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“How Coolness Defined the World Wide Web of the 1990s”

If you weren’t online in the mid-1990s, you might have missed the tremendous effort devoted to curating, sharing, and circulating the coolness of the World Wide Web. The early web was simply teeming with declarations of cool: Cool Sites of the Day, the Night, the Week, the Year; Cool Surf Spots; Cool Picks; Way Cool Websites; Project Cool Sightings. Coolness awards once besieged the web’s virtual landscape like an overgrown trophy collection.

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For example, he says at the company everyone knows what a developer does and what a product manager does. But those roles need an overhaul, and that’s what he meant in his memo when he said “nothing is off the table.”

“Satya Nadella: This Is How I’m Really Going To Change Microsoft’s Culture” via BusinessInsider

I saw the role of the Program Manager change only slightly in my ten years at Microsoft. The explicit separation of the Program Manager’s responsibilities from the non-code side of the business – marketing, business development, KPI’s, etc. – made it such that you could get really good at designing a UX interface but have no idea if customers liked it (or really needed it in the first place). Not every team or individual PM had such clear separations, but it was definitely less than common. 

I’m still in a bit of the honeymoon phase of working for a tiny startup where everyone’s roles are naturally wider (due to the work vs. resource balance). Yet my short time here has convinced me that for the PM role to evolve at Microsoft, it absolutely must move more towards a Product *Management*-style discipline, one driven by metrics, KPI’s, and customer-driven development. This was happening on my last team where we were building Mail, Calendar, and People on Office 365, and I hope that the style of work we were beginning to embrace (more agile, metrics- and customer-driven development) continues to spread.

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Many entrepreneurs fantasize about days longer than 24 hours, convinced that their new venture could change the world, if they just had more time. They don’t realize that a more viable solution is to get more done per existing hour, rather than creating more hours. We all know at least one person who is always “very busy” and works plenty of hours, but generates few significant results. Every person, no matter what their passion, needs to revisit the principles of time management from time to time. However, this topic is particularly critical to entrepreneurs, who struggle with challenges and crises…

Many of my friends and colleagues know I’m a time management nerd; I love calendaring, tasks, and flagging emails more than is healthy for a single person. One of my favorites is using calendar colors to audit my time each Friday.

Entrepreneurs Need Time Management Accelerators

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When Android Wear, Android Auto and Android TV launch this fall, they’ll solve a problem that has plagued Android since day one: an inconsistent user experience across devices. Ars Technica’s Andrew Cunningham points out that unlike Android phones from different manufacturers that sport ugly custom UIs, launchers and interacting with Android on different smartwatches was exactly the same. In fact, Google’s engineering director, David Burke, told Cunningham that with Wear, Auto and TV, the underlying software and interfaces will be controlled by Google, not the OEMs.

This is a move very similar to Microsoft did with Windows Phone 7: they told the OEM’s to get out of the way of design and made it an imperative to design from the bottom of the OS all the way up to the user. The result? A beautiful, consistent experience across disparate devices – a.k.a. the Apple Method.

Google, Not Device Makers, Will Control Android Wear, Auto and TV UI