Linked List: November 25, 2013

Monday, 25 November 2013

Now It’s a ‘Smartwatch Bandwagon’ 

Juro Osawa, writing for the WSJ:

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal Monday, Mr. Lv said that ZTE’s smartwatch will offer technological features that are similar to existing products such as the Galaxy Gear, but will sell for lower prices as it tries to appeal to China’s cost-conscious consumers. “We are focusing on the mainstream market,” he said.

Could just be me, but somehow, “like the Galaxy Gear but cheaper” does not strike me as a winning strategy.

29 Dumb Things Finance People Say 

Numbers 3 and 4 should be front and center every time Apple announces results.

Yahoo Mail and Dogfooding 

Sam Biddle has a company-wide email from Yahoo executives encouraging all employees to use Yahoo Mail for their work email (currently only 25 percent do). Biddle writes:

Somehow, I have a feeling Google doesn’t have to resort to these tactics to get people to use Gmail.

Or Apple with Apple Mail. The onus is on the Yahoo Mail team to make a product Yahoo employees want to use, not on Yahoo employees to use a turd webmail product and somehow magically improve it through collective complaints. If your employees are only using your own products or services because they have to, or feel obligated to out of some sort of loyalty, you’re losing.

Think back to those stories about Bill Gates’s and Steve Ballmer’s kids not being allowed to own iPods. The problem wasn’t with their kids. The problem was with the Zunes or the even worse “Plays For Sure” era Windows Media devices. If those devices were actually any good, their kids wouldn’t have asked for iPods, and they wouldn’t have had to make any silly rules. I somehow doubt Phil Schiller’s kids are forbidden from buying Samsung phones or tablets.