Spam is Dead. Long Live Spam! As pointed out in The Register yesterday (and picked up by Whit in his feed), it’s now been exactly two years since Bill Gates declared that Microsoft would eliminate spam in two years. Hmmm. Let’s think about that. Filters do keep getting better, which Gates predicted. But challenge/response filtering seems to be dead in the water, and the notion that we’re all going to pay for email stamps seems to be toast as well. So where are we? Spam is certainly more of a nuisance than a true crisis these days, which is even more true than when I wrote about here 15 months ago. But it still consumes massive amounts of time, bandwidth,…
Archives / January, 2006
Buying Back Your Own Left Leg
Buying Back Your Own Left Leg There has been much written about the spectacular sale of Pixar to Disney for $7.4 billion this week. The fact that Steve Jobs is now Disney’s largest individual shareholder is amazing news on many levels. Fred has a great posting on this today from the investor perspective. Another angle that I find interesting about this transaction is that it reminds me to some extent of Yahoo’s purchase of Overture a couple years back. Yahoo OWNED the search business. For years. Invented it. Synonymous with it. Then they let others lap them they became more of a diversified online media company, and voila! Others focused, innovated, and created a massive business in paid search. Yahoo…
Book Short: Required Reading
Book Short: Required Reading The Leadership Pipeline, by Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter, and James Noel, should be required reading for any manager at any level in any organization, although it’s most critical for CEOs, heads of HR, and first-time managers. Just ask my Leaderhip Team at Return Path, all of whom just had to read the book and join in a discussion of it! The book is easy to read, and it’s a great hands-on playbook for dealing with what the authors call the six leadersihp passages: From Individual Contributor to Manager (shift from doing work to getting work done through others) From Manager to Manager of Managers (shift to pure management, think beyond the function) From Manager of Managers…
Book short: Proto Gladwell
Book short: Proto Gladwell I’m sure author Robert Cialdini would blanch if he read this comparison, but then again, I can’t be the first person to make it, either. His book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, is an outstanding read for any marketing or sales professional, but boy does it remind me of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Blink (book; blog post). Of course, Cialdini’s book came out a decade before Gladwell’s! Anyway, Influence is a great social science look at the psychology that makes sales and marketing work. Cialdini talks about sales and marketing professionals as “compliance practitioners,” which is a great way to think about them, quite frankly. He boils down the things that make sales and…
New Media Deal, Part II – the We Media Deal
New Media Deal, Part II – the We Media Deal My original New Medial Deal posting from August, 2004, is my favorite posting of all 220 or so that I’ve done to date. It has the most clicks of any posting I’ve done. People mention it to me all the time. I even used it as the foundation for the preface to our book at Return Path, Sign Me Up! The general thesis (although the original posting is short and worth reading) is simple. Old Media was one-way communication – they produce it, you consume it, and Old Media had a deal with us: they give us free or cheap content, we tolerate their advertising. Think about your favorite radio…
Book Short: Fables and Morals
Book Short: Fables and Morals Courtesy of my colleague Stephanie Miller, I had a quick holiday read of Aesop & The CEO: Powerful Business Lessons from Aesop and America’s Best Leaders, by David Noonan, which I enjoyed. The book was similar in some ways to Squirrel, Inc., which I recently posted about, in that it makes its points by allegory and example (and not that it’s relevant, but that it relies on animals to make its points). Noonan takes a couple dozen of Aesop’s ancient Greek fables and groups them in to categories like Rewards & Incentives, Management & Leadership, Strategy, HR, Marketing, and Negotiations & Alliances – and for each one, he gives modern-day management examples of the lessons….