Please. Oh please.
via Mike Rose
I'm in.
People were given phones with nothing but numbers on them and then asked to type in a series of digits, ostensibly as part of an ergonomics study. Instead, the authors were tracking the words that those keys might spell were they being used to punch out a quick text. Unconsciously, it seems the participants were as well. Keying in 5683, which could potentially spell "love" was viewed as a more positive experience than 75463 for "slime."
Two weeks ago marked my 6 month anniversary at Microsoft. Everybody is asking me what it's been like, what I've enjoyed, what I haven't, but the truth is, I've just gotten to the beginning.
Microsoft, like almost any other technology company, operates in a cyclical release cycle. A list of features is drawn up, they are coded, and then they are released; repeat ad naseum. For Windows Live, four of these release cycles comprise a wave. Before the beginning of each new wave, a period of time is put into development of internal infrastructure, system and operations improvements, and general readiness for the next wave. In August, when I onboarded, we were completing a milestone, and entering this internal development period. So the first two months of my job was ramping up on Hotmail, the Wave 4 release, and a few service packs and the next three were internal development, which consisted of many different tasks in and of itself. Now, as we enter our new phase of coding, I'm experiencing what the whole process is supposed to look like from the beginning. The last three weeks have been a flurry of planning, review, and meetings, unlike anything I've seen yet. And now we begin coding. So, six months in, I've finally gotten to the beginning.
I feel it's similar in my personal life, as well. I found a church home not too long after arriving, but it's taken time to begin to feel personally connected and to start making friends. Three weeks ago, I enrolled in a "start group", where 30-40 of us meet for six weeks to watch a DVD curriculum and discuss. I've started getting out of the house to hang out with people from church and people I've met from Stanford. I'm beginning to get to know them, and hoping to begin the process of forming the deep, personal relationships I've been lacking since coming out here.
There's most certainly been growth. I've learned about scale, from the size of Microsoft itself to the technical difficulties of running one of the world's largest web services to the sheer geographical size of the United States of America. I've learned about corporate culture, Californian culture, and a little bit more about nerd culture. And I've learned more about who I strive to be, my strengths and weaknesses, what motivates me, and how I interact with others. But this is still the beginning of that process. And that's okay, because I do believe the quote "The secret to a rich life is to have more beginnings than endings."
When a reader is given a choice about how to consume their content, a major shift in behavior occurs. They no longer consume the majority of their content during the day, on their computer. Instead they shift that content to prime time and onto a device better suited for consumption.
Nice writeup on some of the behind-the-scene thoughts beforehand and the emotion during.
Apparently, even when people know what the units are, they tend to prefer a bigger number. As a newly released study shows, people would rather pay for expedited service to get things in 31 days than they would to get it in one month.
Damon Winter of The New York Times won third place for feature picture story from Pictures of the Year International with photographs taken on an iPhone using the Hipstamatic app. Critics have pounced. The debate over the propriety of using apps, already hot, is intensifying.
Here, Damon gives a well-written response to the criticism: photography is about composition, technique, and aesthetics, not the equipment you use.
Graphical breakdown of President Obama's proposed budget for 2012 from the New York Times. And as an added bonus, it's done with HTML5.
It's always the little things...
There were two bullet points in the announcement of the partnership between Microsoft and Nokia this morning that stood out to me as being not like the others:
Bing would power Nokia's search services across Nokia devices and services, giving customers access to Bing's next generation search capabilities.
Nokia Maps would be a core part of Microsoft's mapping services. For example, Maps would be integrated with Microsoft's Bing search engine.
Now, there is plenty of talk about how the partnership helps Microsoft more than Nokia, why Nokia screwed up choosing a mobile platform that costs money over a free Android model, how this is or isn't going to help Windows Phone worldwide, and how it is or isn't going to help Nokia get back into the U.S. mobile market.
But all this is focused on the mobile realm, which I don't particularly think is much affected by this partnership in the short term. But an interesting viewpoint surfaced at work today: what if the partnership wasn't as much about mobile as the companies would have you believe?
One of Microsoft's great crusades is to dent Google's market share as a search leader. The Bing integration with Nokia opens up a new mobile realm to Microsoft's search efforts and puts Bing in a competitive spot in a mobile space Google is trying to dominate.
What else does Nokia have to trade? Better and cheaper map data. Nokia's 2007 acquisition of Navteq for $8.1 billion was the largest acquisition in the company's history. It fought Google for the privilege and forming a strategic partnership with that company would have admitted a gross misallocation of resources on Nokia's part.
Nokia also faces a bigger threat from Google than it does Apple. They obviously believed so when acting to buy Navteq. Now, the low-margin Android phones are destroying Nokia's established user base in feature phones, where it will no longer able to compete with an outdated Symbian.
Microsoft gets map data and an extended market share for Bing, Nokia takes a slice of search revenue it didn't have to develop, salvages something out of their enormous takeover three years back, and sticks it to the company they fear the most right now. What if the partnership's as much about search and data as it is mobile?