I've decided to come to fewer arbitrary conclusions drawn from meaningless information, but only after consulting my Magic 8-Ball.
August 2009
I sat in stunned amazement last week following a service call with an agency management system sales rep. The call pertained to billing, technical support, and user group experience issues for a recently converted insurance agency.
First, Tim Rutten makes the case that saving "premium" journalism means an act of Congress -- specifically, an antitrust exemption so papers can collude on paid content pricing on their Web sites. Then, the reaction.
Steve Outing, for example:
I love this line of reasoning from Jeffrey Phillips. He remarks how his four-times-a-year golf game belies very low expectations of performance, then this:
"The comparison I want to make to my very part-time golf game is to the part-time efforts most firms put into innovation. If you want to be good at golf, you'll get instruction, play frequently and learn the nuances. Similarly, if you want to be good at innovation, you'll get instruction, work with a pro, learn the tools and use them repeatedly and constantly. Innovating occasionally is like golfing periodically. You may get in a few good shots, but you won't be consistently successful."
I often say a key goal of any Web site redesign should be to make the next redesign easier. Given the rapid pace of redesign launches among newspaper.com sites in recent weeks, it appears some last-generation design work was aimed toward that goal.
Here is my last project for my last MBA course: a video to share my experiences in the Georgia WebMBA program.
