Content, Strategy, Marketing & Business | A consultant’s view » Christine Thompson
If you’ve been running Windows 7 RC on a MacBook Pro in a Bootcamp partition, beware. The path to reinstalling Windows 7 is fraught with problems, hassles, risks and time wasters. Quick summary, if you don’t want to read the rest of this post. After several hours of effort each day, over several days, I […]
Revised on June 4, 2010
Lately I’ve been struck by how we marketers may be losing our way, overlooking our core mission. Preoccupied with wrenching changes in how we launch products, retool the marketing mix, and engage influencers and stakeholders, it’s easy to overlook our core mission: understanding customers. How we apply what we understand about customers is what drives the marketing (and sales) engine.
Revised on June 4, 2010
Just before the holidays I invested in Apple’s new server offering for small firms and workgroups, the Mac Mini Snow Leopard Server. It’s a sweet package.
For $999 you get a whisper-quiet, energy-efficient server not much larger than a paperback book. The device comes with 4GB of RAM and a terabyte of built-in storage, plus an unlimited client license to Apple’s powerful server software (10.6.x Snow Leopard).
Apple claims this combination of hardware and software can handle up to 25 concurrent users. To handle more users would require more powerful hardware. I’ve been using it to serve a handful of concurrent users, and it’s plenty fast. But it’s not perfect, and here’s why…
Revised on February 7, 2010
Last week a power surge knocked out our Comcast Business Class service for part of 2 business days. My firm relies on a mix of cloud-based and on-premise IT platforms, so this outage was a reminder that the last-mile infrastructure here is still too fragile to shift everything to the cloud. Living in the cloud? Watch […]
Last night I heard Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind and the new book Drive, speak about the most powerful wellsprings of human motivation: the intrinsic motivators autonomy, mastery and purpose. If you haven’t read Drive, here is Daniel Pink’s TEDTalk on human motivation. An entertaining 18-minute summary of what behavioral scientists know […]
So here we have two small business owners actively disenchanted with our HP printers, and talking to each other about what the quality decline must be doing to HP’s printer brand. And the time we’re both wasting as a result. What makes this story so disheartening is that both of us worked for HP earlier in our careers. As former employees (and former shareholders), we’d like to feel better about the brand. So how did HP lose its way?
Revised on January 11, 2010
Earlier this week a Boston area start-up called First Orion announced a new privacy service for Blackberry users. Called PrivacyStar, it blocks unwanted calls, lets subscribers manage their list of blocked callers via a web portal, and facilitates reporting of abusive telemarketers to US regulatory authorities. It also offers intelligent features such as reverse look-up […]
Revised on December 18, 2009
Way back in the digital Dark Ages of the early 1990s, some of my colleagues left Aldus, a digital publishing pioneer, to found a company called MetaBridge. Their goal was to develop a “cross-media” publishing platform that would enable content owners and publishers to readily adapt content for optimal display across multiple resolutions and aspect […]
Revised on December 18, 2009
Yesterday I took the leap and upgraded my primary PC from Vista Ultimate to Windows 7 Ultimate. The upgrade took 3 hours, given the large number of applications and data files on my tower PC. (I also upgraded two Macs to Snow Leopard 10.6.2 while waiting for the Windows 7 upgrade to complete.)
Revised on December 21, 2009
I’ve been using Windows 7 release candidate on a MacBook Pro for several months, and would like to upgrade a workhorse PC from Vista to Windows 7. Before upgrading the PC, I wanted to identify potential issues with my primary software applications. Good thing I took this precaution. Here’s why.
Revised on November 13, 2009
