While the US was distracted in its negotiations over whether to have a government, the health insurance exchange, HealthCare.gov, launched. It was beset by technical issues. Put simply, it couldn't handle the load. This isn't surprising. The right way to design a site like this is for robustness in on-going use -- that is, for …
Continue reading "HealthCare.gov really is the purest political failure"
The HBR saga continues today with HBR responding both in the Financial Times and to me personally about some of the issues that have been raised this week. To recap, here are links to: My initial post My clarification My Financial Times article The HBR response in the Financial Times today was written by the …
My post last week on Harvard Business School Publishing's pricing rules for Harvard Business Review articles used for teaching managed to grab lots of attention. That was, of course, my hope given my use of the 'evil' tag. While that seemed like a bold claim, sometimes you need to draw emotion to get everyone focussed. …
Continue reading "Clarifying the issues with Harvard Business Review"
... and this time the tree wasn't happy. There was this boy, San Diego State University professor Joseph Thomas, who wanted to use some branches of the tree to build a biography of Shel Silverstein. Now even though in this case, the tree could still live on happily with all of its branches and all …
Continue reading "Once there was a tree … Shel Silverstein's estate and publishers"
I am pretty sure that Harvard Business School spends some time teaching its students about Google's "Don't be evil" business statement. While I am also pretty sure that it doesn't take it at face value, I would be very surprised if it challenged not being evil as a worthy goal. If their attempts to introduce …
Continue reading "Harvard Business School Publishing crosses the 'evil' academic line"
Re-published from Medium Malcolm Gladwell has a new book out entitled David and Goliath. It is about underdogs and is based on the classic David vs Goliath setting in which a shepherd, David, defeats a giant, Goliath. I have yet to read the whole book — this isn’t a review — but in the very first chapter I was struck …
Last week, Slate launched its long awaited redesign. For a site that is in my regular ‘morning tab’ browser run, to me, this was a big deal. According to the commentary by David Plotz, Slate was motivated by beauty and ease. There is much to like about the new design (for instance, getting rid of …
Continue reading "How Slate's redesign misses the lessons of Prego"
Marco Arment, who has been responsible for some popular apps including Instapaper, is a leader in the app world on discussions of mobile app strategy. For that reason, when he makes a pronouncement that tends to start a discussion. And in today's instalment, he pronounced, upfront mobile app pricing over. What is upfront app pricing? …
Precisely how does the online world provide public goods? That is the question for this column. Public goods in the digital world contain some of the same features as those in the offline world. Yet, there are some key differences in the boundaries between public and private, and that shapes what arises and what does …
The LA School District has been pioneering a roll-out of iPads to High School students. But reports today suggest that things have not gone according to plan. Following news that students at a Los Angeles high school had hacked district-issued iPads and were using them for personal use, district officials have halted home use of …
Digitopoly 