Business Logs – Page 14

Skip Prestige, Do It For The Fun

I do things very differently from a lot of my friends in the design consulting profession. Everybody seems to be looking for the big client, the big money, or the well-known website, but I skip all of those and concentrate on projects I know are interesting and fun to work on. I immediately turn down projects I think are going to take too long, be too draining, have too much corporate political bullshit, or won’t let me express my creativity because what’s the point? It doesn’t matter how well a project pays, if it’s a hassle to deal with it every single day for X months then you’re going to be miserable. Money != happiness.

Some of my friends from school graduated and are now trying to make it on their own, but what’s difficult to figure out is that you’ll hate consulting work if you pick the wrong types of projects, and now those same friends are totally burnt out after only a year or so…..

Apple Pays Off Nick From ThinkSecret

After a long and tumultuous struggle between Nick from Think Secret and Apple, they’ve resolved their issues and Think Secret will be publishing no longer.

This is especially interesting to me because I’ve been a reader of Think Secret for many years, essentially since the site started, and followed the lawsuit from its genesis to now. Nick is actually a few years younger than I am, is still in college, so seeing him go up against a giant company like Apple is interesting for me since I’ve enjoyed his reporting over the years.

As part of the press release that Think Secret posted, it said that a “positive solution” had been reached for both sides. To me, that means the lawsuit has been dropped and perhaps Nick got a payoff to stop writing. I don’t know what type of payoff, perhaps Apple paid his legal fees plus some cash, but maybe it was larger than that. Maybe once the EFF got behind Nick’s case Apple realized they were going to lose, so they decided to turn the tables and stop that from happening. If Nick won then other rumor sites could safely pursue information inside of a protective Apple NDA without worrying about the legal consequences, so by Apple paying off Nick it stopped the forthcoming rumor flood.

Ars Technica mirrors my sentiments in that they also believe he got a nice payday:

“Apple was faced with losing the case and having to pay attorney’s fees,” explained Opsahl, which is likely part of the reason why it decided to settle instead of continuing to pursue it. As for Ciarelli, “We understand that Nick is very satisfied with the outcome of the case,” Opsahl said. “We hope that Apple learns a lesson over this.”

With a wad of cash in his pocket and some real journalistic work experience behind him, Nick can no move forward and has many opportunities to choose from. Of course those opportunities don’t include writing about Apple rumors, but there could be far worse outcomes to this story.

Reputation Management

Scenario: Translucent, Inc. had an image problem. They wanted their customers to understand what they stood for, but were unable to communicate their values effectively. At one point a major glitch occurred in their best selling product and it took months for the PR manager to set things straight.

Google To Expand Its Wireless Plans?

It’s astounding to me to think about Google and then picture them buying Sprint, a “real company” in my eyes. Google’s a search company and Sprint makes things and builds things and has advertising and all the things “real companies” seem to have. But to put things in perspective, Google has a market cap of over $200 billion which is more than 4x the market cap of Sprint Nextel, so Google is certainly a larger company.

Google’s Open Handset Alliance announced last week had a lot of hand-waiving and fun illustrations, but was short on actual product. Phones running Google’s Android platform are nearly a year away from being in consumer’s hands, so there are a lot of questions still up in the air. If Google were to acquire Sprint Nextel, it would certainly give more credibility to their hand in the poker game of their cellphone “alliance” and might open up some additional avenues in regards to generating revenue.

So many people hate the telecom industry and cable companies that if Google were to purchase Sprint and use their infrastructure to build out a high-speed, long-distance wireless network, I can see many people ditching Comcast or TimeWarner and jumping on the Google bandwagon. Broadband pipes are so locally saturated in the major metropolitan areas that wireless alternatives might be a good fit for people fed up with lobbyists having a larger impact on their cable companies then their own petitions. Personally I’d love to see Google sell a WiMAX set-top widget that would coordinate with a cellphone widget to push WiMAX speeds to me wherever I am. Unfortunately with Google pursuing the handset alliance it seems if these pipe dreams (no pun intended) come true, iPhone users will be left out in the cold. At least until a 3G iPhone appears and by then anything is possible.

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