This is the first ever-weekend edition of Om Says. In a week full of news one can easily miss some of the good stuff, so I wanted to share with you some of the best stories I read this past week and found useful and/or enjoyable.
- End of an era at Infosys: India’s most successful technology founder, Narayana Murthy, hung up his mouse this past week. He is not Steve Jobs, but for me, he is no less important. He was one of the first people to show up on GigaOM and here is an essay on him I once wrote. Thank you, Narayana, for making youngsters in India believe.
- Seeing the Future and Supporting Bold Initiatives: An excerpt from A Fine Line: How Design Strategies Are Shaping the Future of Business, the book written in 2008 by frog Founder Hartmut Esslinger. This is perhaps one of the best pieces you can read on Steve Jobs.
- Poor craftsmen blame the tools. Blaming Google for not finding the results we want might actually have something to do with our abilities to search.
- What you can learn from the failure of Dvorak keyboard: Sometimes the best technology fails because people get used to something somewhat inferior.
- How to use LinkedIn properly for business: I for one have not figured out how to use LinkedIn. But this article tells me how I could do a good job, so I am going to give it a try.
- What patents did Google really buy with Motorola? Good question. And the answer makes sense.
- Discovery Engines and how they handle the information overload. Enough said.
- Can Facebook work for brands? Some people don’t think so.
- Is it the end of the Internet in France? Looks like unlimited wired Internet access might be coming to an end. Sacre Bleu!
- How is it (your startup) different from Skype? So many VoIP services, so little time. Skype Journal breaks down and compares all the upstarts with the big daddy of them all.
Thanks Om for reading list while working the night shift at #node_knockout!
Thought the google/motorola article missed the mark. I think google was looking for software parents more than network-related ones.
Poor craftsmen blame the tools.
CRT F, really. Why do I have to know, why can’t the system in context of un-editbale text start search when I type.
Bad craftsmen build bad tools and then blame the users. Or is the the brain about organization which builds rules or about rules which build organization. As long as [Google] doesn’t know, bad tools.
+1
I have always wondered why one needs a “magic” code to get the correct answers in a search? Isn’t the basis for these search engines to make it easy on the user to find things? I write technical manuals and have to interpret Engineer to User. That’s what I think is lacking in search engines . . . the User’s point of view. They’re build by Engineers = questionable (bad) tools made by people that can only see certain things in certain ways and not always how it should be for the end user. It’s just like using a dictionary. You go there to find out how to spell a word, but have a hard time finding it if you don’t know how to spell it . . . Catch 22.
Hey Om,
Regarding the dvorak article. The efficiency gained from using a dvorak keyboard is very small compared to the amount of effort required to learn the layout and its lack of ubiquity. The gain in the speed is very very small compared to the amount of effort you put to learn it. Dvorak may be the best, but (let’s say) qwerty gives 95% performance of dvorak. Is it worth the switch? Unless your life depends on your typing speed, then I would say no.
Here is a response from the design guru Don Norman on this topic: http://www.quora.com/Is-the-Qwerty-keyboard-layout-the-most-efficient-one-Or-are-there-better-ones
Yep, Narayan Murthy was true inspiration for all Indian youngsters, especially those belongs to IT sector.
Hi Om, thanks for linking to our Facebook brand story. I have an open call out for anyone to contradict the somewhat negative picture for Facebook’s effectiveness given by our data, but no takers as yet!