The second edition of Amazon’s annual Prime Day is scheduled for Tuesday, July 12, the company announced today. Amazon Prime subscribers who live in one of the eligible countries will have access to what Amazon describes as “more than 100,000 deals across nearly all departments and categories.” Eligible countries are the U.S., UK, Spain, Japan, Italy, Germany, France,… Read More
Walmart has just expanded its free, two-day shipping pilot to the entire United States. The program is called ShippingPass, and it competes directly with Amazon Prime, offering users free, two-day delivery on any item for an annual price of $49. This is just half the price of the $99/year Amazon Prime subscription, but it doesn’t come with the same access to Amazon’s streaming… Read More
How did Bernie Madoff do it? How did he steal twenty billion dollars from people who should have known better? It doesn't matter if you went to university or not--you can still be played as a chump.
To pull off a significant deception, you generally need two things: A deceiver and a crowd of people open to being deceived.
Once those are present, the deceiver brings out the big lie.
For lots of reasons, people are open to looking for shortcuts and a new reality, even if no shortcuts are available. They may have been mistreated, might be struggling, or they may merely be greedy, looking to outdo the other guy. In the case of Madoff, he was even able to take in charities, with boards that meant well but were in a hurry to scale.
Frustration in the face of the way things are makes us open to the big lie. Frustration and fear and anger can suspend our ability to ask difficult questions, to listen to thoughtful critics, to do our homework.
And the big lie is always present when we get played. To be a chump (not merely the victim) is to be open to the big lie. Not merely open to it, eager to buy into it.
Numbers make it easy to tell a big lie. People hate numbers, and they seem so real.
Anti-intellectualism, disregard for the scientific method and conspiracy theories also set the stage for a big lie.
And demonizing the other, the one who is already held in low esteem or feared by the chump, this is usually part of the big lie as well.
In retrospect, the warning signs around Madoff were obvious. Just about any skeptical, thoughtful investor could have seen through the big lie if he wasn't so busy being a chump.
When a population gets played, the responsibility lies with the liar, with the con man, with the person so craven that they'll trade trust and productivity and a bit of civilization for some power and authority.
But the chump also has to take responsibility. Responsibility for looking for the shortcut, giving into the fear and for eagerly believing the big lie, ignoring the clues that are all around.
Chumps aren't restricted by nationality, by education, by income. Chump is an attitude and a choice.
We're not chumps. Not if we don't choose to be.
Over a year ago, Amazon’s AWS cloud computing unit announced the beta launch of the Amazon Elastic File System (EFS). While AWS already offers a number of cloud storage services in the form of S3, Glacier and Elastic Block Store, the idea behind EFS is to offer AWS users access to a more straightforward file storage system that at least partly mirrors the features of the kind of… Read More
Microsoft today announced that the Windows 10 Anniversary Update will launch on August 2. This is one of the biggest Windows 10 updates yet and will include new features for both consumers and enterprises. As Microsoft also announced today, Windows 10 now runs on 350 million devices and users have spent 135 billion hours using it so far. That’s up from the 300 million devices running… Read More
In a move that is both altogether unexpected and entirely predictable, Amazon is announcing this morning that it will bringing the same on-screen ad subsidized price cut its been offering on its own Kindle products to third party devices. As of this morning, the online mega-retail is offering up deep discounts on a pair of already low-priced smartphones in a service akin to its Special… Read More
Consider a race to the top.
How can Lyft possibly compete with Uber? Scale is often the secret to a commodity business, and if Lyft races to be ever cheaper than Uber, the only possible outcome doesn’t look good. It's a cutthroat corner-cutting race.
But what happens if Lyft (or your project) decides to race to the top instead?
What if they say, “we’re always a dollar more than Uber”?
And then they spend that dollar, all of it, on the drivers...
What kind of person buys the cheap ride, the ride with the stressed-out angry drivers?
So instead of drivers abandoning fares they accept (they’re under so much pressure to make ends meet, Uber drivers do this all the time--it happened to me four times in one weekend), you end up with drivers that were good enough to be able to charge an extra dollar…
Uber becomes the bottom fisher, and Lyft (or whatever it is you do) is the place you go once you've proven yourself...
And what would happen if your fast food place said, “we’re the place that charges you a dollar extra at lunch,” and they spent all that dollar in paying their employees and their suppliers a living wage?
Some people will always want the cheapest, regardless of what it actually ends up costing them. But in market after market, the list goes on. Projects and organizations that proudly charge a dollar more.
Not merely a dollar more.
A dollar more, and worth it.
Need to find that one other passage or picture in a book but find it hard to do with an e-reader? Kindle readers wanting to flip back and forth and make a quick reference to materials now have an easier way to do so with a new feature called Page Flip. Kindle refers to Page Flip as a “reimagined navigation experience.” What that means is you can now “flip” pages back… Read More
It will now be easier to add “Skills” – new functionality by way of voice-activated apps to Amazon’s smart speaker Echo, and its other Alexa-powered devices, Amazon announced this morning. The company has finally given its Skills “app store” a makeover, and is introducing a means of adding new Skills by voice, too. Amazon’s Echo and other Alexa… Read More
Confirming reports from earlier this week, Amazon announced this morning an expansion of its Dash button program – the small, push-button devices that allow consumers to place orders of specific products, ranging from paper towels to trash bags to even bubble gum and condoms, via Amazon.com. The retailer says today it’s adding over 50 new brands to the service, which now includes… Read More
Doubt is corrosive.
Someone faced with doubt rarely brings her best self to the table. Doubt undermines confidence, it casts aspersions, it assumes untruths.
Yes, of course you need to qualify your leads. And yes, we know that you need to protect against risk and to not waste your time.
But... if you're going to spend five minutes or five hours with someone, what happens if you begin with, "the benefit of confidence" instead? What if you begin by believing, by seeking to understand, by rooting for the other person to share their best stories, their vision and their hopes?
Perhaps you can manipulate someone by scowling, by negging, by putting on airs. But if you do that, you end up with people who have been manipulated, who are wounded and not ready to soar.
The problem with qualifying leads is that all the obvious ones are already taken.
The challenge with assuming that someone is completely imperfect is that you'll almost certainly be right.
There's plenty of room for doubt later, isn't there?
It’s been over a year and a half since Microsoft first announced the open source .NET Core project, which aims to bring the core parts of Microsoft’s .NET framework (and it’s cousing, the web-focused ASP.NET Core) to Linux, OS X and other operating systems that the company didn’t previously support. As Microsoft announced today, .NET Core and ASP.NET Core have now… Read More
As the security market shakes up in more ways than one, who wins, who struggles and who will get acquired next? Read More
Back in March, we reported how the e-commerce and cloud services giant Amazon was poised to up its stakes in the educational publishing market with the launch a new, free platform called Inspire for teachers and others to post and share education resources online. Today, the company has confirmed it is doing just that. It has announced Amazon Inspire, an online education resources (OER)… Read More
Shannon Weber decided that there wasn't enough love, recognition or connection in her world, so she did something about it. When she finds an unsung (don't say 'ordinary' hero) she makes them a cape.
Caping people, catching them doing something right, shining a light on a familiar hero.
It turns out that this is way more difficult than being cynical, or ironic, or bitter. Being closed is a lot easier than being connected. It takes guts.
What kind of impact does one act of kindness make? It can last for years.
Go, cape someone.
The sales tech stack is being built as we speak, and it’s happening in lockstep with the move from the one-to-many work of demand generation, to the one-to-one world of account-based sales and marketing. Read More"I'm not sure what it is, but I'm against it."
It's a mistake to believe that people know all the facts before they decide.
In fact, most of the time, we decide and then figure out if we need to get some facts to justify our instinct.
There are two common causes of uninformed dissent:
The first is person who fears change, or is quite happy with the status quo. He doesn't have to read your report or do the math or listen to the experts, because the question is, "change" and his answer is, "no."
The second (quite common in a political situation), is the tribal imperative that people like us do things like this. No need to do the science, or understand the consequences or ask hard questions. Instead, focus on the emotional/cultural elements and think about the facts later .
