All That I Know (About Technology)

I’ve started noticing how I’m tackling projects at home much like I do at work. At work, I’m the guy that gets called up to clean up messes — a janitor of sorts — because some projects don’t run perfectly. It requires strong analytical skills which is my strong suit. Based on my experience, jumping into the middle of a project requires three things:

1. Ensuring that you don’t waste time on the “blame game.”
2. Identifying a path to take the project from the current state to the end state.
3. Keeping the team focused on their goal avoid another project “derailment.”

So following these same steps, I decided to tackle our home media network panel (see image above). The network panel was organized in such a way that the wires from each room were bundled together. While in theory it sounded logical as the wires originated from the same outlet, the panel was very difficult to manage because the bundled wires from each room had to be split up and terminated into the same module. For example, the coax wires from the office and the living room, which were bundled with the telephone/satellite/network wires from the same room, had to be bundled together and terminated in the coax cable splitter module.

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There’s really nothing more irritating than lazy marketing. It’s when a marketer expects you to just hand over your money to them. The marketer is behaving lazily — they don’t invest their time researching and developing a compelling offer that drives consumers to purchase the product/service.

So imagine my frustration when a lazy marketing email arrived in my inbox from Netflix, a company that I’m a big fan of and I’ve written about in the past. It was a win-back offer asking me to renew my recently cancelled subscription. I had closed my account when Netflix announced that their 1-DVD rental/unlimited streaming service was increasing from about $10 to $16 per month earlier this year. Actually, I considered subscribing only to their streaming service but felt that the value wasn’t there at the $7.99 per month price point. While I am a believer that streaming media is the wave of the future, I felt that the Netflix library (or anyone else’s these days) is a bit anemic. So shortly after shutting it down, the win-back emails started rolling in and while I ignored the first one or two, I started to notice a surprising pattern.

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Late last week, I caught up with our CEO who was telling me just how much he loved his iPhone 4S. He was most impressed with Siri, the new personal assistant powered by advanced artificial intelligence. He explained how he was running late to a client meeting because of a car accident and that he was able to look up the mobile number of the client and send them a text message without typing a single character. While I’ve been unimpressed with Android in the past, I’ve recently written about how amazing is Android on the Samsung Galaxy S II so it got me thinking as to why people refuse to switch.
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