On the whole, I think I agree with Scott's advice in this post. However, there are some real challenges that come with the choice to be 'good at a few things' instead of the 'best at one thing. Namely, if you're not starting your own business, I think it massively reduces your employment mobility.
I am fortunate in that I am valued within my organisation for my 'generalist' spread of skills (including communication, development, analysis & sales). It's clear to me how useful it is to be able to approach a problem from several angles and engage with specialists from different areas effectively.
However, if I ever want to move out of my current organisation, I feel as though I would end up taking a significant step backwards in my career because almost all advertised jobs are specialised roles.
This creates a constant pressure in my mind to specialise and focus more on a single area.
Yes, but I believe in a society where almost all of the major news outlets are owned by supporters of the current government, the politicians also have a strong ability to control what their voters are demanding.
AppleCare extends the product warranty for an additional year, but outside of an Apple Store (where they register the machine for you in-store) you are simply buying a warranty in a box. It's a failing of the staff that sold the warranty for not making this clear to the purchaser.
Over the course of my professional life with laptops, I've used Apple, Alienware, Dell and Lenovo machines. I can safely say that the three-day turnaround in an actual bricks & mortar store offered by Apple is far and away the best service I've ever received (the worst being a two-week wait that didn't resolve the issue!).
Regarding the business-level support, I think it's fair enough for the store to deliver a baseline level of support to consumers for free and a paid-for service for people who need priority and/or loaner machines to cover the repair period. I personally don't think that yelling at managers should result in priority over other people in the queue.
I think the main issue here is that because Apple integrate their batteries like they do, it's not possible to perform what was once a simple repair yourself. I'm personally okay with that, because the outstanding battery life on my MacBook Pro is a boon almost every single day.
I've found that if you have authoritative addressing data for your target market(s), a search/autocomplete field is a great alternative to the multi-field form being talked about in this discussion. Having access to that sort of data is, of course, a pretty big caveat as much of it is currently proprietary but efforts are being made globally to address (couldn't resist!) this (e.g. http://openaddresses.io, http://alpha.openaddressesuk.org).
I've been doing this for a while and, while it infuriates some people, I've found it to be very freeing. Mailbox is a great way of dealing with email, and Do Not Disturb lets me allow certain important calls through if I need to. I enjoy the feeling of being in control of my phone, rather than at its mercy!
This, absolutely this. I just can't comprehend why anyone with such a great buzz around their fledgling product would get into bed with FB, dooming their work to ad-riddled nonsense.