We’re moving

Coming soon this blog will relocate to www.DavidKissinger.com, along with a whole new look. Stay tuned!

Desperately Seeking The Great Gatsby

What is good writing? I’m in the presence of good writing after I write a draft, then polish, scrub, polish, scrub, delete half of it and still love the rest. It’s when I read the same piece the next day and don’t hate it.

Good writing is when I open a vein and distract myself until something major comes out. It always does.

Good writing is when I read a piece over and over again and get so into it that I forget what day it is. Good writing is a moment that comes and then is gone just when you were both getting to know each other.

I thought about the mystery of good writing when I continued my fruitless search for an article I wrote about The Great Gatsby that appeared in the San Francisco Bay Guardian sometime in the 1990s. I loved that piece. I can’t find it anywhere: not in my files; not on the website’s archives.

My high school junior English teacher, Mr. O’Brien, taught us the ins and outs of The Great Gatsby. He also taught a certain love of reading and taste for pictures, images and feelings in good writing. It’s all in the article, somewhere.

One day, I’ll find that article again. It’s worth a re-post, if only to get back into the moment one more time.

So I got a Kindle. But that’s not the last word on consumer choice

After ignoring the hype for months, drooling over Plastic Logic, dreaming about the Nook and fretting about the Sony eReader, I finally ordered my Kindle last night. Is because the Kindle is the best product for electronic book readers? Sorry fellas, not a chance.

We’ll spend some time here on ereaders – why I chose Kindle (for now), why I chose ereaders at all, and what features on these little gewgaws add the most value to the consumer for the least expense and risk to the… what are they? Publisher? Manufacturer? Retailer? Shopping mall in a box?

Still, I’m looking forward to getting my Kindle. In a way, my “consumer choice” wasn’t much of a choice at all. It was tempered with:

• Nook: Barnes & Noble released a buggy device, according to some reviewers. They subsequently ran out of stock smack in the middle of the 2009 holiday shopping season which, surprisingly, is turning out to be a pretty decent retail sales period.
• Plastic Logic: Wasn’t there supposed to be a product release in late 2009? Yes things slip, it’s really OK. Why again, really, do some retailer  bet the farm on the holiday shopping season? That’s a crappy model for reliable revenues. (More on that some other time.)
• eReader: see “Plastic Logic”, above. Plus, its lack of connectivity is an issue. More on features later.
• My impatience: Perhaps consumer impatience is a benefit to retailers, at least the one who know how to tap it with impulse buys, loss leaders, and more.
• My anxiety about this market space: Are single-use gadgets able to stand their ground among the multi-use items like iPhone, Verizon’s Droid and Google’s Nexus One phone? Am I wasting my money? (By the way: Droid or Nexus One – which one should I get? That will be my April toy.)

So Kindle is my starter toy, but I’m looking to see how later readers, especially the cleaned-up Nook and Plastic Logic, come out when they’re released later. It may be that first to market is a huge advantage, but I wouldn’t suggest that the Kindle folks write off Nook, or anyone else.

I’ll check in here periodically to see how it actually goes with my new toy. Starting with delivery: It’s supposed to arrive tomorrow!

Zoho’s application cupboard – it’s certainly not bare!

Who better to hear from on application development than from someone who (like me) has no real marketable app dev skills? I appreciate that rich irony but I’m going to forge ahead anyway.

My interest here is not the nitty details of programming languages but rather each app’s usability, interface, the way it integrates with and contributes to the overall Zoho brand. (I don’t know the recipe for Coca Cola either, but there should be a similar discussion about Coke’s products relating to the Coke brand. And those bottles!)

Let’s start with a look at the universe of applications available. Check out again the apps shown in this image at right.

How cool is that? This is the rare moment where less isn’t more. In fact, for years Microsoft and its partner PC makers have front-loaded new PCs with lots of applications that most consumers wouldn’t use. It only got annoying when brands like AOL and Quicken used the PC desktop as a shopping mall to push consumers to buy software they didn’t know they needed.

But what is the best muli-application scenario for Zoho?

Zoho: The front door says a lot about a house, but which door is it?

In today’s look at Zoho, let’s go to the starting point: the interface. By “interface” I don’t mean the specific features of each Zoho app but rather the overall navigation between them – the thing that ties it all together.

This is a singularly critical point for an office solution like Zoho, because the interface brings together all of the apps’ functionality and keeps them in the same sandbox under the Zoho brand. The “front door” of any web app – or any consumer brand at all – is where impressions count. Here is what I’ll call Facebook‘s front door:

This is Zoho’s front door:

This page appears after I log onto www.zoho.com.

In an earlier post I alluded to my discomfort about Zoho and its interface inconsistency. It implies somehow that Zoho lacks a solid foundation where I can safely store my data, reliably share it with partners, and know it will be there in the future when I need it.

This sandbox is more like a leaky sieve rather than a strong wall that differentiates My Stuff from the Big Bad Web. Let’s look in detail at some elements of the Zoho interface before the sand leaks out.