Tara Hunt’s lesson in her anti-community post: Don’t establish your company’s position in reference to one of your competitors.

As much as I love Apple’s latest TV ads, I now wonder if these Mac vs. Windows ads appeal primarily to the company’s already-loyal fans. The Mac market share numbers for the coming quarters should tell the story.

In Sun CEO sees competitive advantage in blogging, Dustin Sacks of Sillysoft weighs in on what Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s blog means to him: “Sun seems more open if I can leave a note for the CEO.”

Sacks explains here how he learned about the article in today’s USA Today:

I read Schwartz’s blog (since my business is pretty heavily tied to Java I like to keep up-to-date with the big picture going on at Sun) and occasionally comment like the opinionated guy that I am. On May 22 I got an email from the USA TODAY article’s author. He was contacting some people who had posted comments on Schwartz’s blog with some questions he had. I whipped off a reply the next day and forgot about it. Then today voila, the article popped up in the Google Alert I have set up for “sillysoft”.

Blogging sure paid off for Dustin today. It appears that it’s also paid off for Schwartz and Sun. Too bad only two Fortune 500 CEOs — and far too few small company CEOs — do blogging.

Update:
Doc Searls in It’s still only the 21st Century:

[I]n the long run, most businesses will be understood to work fundamentally at the grace of their customers and employees, and . . . conventions for getting those two parties to communicate directly will replace the cosmetic callings of advertising and PR. (One good reason: it’s cheaper.) Blogging may be one of those conventions. Maybe others will emerge.

Today’s USA Today includes the article Johnny Depp plays it his way, an interesting peek into the mind of one of Hollywood’s most creative actors. Some Depp-ology [from the article]:

It’s about “pushing yourself to the absolute brink of failure, in terms of like, ‘Boy, if this don’t work, it’s going to be real bad. And if it does work, it might be great.’

If you don’t sort of tread in the arena of fear, you won’t move forward somehow.

It’s not like you get a thrill out of worrying [studio executives]. But if they’re freaked out about it, that means it’s different. Let’s keep going in that direction.

Gore Verbinski, director of the Pirates of the Caribbean series, tells USA Today that he and Depp were constantly seeking ways to “one-up each other” with risk-taking ideas. Their intent: Avoid the safe path that usually leads to mediocre performances.

Do you have a Johnny Depp type working for you? If so, let him do his thing (within moral and legal limits, of course) — even if he makes you squirm a bit. He (or she) might create millions in new revenue for your company.

Seth Godin offers ten things programmers might want to know about marketers. My favorites:

1. Marketing is not rational. Programming is. Works the same way every time. Marketing doesn’t, almost in a Heisenbergian way. If it worked before, it probably won’t work again.

6. Truly brilliant coding is hard to quantify, demand or predict. Same is true with marketing.

8. Unlike mediocre programmers, mediocre marketers occasionally get lucky. When they do, they end up with a success they can brag about for a generation. But that doesn’t mean they know how to do it again.

10. Without marketing, all your great coding is worthless. Push your marketer to be brave and bold and remarkable. Do it every day. Your code is worth it.

I would argue that a lot of marketers could learn something from Seth’s list as well.

Steve Yegge offers some tips for managing [or not] culled from about 15 years of herding software developers. His money quote (bold text is mine):

The secret ingredient to Great Manager Sauce . . . is just one word: Empathy. If you have true empathy for your engineers, they can forgive almost anything. Which is good, because you will make mistakes. We all do.

[Empathy is] all about having the rather deep realization that people are all pretty much like you in many ways, and their feelings matter a lot more than you probably think.

Reminds me of the time I was in a meeting to discuss the agenda and messages for a year-end meeting at a small technology consultancy. The president and the VP of sales were proposing ideas on what to tell the workforce about the past year and the year to come. In addition to contributing my own ideas, I was continually posing questions to them like “How will employees receive this message?” and “What will they think of that?” The sales VP — an MBA, I might add — said something I’ll never forget: “No offense, but you seem to look at things from an employee’s perspective.”

Duh! He probably made the comment as a hint for me to “Think like a manager, stupid!” I heard it as proof that I’m projecting what I truly feel: empathy for talented people. That’s the way I roll — and that’s what most people (including me) seek in a leader. My answer to the MBA: “That doesn’t offend me at all.”

My favorite stuff from the rest of Steve’s post:

The catch-22 of software management is that the ones who want it most are usually the worst at it. Some people, for worse or for worst, want to be managers because it gives them power over their peers. There’s nothing good that can come of this arrangement . . .

[I]f you take all the managers away, great engineers will still build great things. Maybe even faster.

I know plenty of good managers, even great ones, and none of them are managing. They’re leading, and there’s a world of difference . . . the best managers don’t want to manage: they want to lead.

Leadership stems from having a clear vision, strong convictions, and enough drive and talent to get your ideas and goals across to a diverse group of people who can help you achieve them. If you have all that, you’re close. Then you just need empathy so you don’t work everyone to death. If you’re a great leader, you can put the whip away; everyone will give you everything they’ve got.

Great companies recognize that leadership is orthogonal to management, and that people can be highly influential leaders with or without direct reports.

If you don’t know whether you’re a bad manager, then you’re a bad manager. It’s the default state, the start-state, for managers everywhere. So just assume you’re bad, and start working to get better at it. It’s actually a pretty good assumption, because you are going to make some mistakes, even after you have lots of experience. Even if you’re a good manager, you can always get better at it.

If nothing does come up — if things are all running smoothly and you’re hardly having to work at it — then you’ve got a more insidious problem on your hands: if it all seems easy, then your company is probably sailing smoothly towards insignificance. Because I guarantee you that your competitors are working really, really hard.

Although his observations relate to his time spent with programmers, I think the principles apply to anyone who finds themself leading a group of technical folks.

That’s the opinion of most CEOs at fast-growing technology companies, according to Deloitte & Touche.

An article in this morning’s Wall Street Journal provides the key numbers from this year’s and last year’s Deloitte surveys:

That’s worth repeating:
About 2 of every 3 CEOs at fast-growth tech firms say high-quality employees are the biggest contributors to growth, outranking leadership and strategy.

Talent more important than leadership and strategy?! Last year, 1 of 4 CEOs thought so; now it’s 2 of 3. Talk about a major paradigm shift within a short time frame!

Tom Peters has been ranting about the importance of a focus on talent for years. Today, Seth Godin posits that people are to most businesses what real estate is to retail stores. Seems that the fast-growth tech companies are just now getting it. How about the rest of you?

Mark Cuban responds to the criticism he’s been hearing since day one in his role as owner of the Dallas Mavericks:

To me, the proof is always in the details. No matter what business I’m in, [I find that] most people work in headlines mode. They think that if they say or write something that makes a good headline , then there must be substance to their point. That’s not the way business works. Which is why most people never get further than the middle.

Substance comes from detail. Luck comes from detail. Winning comes from being willing to do the work on the details. Learning comes from investing in details.

Once you have information, then you can add brainpower and try to do things better. Once you have information, then you can start to define excellence and strive for it, measuring your progress along the way.

I don’t agree with everything Cuban says or does — but I can say that about virtually anyone. I do believe this: Mark is the biggest reason for the Mavericks’ rise to the NBA elite, and he is exactly what the league needs.

Passion, a strong voice, attention to detail, and a focus on continuous improvement are a powerful combination. Cuban has all four in spades.

Last week, Doug Miller pointed to this story about Stephen Hawking telling a Hong Kong audience that humans should pursue space colonization. I agree with Doug – the physicist is a genius, and we should heed his message. Unfortunately, I think Hawking’s words got lost amid far too many other competing headlines.

Consider the space race that led to the first trip to the moon. The Apollo program was largely catalyzed by President Kennedy’s “man on the moon by the end of the decade” vision, and those who made it happen were likely inspired by the prospects of competition against an “evil” foe (the USSR). But ultimately, the whole initiative was driven by fear – the fear of falling behind the Russians in technological superiority.

Today, I think we Americans lack the kind of fear that would inspire a similar government-led “moon or bust” effort. Of course, we live in different times, the U.S. has a lot on its plate, and NASA has had its share of problems over the past couple of decades. But it seems that NASA could do a lot more to inspire the public — especially today’s kids who might become tomorrow’s astronauts & engineers. For example, consider their latest incarnation of the Implementation Plan for Space Shuttle Return to Flight and Beyond. That document is 306 pages long. Can’t you guys come up with something a little more suitable for public consumption (not to mention interesting)?

The most inspiring words regarding space exploration I’ve read in years were blogged here more than two years ago by Peter F. Drucker’s grandson, tech entrepreneur Nova Spivack:

Of course there are big problems on Earth that could also use the money that would otherwise go towards Mars development, but I think in the long-term — if we take a 1000 year view of things — spending money on colonizing Mars has greater potential benefit for greater numbers of people in the future than almost anything we can do on Earth . . . Spreading to another world dramatically increases the odds that humanity will survive in the universe. Staying only on Earth is far too risky in the long-term.

Fortunately, there’s a new crowd looking to the stars now, but they walk in different shoes and are driven by a different emotion. Today, the leader is private industry, and the driving force is personal dreams (with a touch of greed). Amazon’s Jeff Bezos started Blue Origin. Elon Musk of Paypal fame founded SpaceX to develop reusable launchers at a tenth of the cost of today’s technology. Richard Branson wants to provide suborbital joy rides with Virgin Galactic. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen invested in SpaceShipOne. Video game creator John Carmack has joined the space game as well with Armadillo Aerospace.

Maybe Hawking can inspire some young minds to become the kinds of engineers a growing space industry will need. He and his daughter plan to write a new book about the universe, aimed at the young Harry Potter crowd. I hope they take a page from the Potter series and make the book a story that sparks young imaginations. A book based strictly on whats and hows might not generate the word-of-mouth required to capture kids’ attentions.

I’m eager to see how Space Race II unfolds over the next few years.

Update:
I just found out from this article about NASA’s COTS program. They’re sponsoring a competition in which the winning companies will split $500mil in seed money to develop new space vehicles. Although there’s some concern that splitting up the prize money will dilute its impact, the program appears to be a good thing.

A couple of New Yorkers weighed in yesterday on Net Neutrality, each with a different delivery.

Amanda Congdon hosts a daily videoblog on Rocketboom, and made NN yesterday’s topic du jour. In typical Rocketboom style, Amanda conveys her message in a manner both entertaining and informative.

VC Fred Wilson used his blog to post his views. His money quote:

[O]ur current network architecture is “dumb”. It doesn’t care what application runs on top of it. And if we change that simple fact, the Internet in our country will cease to be a viable platform for innovation. The action will move to Estonia, India, China, Israel, Korea, or wherever else they understand the power of a dumb network.

I vote for dumb.

Update:
Doc Searls offers some recent scoop on S.2686, including this Jamie Lewis quote:

We need to incent the world we want rather than regulate the world we fear.

Seems like good advice for legislators and business leaders alike.

Sig has posted a beauty: YKSIW. I think he’s invented a new acronym as well.

As his post suggests, Sig’s mission goes beyond merely selling software which automates the way we do certain tasks. He wants to change the way business is done, for the betterment of all.

As Hugh has said, “Business is change; there is nothing else.” Given a flat world, Friedman’s miscalculation, and rampant job dissatisfaction (among other things too numerous to mention here), a continuous pursuit of change in business has never been more important.