Orcmid's Lair

	Orcmid's Lair	status privacy about contact
Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton Archives Atom Feed Associated Blogs Edge City Numbering Peano Praxis101 Prof. von Clueless in the Blunder Dome Recent Items Recognizing the Perspective of Others: Ask for The... Framing the World: Social Engineering the Conventi... OOX: ISO 5–month Ballot Period Ends September 2, 2... Freedom Is Not License — Stop Cyberbullying Day: M... When Your Team Owns the Business Marquee de Sells:... Is “Digital Identity” a Misleading Notion? The oth... John Backus: December 3, 1924 – March 17, 2007 I j... Herding OOXen Doug Mahugh was the semi-official ph... OOX-ODF: Why Have Peace When You Can Have War? In ... OOX-ODF: Taming the Guerilla Bob Sutor just linked...	2007-04-15 Malcolm Gladwell on Secret Sauce: Leadership in Software Usability? I found the wonderful Bruno Giussani extract on leadership thanks to a Robert Scoble shared item (a feed I can subscribe to but not link you to, oddly). I was curious enough about Giussani’s Lunch over IP blog that I checked out the previous entry, “‘Don’t Speak, Point!’ — Three Ingredients of the Future of Journalism.” Offered as an example of embedding, Giussani uses a Malcolm Gladwell talk from TED in 2004. This reveals how much Gladwell’s public persona is very much as he writes. I recommend the 18 minute video which I too may have succeeded at embedding (or not in which case please go to Giussani’s post and watch it). I made an effort to embed the Gladwell video here, but I failed with it for reasons I am unclear about. Please follow the preceding link and *watch it now.* There was an embedded video player here, but it didn't work. That says something interesting about the web and portability and presumed behavior of formats and browsers, but that is a subject for another occasion. What amazes me here is how the brilliant insight of Howard Moskowitz may be completely applicable to the design and configuration of computers and their software platforms for people. This is different than the number of configurations of Vista, which is more about packaging and price differentiation, as far as I can tell. I’m seeing something here about what makes people happy and how there are not one-size-fits-all solutions at any price point. This is important in the Linux-Macintosh-Windows desktop world, in the choice of phones and audio appliances, and also in the efforts to standardize on the wrong essential. (This last will be a problem and I don’t quite know how to address it beyond observing that we really don’t want standardization to mean that everything gets painted battleship grey and all users are to be thought of as government office workers.) Forget my pet concerns and issues. Look at the leadership quote. Most of all, watch the Malcolm Gladwell video wherever it is successfully embedded. I did check the source code where the video appears for any attribution and use requirement but I didn't find anything. I also notice that I am allowing a commercial onto my blog. I figure BMW doesn't mind, and that does not change my policy about advertisements on my web properties. (The other exception is the mandatory Blogger button that is a condition of my using their service.) Tags: orcmid, Malcolm+Gladwell, software+varieties, Howard+Moskowitz, customer+satisfaction, software+usability, Windows+Vista, Macintosh, Linux+Desktop posted by orcmid at 4/15/2007 07:49:00 PM *Comments:* Post a Comment