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July 2006

“The Long Tail” Ad Nauseum

by Pete Abilla on July 31, 2006

long tail, chris anderson, wired

Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson’s new book The Long Tail is hot. It is a provocative and innovative book that attempts to show an economics that the web has created, where the sales of “non-hits” can cumulatively be larger than the sales of hot selling items. While his ideas are germane to many areas of [...]

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Scrum at Yahoo!

by Pete Abilla on July 25, 2006

The New York Times published an article comparing Yahoo! and Google’s products and their development times. It was an interesting read. In that article, the Ash Patel, Chief Product Officer at Yahoo!, mentioned Scrum as a method used to reduce development time: Meanwhile, Yahoo says it is now trying to emulate Google’s faster method of [...]

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Focus on the Customer

by Pete Abilla on July 24, 2006

Jeff Bezos, during a pre-peak meeting once said to a small group of us that there will be many, many winners on the internet. He said that some follow the close-follower mentality and those companies focus on the competition. He continued to say that Amazon has and always will be customer obsessed. He vowed that [...]

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Software Development: Agile, Team Size and Dynamics

by Pete Abilla on July 19, 2006

software development best practices

I’ve long ranted about Amazon’s 2-Pizza Team, which is defined as the following: a team where the team size is no larger than 2 pizzas can feed. Amazon realized early on that in order to cut software development time, the solution was *NOT* to put more people on the project. What is required is a [...]

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The Guerrilla-War-Of-The-Mind Strategy

by Pete Abilla on July 17, 2006

Continuing the series on the 33 Strategies of War, I’ll be summarizing the 2nd Strategy: The Guerilla-War-Of-The-Mind Strategy. Greene begins by stating that often the biggest contributor to failure in strategy is our past — our previous successes and failures.  He recommends venturing forth into new ground: Sometimes you must force yourself to strike out [...]

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His Chin was Criticized: Market Segmentation

by Pete Abilla on July 14, 2006

weak chin, ufc

Last week a few buddies and I watched The Ultimate Fighting Championships 61. It was pretty good. A few featured fights were Tito Ortiz vs Ken Shamrock and others. One of the fights was between Andre Arlovski vs Tim Sylvia. During the Arlovski vs Sylvia fight, the announcer made a comment that Arlovski’s chin has [...]

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Cumbaya Management Essentials

by Pete Abilla on July 11, 2006

. . . or, how to ensure that nothing gets done in your organization. Make sure that your organization has an unbalanced number of ex-management consultants who have mastered the art of business-speak, have never managed an operation or people, are greasily good at selling an idea but are completely inept at execution. Concensus — [...]

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Shmula Cleans Stuff: Ethnography & Product Design

by Pete Abilla on July 7, 2006

ethnography, design, pete abilla

Warning: This post is longer than normal. I include my thoughts on Product Design and then an article on Ethnography. It’s good stuff, just a little long. I cleaned-up our bird room the other day. I changed the newspaper, their water, I 409′d under the cages, and I vacuumed the carpet. It wasn’t a bad [...]

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