What a great success story

I just love hearing about people that have made it lifting themselves up from their bootstraps. Carlos Gutierez is one of the latest in a long line of people to validate the Land of Opportunity.

First Christmas decorations up

Took advantage of the nice weather today to put up Christmas lights on the front of the house. One task done and didn't even need gloves or a ski mask to pull it off. Doesn't help Spencer's perception that it's already Christmas because he's seen snow - he keeps asking where the presents are.

What a pathetic performance

Going into yesterday's Lions' game, I actually thought the Lions had a good chance at shutting down the Colts' offense. After all, it was Thanksgiving, and the Lions usually rise up and play a great game while the whole country is watching. Couple that with Dick Jauron, a supposed defensive mastermind, and I would have bet a less than stellar offensive performance from the Colts.

Oh well, it's the Lions =)

That time of year again

The crazy Thanksgiving holiday! Love our tradition of a home-cooked turkey dinner, a Lions game, and lots of laziness =)

Too much to be thankful for to post here, although I will shout a special thanks out to those who protect and ensure our freedom.

Everyone have a Happy Thanksgiving!

Consumer Research and Bottled Water

I work in Whirlpool's Innovation and Technology organization; we're responsible for filling the product pipeline with innovative product ideas.

Yet, time and time again I listen to people who look at focus group and survey data and kill innovative ideas because "the data" doesn't justify futher investment in a particular innovation.

I would love to see "the data" that justified the market for Bottled Water. Better yet, I'd love to "the data" that suggested companies could charge more for water than they could for gasoline!

The flaw I see is that we are comparing apples and oranges; to expect consumers to understand the impact of an innovation when they've never experienced and capture that information in the same manner you would capture their response to existing concepts they have experience with doesn't make sense. Somehow, there has to be a different mechanism to guage potential acceptance of an innovative idea.

I do have a theory and a model for innovation. A couple, actually. One of them is no different than what a number of companies (especially cell phone companies) already do: put ideas in the market and see what sells. The other is more scientific for those areas where putting ideas into the market is cost-prohibitive. I just don't have a way to test it out =(

This is a topic of extreme interest to me. Would love to get others' ideas on this.

My Yahoo! now supports RSS feeds

Well it's about time. This was a feature that I thought should have been obvious over a year ago. Love the idea of RSS feeds in My Yahoo! How do I get alerts from new RSS content? Is that available via Yahoo! Messanger? (If not, it SHOULD be). That's one of the features I love about FeedReader - it has a small, non-intrusive notification window as it detects new RSS content. For now I will still use FeedReader until Yahoo! provides better RSS support. At least this is a step in the right direction.

Enough is enough

I've watched over the last 25 years professional and collegiate sports degrade in sportsmanship and profesionalism. In the past the major sports associations have been a joke regarding suspensions, fines, etc for reprehensible player behavior. It appears that that line has finally been crossed that the trend must be reversed. Kudos to Stern for suspending that thug Ron Artest for the season (hopefully the Oakland County District Attorney files criminal charges against him and the other participants in Friday's melee).

I hope all professionals in the sporting community take a look in the mirror and use this opportunity to reverse this poor sportsmanship trend. Would hate to not have my children not experience live sporting events due to such criminal behavior.

How 'bout them Boilers!

Wow, Big Ten record for total yardage in the game, and I was there to witness it =)

Sun allows early access to J2SE 6.0

https://j2se.dev.java.net

Good move by Sun and good for the Java community. It will be interesting to see how they respond to suggestions from the developer community. If only they would have done that for 1.4 and I could have asked them to rename assert =)

Sears and KMart?

Wow, two dying brands merging together. Wonder what that means for Wal-mart and Whirlpool?

Speaking of brands, from Sunday's New York Times Business section...

"Late last month, Steven P. Jobs, Apple's chairman, rented an ornate theater here to promote Apple's latest advertisement for its iPod music player - a crisp psychedelic montage of the Irish pop band U2 playing "Vertigo," a song from its next album. Unlike the 1984 commercial, this one is intended to help Apple preserve a big, and growing, lead in the marketplace.
Speaking just after the event, Bono, U2's lead singer, said the band was not charging Apple a penny to be in the ad. (The band says it had turned down as much as $23 million to use its music in other commercials.) In its three-year life, the iPod has achieved such "iconic value," Bono said, that U2 gets as much value as Apple does from the commercial, by promoting its music and the new Red and Black U2 edition of the iPod, for which the band gets royalties."

Wow. Kudos to Apple for its innovation process that allowed it to launch a product like iPod. I wonder what their marketing research looked like back in 2000?

Well it's about damn time

After a year of hemming and hawing, I finally got around to creating my own blog. Now the world gets to see what up to now only my wife heard me bitch about. BEWARE!