Balance is key to many (though not all) areas of life. Today we’re going to explore the need to find a healthy balance between analysis and action. Spending too much time and effort on either will lead to stagnation and failure. If all of your time is spent figuring out a better way to do things you’ll never actually get things done and if all of your effort goes toward action you will fail to improve and adapt how you do them.
There are some really great ideas out there on how you interact with your customers. Some companies survive because customers have no choice but to rely on them. The power and gas companies tend to fall into this category. However, most companies have competition, often fierce, that is actively trying to crush them and take their market share. These companies have to work hard to keep their edge and draw customers. There are some people out there with truly original, innovative, and sometimes radical ideas on how to do this (we are of course among them but today I want to point out some additional resources).
Back in April I wrote about “Lock-In” and mentioned Microsoft as a company that locks customers in using proprietary data formats. Well, sure enough they go ahead and announce a major change in the data formats for the next generation of Office (due entirely to my comments I’m sure). They are promising to keep the XML formats open and publically available for anyone to use. This means that software makers will be able to easily access the documentation for the file formats and create applications that can easily read and extract information from Office documents created in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. This also means it should be easy to write in files into those formats as well. Using a simple […]
I mentioned the other day that I spend a great deal of time reading in order to stay up on all of the latest tricks, techniques, and technologies. I thought it might be useful to share a list of sites I frequent. These sites talk about design, usability, accessibility, programming, technology, and other topics. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I do.
I work hard every day to become better at what I do. I sit in my office reading blogs, books, tutorials, and anything else I can get my hands on and work on experiments and projects to hone my programming and design skills. I do this to avoid facing the trunk monkey in my car that attacks me when I go out… or possibly I do this so that I can produce really great websites. However, it is apparent to me that no matter how much I learn it will not be enough if what I build is not useful to people. So the real question is not just how do we build things well, but how do we build […]
