Category: General musings

  • AT&T teaches Apple a lesson about control

    While everyone else was drooling over the iPhone, I knew to stay away. I suspected a consumer disaster of epic proportions when Apple, rightly famous for its brilliant products and exquisite marketing, collided in the marketplace with AT&T, one of the worst consumer vendors in the history of Earth. Cellular One…no AT&T Wireless…no Cingular…no AT&T…

  • With Alli, my lunch is in my pants

    (Photo courtesy of J. Star, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike) OK, so I know that what you blog about is a more-or-less semi-permanent record of you. Plus, I have clients who read this blog. And I might be just a little more over the top than usual with this post, but there’s a real marketing…

  • Why the Red Sox are in first place

    Unlike many members of Red Sox Nation, I don’t wear it on my sleeve. But my infatuation with the Olde Town Team goes back to my days as a BU student living in Kenmore Square, watching the ’75 World Series on TV with the sound turned down and the windows open in Myles Standish where…

  • Pharma’s snake-oil marketing to voodoo doctors

    If the title doesn’t make it clear that I’m upset, let me start by saying that an article I’ve just read on nytimes.com (registration required) has me neck-vein-throbbing apoplectic. (It’s my blog, and I’ll use 50¢ words if I want to, 50¢ words if I want to.) In short, I don’t understand how the marketing…

  • ‘Cause Google’s the taxman

    Mid-April! So metaphor rich: the Boston Marathon…tax season in the US…EMI and Apple Corps have settled their disputes. What’s a blogger to do with all this? Easy: cram it all into a rant about Google. You will advertise your product or service on Google. You will allow your competitors to bid against you for the…

  • Brevity, baby.

    To the surprising large number of people who’ve emailed, called, IM’ed and otherwise let me know that you’re wondering why I haven’t posted lately, I offer as a short interlude this post with its “a picture tells a 1000 words” explanation.” This is like the overly-long intermissions in 1960’s film musicals like My Fair Lady…

  • After being a yuppie…I got a BMW and an HDTV

    Just when you think you’ve outgrown all sense of fashion, peer pressure and have resigned yourself to your own middle-aged individuality, along comes a jolting reminder than your cohort’s tastes may change, but the pressure to conform doesn’t. I was scanning a newsletter for a client and ran across this amazing story: BMW owners love…

  • Major league antitussive

    A cold that I brought back from Europe resulted this week in a cough nasty enough to remind me of the incessant hacking, phlegm-ing and general mucous-ness of a smoker I once had the misfortune to sit across from. Yech. But in the “better living through chemistry” department: my doctor gave me a prescription to…

  • How to be bush league

    Every now and then, even the best of us does really stupid stuff. Thursday, February 1 was my day. I was headed home from Paris after a good set of meetings…all I had to do was get to the airport on time. We were booked on Air France 332, leaving CDG at 1:15pm. The instructions…

  • The love affair continues

    If you even lightly press the “talk technology” button on Alex, you are more than likely going to get a lot of gushing from me about WordPress. Since I first found WordPress 2.0 in the early summer, I’ve been amazed at what I, last a developer 15 years ago, could do with this industrial-strength, multi-user…

  • Bitch slappin’ Bob Lutz

    Oooooh, Mama! There’s some serious fur flying in the blogosphere. You all know I am a car junkie. And you all know I am a blog junkie. I satisfy both cravings with a healthy dose of car blogs and forums, with my favorite being The Truth About Cars. This blog has it all: killer writing,…

  • When Frogs Fly

    Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve never been a Microsoft fan. I’ve considered their products derivative and their business practices despicable. Office was a response to Lotus SmartSuite and Outlook has always been stuck at Notes Release 3 in terms of user interface. Meanwhile, Microsoft to this day is still trying to kill what…