- Early products by James Dyson
- “James Dyson’s first product, the Sea Truck, was launched in 1970 while he was studying at the Royal College of Art. A few years later came the award-winning Ballbarrow that can go where no wheelbarrow has ever been before. Then there was the Wheelboat and the Trolleyball. Even the integral hose, seen on most upright vacuum cleaners, is a Dyson invention.”
- Building loyalty with the long wow
- “True loyalty grows within people based on a series of notable interactions they have, over time, with a company’s products and services. No card-carrying programs are necessary: Apple doesn’t have a traditional loyalty program; neither does Nike or Harley-Davidson. These companies impress, please, and stand out in the minds of their customers through repeated, notably great experiences.”
- Joel on installable software
- “Making an elegantly-designed and easy-to-use application is just as gnarly, even though, like good ballet, it seems easy when done well. Jason and 37signals put effort into good design and get paid for that. Good design seems like the easiest thing to copy, but, watching Microsoft trying to copy the iPod, turns out to be not-so-easy. Great design is a gnarly problem, and can actually provide surprisingly sustainable competitive advantage.”
- Turtles all the way down
- “For Hawking, the turtle story is one of two accounts of the nature of the universe; he asserts that the turtle theory is patently ridiculous, but admits that his own theories may be just as ridiculous. ‘Only time will tell,’ he concludes.”
- The "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks
- Pretty self-”explanatory.”
- Nike’s Phil Knight at Stanford
- “But it was around that time that Mr. Knight was surfacing anew in the classroom. Though not registered as a student, Mr. Knight has periodically taken classes with Stanford undergraduates over the past three years, swapping homework assignments and even going out with fellow students for a few beers at Palo Alto bars. He has told fellow students that he is writing a novel.”
- About blogs on the Kindle
- “If Amazon charged a monthly connection fee for the Kindle and made blogs free, instead, no one would complain (about the blog part). Because that’s the pricing model they’re used to.”
- Global open-source car design summit
- “Each team contributes a different set of parts or designs. I thought writing for my college newspaper was cool. These kids are building a hyper-efficient car, which, they hope, ‘will demonstrate a 95 percent reduction in embodied energy, materials and toxicity from cradle to cradle to grave’ and provide ‘200 m.p.g. energy equivalency or better.’ The Linux of cars! They’re not waiting for G.M. Their goal, they explain on their Web site — vds.mit.edu — is ‘to identify the key characteristics of events like the race to the moon and then transpose this energy, passion, focus and urgency’ on catalyzing a global team to build a clean car. I just love their tag line. It’s what gives me hope: ‘We are the people we have been waiting for.’”
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9 comments so far
brad 07 Dec 07
On the subject of quotation marks, I’ve noticed a lot of Americans using English-style single quotation marks (‘) in places where for the past couple of centuries we’ve been using doubles (“). I’m seeing it everywhere (I’m an editor, and am constantly fixing it in pieces submitted to me), is this some sort of new trend?
Carl Isenburg 07 Dec 07
It may be a programming thing – in many scripting and programming languages, a single tick ` is used to represent “use this literally”. So, sometimes that thought process passes through the author’s head from the programming language to the English language. At least that’s my theory – I found myself doing it…
Paul Thrasher 07 Dec 07
Harley does have a few loyalty programs. H.O.G.S. is a big one. There’s another that ties into Best Western for rider points.
Zombie 07 Dec 07
I like turtles
ok 07 Dec 07
C’mon 37 signals … the link defending Amazon’s decision to charge for reading blogs on the Kindle is ridiculous. The arguments are so full of holes it’s not worth going through them (ie: “Do you not pay for paper and ink if you print them?” !!!)
The fact is the web would be a lot worse off if every device took Kindle’s lead, imposing its own fee on subscribing to blogs and restricting access to those blogs willing to join the racket. It would change how we relate to the endless sea of information that RSS feeds help us manage. Who could afford to pay a dollar per month for each of the dozens of feeds they have bookmarked? How would you choose which ones to keep?
If a price tag becomes the deciding factor in how many and which blogs we read haven’t we taken a big step backwards?
Anonymous Coward 07 Dec 07
re: the Kindle: “So get over it. One pricing model is not morally superior to the other.”
Actually a model that encourages us to explore more sources of information IS morally superior to one that makes us artificially set limits on what can tune in to.
MH 08 Dec 07
It’ll get 300 MPG , but you’ll have to get in squeezing through a foot-wide hatch at the top, and steer by typing in the desired degrees of motion in hexadecimal.
Nivi 08 Dec 07
I don’t think good design provides a sustainable advantage.
The people that made it do. =)
“[An organization] is much more difficult to copy than strategy.” – Jeffrey Pfeffer, http://tinyurl.com/3c67uw
Simon 11 Dec 07
Re: The long wow
While I’m in general agreement with the notion that long-term customer loyalty can only be achieved through systematically impressing your customers over the course of many interactions – loyalty schemes do seem to work for some businesses.
As we wrote on our blog: “In the travel sector for example, we’ve spoken to plenty of people who will not fly on any airline outside of the Oneworld alliance or stay in a hotel that does not fall under the umbrella of the Starwood group. Why? Because they are collecting the points necessary to enjoy free / discounted flights and accommodation. While none of the other benefits seem to matter to them, these freebies create a fierce loyalty to the vendors that offer them.”
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