Synergy of Business = Design + Technology + Marketing Strategy

You have seen many PowerPoint presentations that speak of the power of the successful business treo: design, technology and strategy. It usually goes like this:

1. A circle appears, representing design.
2. Another circle appears, representing technology.
3. Yet another circle appears, representing strategy.
4. These circle overlaps one another, looking like an RGB mixing diagram.
5. Drum rolls... and the presenter talks about the importance of being at the center where all three circles overlap.

This presentation bores so many to tears that it doesn't see the light of day very often these days. It also neglects the reality that being at the dead center is not really what matters (the result), rather, it is the constant balance among the three groups that matters most (the process by which to achieve equilibrium):

• design + technology / strategy
  
• technology + strategy / design
  
• strategy + design / technology
  

It is an important business idea, however, and I propose that the wordings be changed from the What to the Why. When you show the ROI first, people generally listen more intently:

• Usability = Design
  
• Longevity = Technology
  
• Commercial Value = Strategy
  

When you wish to back it up with examples, instead of picking a single product to demonstrate the effect, pick all of them. Show your audience how the same formula applies to all products and services that wish to be successful in the market place. It is especially true if you wish to reap the benefits from the power of cult branding: from Apple to Linux, from Harley-Davidson to Volkswagen, from the World Wrestling Entertainment to Oprah Winfrey.

Know thy enemies = the art of competitive analysis

If you are working on the consumer strategy for Poland Spring, besides getting your water delivered from Nestle Waters, also subscribe from Wissahickon Mountain Spring Water, DS Waters of America, Voss Artesian, Silver Springs, Eden Springs. Find out what kind of special offers you are getting while you are a customer. Figure out what kind of landing pages make you tick and stick.

If you are working on the consumer strategy for AOL, subscribe to services from Google, MSN and Yahoo, note the pros and cons of these services, their unique features, and their user experience models.

If you are working on the consumer strategy for MasterCard, learn the business model of American Express, find your client's differentiation from VISA, and digg up brand management for the Discover Card.

Know the strengths and weaknesses of yourself as well as your competitors and you will succeed. This is one of the fundamental ideas from Sun Tzu's The Art of War (孫子兵法).

You can read the full text of The Art of War in English, Español, Français, Nederlands and 中文 on WikiSource.

From closed to open

If Web 1.0 is about information authoring, then Web 2.0 is about information sharing (1).

This change is evidential when we look at the climate of information representation: from FAQs to forum discussion, from personal homepages to personal blogging, from closed-development to open-source movement, from categorizing to tagging, from trees to wikis.

In other words, from closed to open.

Being open is a good thing. A prime example is opensource development. You initiate an idea and concept, and a whole world of developers is available to improve and improvise on it (2). IBM reaps the benefits of open-developing their Eclipse platform as a successor to their VisualAge family of products.

In the world of knowledge, Wikipedia became statistically evaluated to be as accurate as Encyclopedia Brittanica, eclipsing Brittanica’s once dominant sovereign in the world of knowledge (3).

In the world of business, corporations open up their communication channels and invite the whole world for discourse. Blogs like the Google Blog, Adobe blog and Microsoft’s Channel 9 created two-way communication channels, and thus benefits, with the users. Web users learn the insider tips on different companies’ products and services, and the companies in turn gain tremendous amount of user feedback on their betaware with very little upfront investment.

Interactive agencies see blogging as a free PR device to influence the industry. Organic has Three Minds, Frog Design has the Frog Blog. I find myself reading these quite a bit to learn where the industry is going and how different companies are utilizing upcoming technology to do amazing things.

In turn, I noted that while I took note of Razorfish in the early days (~1997) via the RSub–the Razorfish lab that sells company merchandise and all kinds of ‘experimental’ ideas that their employees create–it appears that the same business model of social marketing has now transformed to corporate blogging.

References / Citations

1. Inspired via discourse with Tom Nicholson.
2. Via discourse with Adam S. Kirschner.
3. CNet | Study: Wikipedia as accurate as Britannica by Daniel Terdiman, 2005-12-15

Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, a must-have for coders.

Bitstream Vera Sans Mono is the best font for coding, period.


(source: Wikipedia)

The advantages of using Vera Sans Mono--the monospaced variant from the Vera family--are:

• It comes with normal, bold, oblique and bold oblique. Great for syntax highlighting.


• Unlike Courier, changing weights from normal to bold do not change the mono-text-width. In other words, if you wish to highlight your keywords in bold, your code won't all of a sudden break your indent formatting


• Unlike Courier, it carries a Gnome license and thus free. Courier comes with most Microsoft products, but is not freeware. While you are unlikely to be sued by Microsoft for your use of Courier if you do not own any Microsoft products and thus the license that comes with it, that is an illegal activity.


• It is Unicode aware and comes with the full latin set of Unicode characters so coding on your internationalization projects would always be a breeze.


• It is highly legible down to 8pt on a 96dpi monitor so you can get as many lines on Eclipse without suffering from legibility issues.


• It is highly legible when printed. Great for code documentation.

I have been using this for a few years now round-tripping from ActionScript to Python, Java to C# using IDEs like Eclipse, Visual Studio or the almighty Notepad and it never lets me down. Highly recommended.

Download the latest revision of Vera.

Friends and family

I have been through a whole lot last year. 2006 is officially the most miserable year of my life. If we can chart our life in a Cartesian graph, with x = time and y = (-1, 1) to signify absolute negative to absolute positive, I hope that last year remains to be my life's absolute minimum.

While I enjoy the happy times (>0), I do think that it is important to have frustrating times (<0). Without the down points, one could not possibly appreciate the many wonderful things in life that we take for granted.

If I draw another graph, with x = the y-axis of my Life graph, y = number of friends, the resulting graph looks like a Bell curve. When I am at my lowest point, most people drift away, until finally there remains only my family and one handful of folks who are my friends. Similarly, one gains many friends as life become positive, but as one drifts towards fantabulous times, one also gains many enemies, and as such y would also tends towards 0.

If we consider the ratio of number of friends / time, we have the rate of friend acquaitance, and at least for myself, that's the happiest of all times. Mapping this, it appears that the sweet spot would be around -0.3.

Nerd point aside, we find something equally interesting. To find one's closest friend, either fuck up your life, or become extremely successful. You can immediately identify who's friend and who's foe. Obviously, you cannot control your life (as you are not a controlled subject). However, examining one's history will allow you to discover.

While I have been in very desperate moments, I am grateful that I have identified my friends. They have been there to support me in every way possible. I am also deeply grateful to those who have the patience to work with me. I don't know how I could have gone through all these without them.

Coming Out

About sixteen to seventeen years ago, when I was fourteen, I came out to my parents that I am gay. About six to seven years ago, during the years of my early adulthood, I came out to my co-workers that I am a designer who uses a PC. Until this day, I do not have the nerve to tell a single person at an AIGA event that I have never bought a Mac in my life.

Point.

Blogging, a realization

I just realize today, that instead of bothering people with monologue IM, I should blog instead. It's really the same thing. Here are the differences:

1. Instead of typing paragraphs after paragraphs on an IM window, I type paragraphs after paragraphs into an editable area.
   
   
2. Blogging enables the ability to not have to shut someone up with a wall of text that is normally unreadable inside the size of an IM window.
   
   
3. I can edit what I said previously, correct my spelling mistakes, and I don't get the instant gratification of the occasional uh-huh that my 'target' was able to insert in between my 80wpm-typing.
   
   
4. With blogging, I cannot be certain a single person would read these words. Ultimately, however, I guess I don't really care -- like maybe I don't really care that someone is actually reading my IMs... hmm...

So, in under two minutes, I managed to type a ton of stuff without someone thinking that I am just purely crazy. That's good. That's therapy.