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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. [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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.
Microsoft has missed opportunities that were right in their [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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I know of no harder place to do a software demo than a trade-show/exhibition-hall floor:
It’s noisy.
You have to figure out a strategy for getting people to stop at the booth and listen for at least ten seconds.
The people who do stop will have different situations (contexts) and different needs… and some proportion won’t be your [...]
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In part 2 of this series, I described a scenario with Google Docs focusing on collaboration. Recall that there were two demoers!
Collaboration
If you’re showing collaboration, you need two demoers! Don’t try to fake it; that’s confusing and counterproductive. If possible, set up the scenarios so that you don’t have to switch between screens, such as [...]
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As I noted recently, in any deal, there are a small number of people who can meaningfully say Yes, a large number whose Yes doesn’t matter but whose collective No might, and usually a small number of people with significant power to say No.
In demoing software, you need to first figure out who’s in the room. [...]
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In any deal, there are a small number of people who can meaningfully say Yes, a large number whose Yes doesn’t matter, and usually a small number of people with significant power to say No. In a later post in this series, I’ll talk about the Yes/No conundrum.
For now, I want to focus on three [...]
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Read More Steven's new book is Legal Project Management: Control Costs, Meet Schedules, Manage Risks, and Maintain Sanity, available now from DayPack Books and Amazon.

Steve’s Other Posts: Lexblog Steven writes regularly about the legal world here (Lexician.com), on topics such as Legal Project Management, legal operations, and legal technology:
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