Walken
Little man, I give the watch to you.
“Having ideas is not the same thing as being creative.”
Kevin Ashton is calling bullshit on brainstorming:
Claims about the success of brainstorming rest on easily tested assumptions. One assumption is that groups produce more ideas than individuals. Researchers in Minnesota tested this with scientists and advertising executives from the 3M Company. Half the subjects worked in groups of four. The other half worked alone, and then their results were randomly combined as if they had worked in a group, with duplicate ideas counted only once. In every case, four people working individually generated between 30 to 40 percent more ideas than four people working in a group. Their results were of a higher quality, too: independent judges assessed the work and found that the individuals produced better ideas than the groups.
Follow-up research tested whether larger groups performed any better. In one study, 168 people were either divided into teams of five, seven, or nine or asked to work individually. The research confirmed that working individually is more productive than working in groups. It also showed that productivity decreases as group size increases. The conclusion: “Group brainstorming, over a wide range of group sizes, inhibits rather than facilitates creative thinking.” The groups produced fewer and worse results because they were more likely to get fixated on one idea and because, despite all exhortations to the contrary, some members felt inhibited and refrained from full participation.
I concur with this based on 15 years in the design and advertising industries.
In brainstorming sesssions—as in life—there’s a couple of winners and a whole lot of losers.
The Gold Stigma is Gone
iOS and Fitts’s Law
Flowers & Football Tops
Over Nearly Everyone
A few weeks ago, my buddy Jory Kruspe suggested I do a poster about KRS ONE.
I’ll admit KRS ONE gets a little too intense for me in a lot of the interviews I’ve watched of him, but I admire and respect the mark he’s put on Hip Hop. He’s a smart dude. MC’s Act Like They Don’t Know is one of my favorite hip hop tracks.
So here it is, a poster spelling out his acronymic hip hop name. The font? Black Slabbath.
A version of this entry first appeared on The Combustion Chamber
“Dead”
The Verge: After 17 years online, Pitchfork is launching a magazine
Wait, I thought print was dead?
Guess not.
I guess print is dead like vinyl records are dead.
Or desktop and laptop computers.
I’m not saying old mediums and technologies never get phased out completely, but many people are quick to dismiss things once they drop below a certain threshold—even if that threshold represents thousands, even millions of people still using said medium/technology.
Find Another Analogy
Ballmer’s thoughts on Microsoft’s inability to gain significant market share with Windows Phone:
Speaking at Microsoft’s financial analysts meeting today, CEO Steve Ballmer was refreshingly realistic about the company’s struggles in smartphones and tablets. “Mobile devices. We have almost no share,” he admitted on stage, before noting he didn’t know whether to be enthusiastic over his admission or uncomfortably tense. “But I’m an optimistic guy, any time we have low market share sounds like upside opportunity to me.” That upside opportunity is the key reason Microsoft moved to secure Nokia’s phone business.
Stevey-Steve, this isn’t a matter of optimistically seeing the glass half full. Google, Apple and Blackberry drank 96% of the milkshake in US and that’s after Microsoft trying to fill it for 3 fucking years.
Or perhaps the glass was completely full and Ballmer took a BB gun and shot a bunch of holes into it.
Or maybe It’s last call, Ballmer’s hammered stupid and the bartender isn’t serving him anymore.
Ok, I’m done with the glass analogies.
Beauty
Changes
zzz
zzz
Check…
Peter Bright at Ars Technica on Microsoft bringing Office to the iPad:
It’s still not official, but the evidence that Microsoft is bringing Office to the iPad and iPhone is growing in abundance. At this point, it seems to be an inevitability that Redmond will release Office apps for iOS in some form in early 2013, with Android apps following soon after.
In so doing, the company stands a good chance of cementing the role of the iPad as a business tool, eroding the advantages of Windows Phone 8 and undermining the entire value proposition of Windows RT. It will also hole Microsoft’s argument that the iPad is “just” for content consumption below the waterline. The upside of Office on iOS? That’s harder to fathom.
You know when you’re playing chess and it you realize you only have one more move left before you’re checkmated?
Microsoft is already there.
They can release Office for iOS and further cement the iPad’s position as the tablet contender with the upper hand (No, I don’t think there will be one marketshare winner in tablets like the Mac/PC war with a 95-to-5-percent ratio) and let Surface fall to the wayside…
or
…not release Office for the iPad and continue to watch Surface not become the hit that Windows was and fall to the wayside.
Either way, Apple is going to follow them around the board until they lose their king.
And Microsoft has run out of moves.
Don’t Put a Bird On It
I woke up this morning, started reading my RSS feeds, ran into this nightmare and puked a little inside my mouth:
Yes, you’re seeing that correctly. Comcast has co-opted the NBC peacock. No, this isn’t a prank.
I know companies aren’t people and don’t have feelings, and while I’m not going to necessarily lose sleep over this abomination, it does bother me. Like many guys and gals my age who grew up in the New York, tri-state area, I have a soft spot for NBC. The 3-note jingle, Saturday Night Live, Chuck Scarborough & Sue Simmons, Rockefeller Center, Seinfeld. I grew up with NBC, so in a sense, it’s part of me. Let’s not mention my wife has worked for NBC for over 10 years.
General Electric has never tried to incorporate the NBC logo into it’s own identity since it took a controlling share of the company in 1986. Comcast obviously doesn’t have the level of brand cachet that GE has. Comcast is Kabletown (note: Comcast is referred to as Kabletown internally too, not just by Tina Fey).
Business is business and life will go on, but moves like this just look pathetic. It’s the equivalent of pulling a Mercedes-Benz emblem off the hood of a car and wearing it around your neck.
Hey Comcast, putting a peacock on top of your head doesn’t make you look cool. It makes you look like a jackass.
Update: Perhaps a better analogy is if you ripped off a Mercedes-Benz emblem and stuck it on the hood of a 1982 Chevrolet Chevette.