, common sense and good old user centered design, in short, stuff we
all know, there are books on it for God’s sake. So will somebody go tell the people at Opodo? I’ve just tried to buy a flight from there, 3 times (am I stupid) and each time something went wrong.”

Read the rant…

Gerry McGovern — “Usability sometimes misses the point. If you’re trying to sell me red shoes, I don’t care how user-friendly your website is, I’m just not interested in buying. If you’re charging me 30 percent more than your competitor, all your fancy usability is pretty much irrelevant. If I think this product is cool and I must have it, I will gladly suffer an unusually designed website just to get my hands on it.”

This is a good article in that it provokes a conversation, but Gerry is throwing a red herring at us. Usability is not something you do instead of following good business practices. No experienced usability specialist will tell you to give up an interesting design just for the sake of making something more usable. Usability is no replacement for smart business decisions.

I was doing consulting for a client where I had extremely good data that indicated that they should move their search bar to the upper left part of their home page. My client declined to make the change and made a good business case for leaving the search bar right where it was. I respectfully backed down, looked at the data again, and suggested a compromise that everyone could appreciate.

Just because someone is willing to suffer through a bad web site to get something they want, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to make it easier. Gerry is trying to bifurcate the issue. He makes it seem like we must choose good design OR usability, excitement OR usability, good business strategy OR usability. Hogwash! This is not an “either-or” issue and it is a shame that Gerry McGovern is using a logical fallacy to drive his point. (For what it is worth, I respect most of Gerry’s articles.)

Read critically, and read between the lines. Don’t allow yourself to just accept what you read without thinking deeper. If you read Gerry’s article without thinking about it, you might think that usability is a bad idea. The truth is that usability is almost always a good idea. (Gerry did a good job finding examples where usability was not a good idea. That’s not easy; bravo!)

I’ll end with an analogy. I could very easily write an article about how good writing doesn’t replace smart business decisions. I could use some examples where good writing, editing, and punctuation, are bad for business. I could show how smart writing is not “cool” and that it gets in the way of innovation. In this way I could easily attack Gerry’s domain: good writing. I could easily use some powerful fallacies to generate all-or-nothing thinking, or I could appeal to authority, or I could make false analogies. But I won’t. Instead, I’ll just emphasize what I said above. Think critically or you will be letting other people think for you. That is a crime you don’t want to commit.

Read Gerry’s article…