There's a great book called 'Founders At Work' that tells Max Levchin's account of PayPal's early days. Apparently they stopped considering PayPal a payments company very early on. They moved on to being a fraud prevention company. In reality, they no longer have to do anything to promote growth or even sustainability in money moving through the system, so they can just ignore that part. Almost their entire focus is on preventing fraud. I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying.
I know there are a lot of arguments for why the user owns a completely free interface that revolutionized electronic communication. I know that many of them will be stated below. I acknowledge that these arguments have weight and validity.
However...
This is a business decision. MaysonL stated that '...people trying to foist changes like this...should consider the fact that there are humans on the other end of the computer.'" Why exactly should they consider this? Has there been a vast migration? Are the people using the service paying them?
Has anyone noticed that Google is moving to enterprise platforms. More importantly, has anyone noticed that Google has an active branch pursuing RFPs an IDIQs in the federal space?
Google is looking for paying customers. This is how it goes. This is Hacker News for pete's sake. If you don't like GMail, make a product that works better and post it here. You'll probably get a lot of customers. (By which I mean freeloaders to whom you will have to provide massive memory and bandwidth)
This is where we started a couple of years ago. He has expressed a lot of interest in app design, and I'm taking the track of "walk before you fly." As an intensely analytic and intelligent guy, I think he's ready to get into the code.
Surprised no one mentioned HacketyHack. Anyone have any experience with that?
At first read I was getting all upset about what a short-sell of virtualization the definition was. Then I read it again and realized it was an intro, and how do you really introduce a concept that solves so many problems? I'm looking forward to reading what comes next.
I think you will find most people don't walk away from this with a full understanding of who is to blame. Instead, many may create a sub-conscious linkage with the Avenger and a bad customer service story. It's easy to create perceptions and difficult to remake them.
Maybe it does work well for N-Control this time....but a strategy? I'd like to hear what marketing professionals would say, but it sounds much too risky for me.
The moment that about face happened, when he said, "Screw it." That was when Mr. Jobs created the campaign. Certainly there was creative work involved that deserves much credit, but the leap was made in that mind and in that moment. In the first page of the online article, more deference ought to have been paid to the man for that reason.