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Share Joel on Software — by ex-Microsoft veteran and Fog Creek CEO Joel Spolsky — has been my favorite tech-world blog by far for the past decade. In two weeks, he’s going off the air — for good, he says, in both senses of “for good.” Joel, you’ll be missed. I can think of no one in the tech [...] Share Software vendors are invariably after you to upgrade. Should you? If so, when? Right now, WordPress — the tool I use to run both my blogs and my Lexician.com site itself — nags me at the top of every screen: “WordPress 2.9.2 is available! Please update now.” [Exclamation point in original.] There’s nothing that tells me [...] Share It must be written, in the Great Book of Software Design Principles: Thou shalt never leverage the usability/design principles discovered by thy rivals. I’ve never actually seen the book, mind you. But I know it’s there. Why else would so many software designers follow the same rules so slavishly? This rule is sometimes called NIH, “not invented here.” [...] Share If there’s nothing certain, as Ol’ Ben put it, but death and taxes, Hamlet wrestled with only part of the question in his most famous soliloquy: To be, or not to be…. For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come! (This passage must set the record for titles derived from a single chunk of text. [...] Share Recently I wrote about ten things Microsoft doesn’t get enough credit for. Today I want to point out ten opportunities that they missed, things I was there for. I’m avoiding anything that is not public knowledge, of course. I’m not suggesting they should have jumped on all of these; it might not have been an economically [...] Share Yesterday I went through part 1 of a list of ten things I think Microsoft has done right. Some of these are major, industry- or world-changing items. Others are smaller but overlooked contributions that deserve to be recognized. All of it is my opinion; there’s no scientific method in play. Yesterday’s list included Driving down the cost [...] Share I left Microsoft just over a year ago. Looking back, three things in particular strike me. There are good substitutes for much of the Microsoft software I use. Other Microsoft products, however, I find indispensable. I wrote about this in a series of posts a few months ago. Share One of the repeated knocks against the iPad has been the lack of multitasking. You can run only one app at a time. There are lots of good reasons to knock the iPad, starting with the no-women-in-the-Apple-hierarchy name. Is single-tasking one of them? Multitasking is a computer’s ability to run multiple apps at the same time. In [...] Share I’m demoed out. I just came back from a three-day conference and trade show on legal technology, called, appropriately enough, LegalTech. I saw awful demo after awful demo, along with a few decent ones. (For the record, in this post I’m excluding a number of demos that were one-on-one by people who knew me. That’s an entirely [...] Share I know of no harder place to do a software demo than a trade-show/exhibition-hall floor: It’s noisy. |
Steven's new book is Legal Project Management: Control Costs, Meet Schedules, Manage Risks, and Maintain Sanity, available now from DayPack Books and Amazon.
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Copyright (C) Steven B. Levy 2009-2012. All rights reserved. |
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