I’ve fallen waaaaaaay behind in my podcasts so here is a two-for-one podcast post.
First up is Tim O’Reilly‘s opening remarks from this past OSCon. It’s not a bad talk as they go in which he asks questions about open-source in the Web 2.0 world. Some of the questions / thoughts taken in a different context could be well applied to testing.
- Are we asking ourselves the wrong questions? They might have been the right ones before, but are they still?
- What does term ‘x’ (freedom) mean? (see Brian Marick’s talk on boundary objects)
- Freedom to switch (open standards) > freedom to fork
- Extensibility is key to the success of a platform
- The metrics in different spaces are different
The podcast details page complete with embedded and downloadable versions can be found here.
The other podcast comes from ETel (another O’Reilly conference). In it Jeff Bonforte talks about Anger being the driving factor in the context of innovation and startups. See Michael’s presentation on Emotions and Oracles for more on this idea.
- Anger is the most untapped emotion in startups
- Anger is the most important emotion
- Find the angry/irrational people and solve their problems
- Skype tapped into the “I’m pissed at the telcos”
- Consumers change behavior out of anger; not because it is cool (which is why geeks are a bad indicator on whether something will succeed — we intentionally follow cool)
- The angry people feel what the rest of the world feels but on an exponential amount
- If you hear…
- I am sick of…
- I want to belong…
- Telcos, banks, health care, government services, airlines, Microsoft all great places to search for latent anger
- Any solution that requires ‘the dreaded two-step’ (where another party is involved between you and the consumer) has a massive uphill climb
- Your value statement should be what consumers tell other consumers in one sentence
The podcast details for this one are here.