We learned the wrong lesson from Apple
I’m just sitting there watching it going like, wow, they’re not showing the product, we’ve learned the wrong lesson from Apple, because Apple is a consumer products company. You have to get that product in your brain as soon as possible. Salesforce, Postlight, Software as a Service, you sell success to the client.
– Paul Ford, ep275 Postlight Podcast
Everybody says amazing 5000 times
In ep275 of Postlight’s podcast Paul Ford and Rich Ziade talk about Salesforce for 10 minutes. I must have listened to that 10 minutes three or four times.
On what Salesforce wants to be:
Paul: Salesforce wants to be kind of the operating system for how people do day to day business
On how Salesforce talk about what they do:
Paul: I’m fascinated by how they communicate. Now, when you and I communicate, we talk about what we do. We talk very much about the products we build and the things that we do, we actually get right in there. […] But more and more as we go into the room, people are like, ‘Well, why wouldn’t I just use Salesforce?’
Rich: You’re validating sort of a theory I’ve had about Salesforce, which is, software is very secondary to Salesforce. It is not about the software
What a Salesforce presentation is like:
Paul: So start with values. Take your time, talking about all the things you do. Go to success. Talk about, take your time, talk about all the people you help. Clap for them, show trailblazers, show success stories of people in your network, because that’s who’s watching. Okay, I’ve communicated my values. Third, at about like the halfway point, like, you know, or like a half hour in. Now I’m going to show you one video about a product
Rich: It’s a demo?
Paul: No, there’s no demo. It’s a promo marketing video from an executive showcasing somebody getting their vaccine in New York City, through a Salesforce managed program.
[…]
Paul: Here’s what that success looks like. Now, actually, you know, and let me show you the engine that drives that success. But really, it’s not the most important thing. Let’s get back to your success. Let’s get back to the values. The product itself is an afterthought.
Nerds on Salesforce:
Rich: you have to appreciate what they over-indexed on to create the value they’ve created, which is people don’t care! People don’t care! They just don’t care, you and I care, because we’re nerds. And we can’t believe there’s still like remnants of jQuery in the thing. But people do not care.
Sick burn, Paul:
Paul: Salesforce wants everyone to feel good and successful who touches this thing. […] I can tell you objectively that they don’t, but, but nonetheless, I really do think they want it in a way that they want business to be this sort of big, healthy, positive thing.
Summing up:
Rich: Salesforce puts values ahead of software
Lynch’s Sketch Maps
Currently sort of obsessed with Kevin Lynch’s “sketch maps” of cities from The Image of the City.
What now?
The seatbelt pre-tensioners, vital to Volvo’s safety programme, contained dynamite
Elon vs Jeff
Elon builds things—he uses rational and technical means to bring wild fantasies to reality. His true achievement, though, is just being a fascinating personality who thrives in the contemporary media landscape—a “shitposting meme king” who creates spectacles around accomplishments of varying substance, which might even seem quite mundane if portrayed differently. The juggernaut that Bezos actually built is considerably more impressive, ironically, but he was smart enough to make it seem as boring and invisible as possible. How many people have a lucid mental image of what a fulfillment center looks like?
Jack Reacher loves milsurp
“Reacher had very few civilian clothes, and some of them weren’t really civilian. His off-duty pants were Marine Corps khakis about thirty years old. He knew a guy who knew a guy who worked in a warehouse, where he claimed there was a bale of old stuff wrongly delivered back when LBJ was still president, and then never squared away again afterwards. And apparently the point of the story was that old Marine pants looked just like new Ralph Lauren pants. Not that Reacher cared what pants looked like.”
— Night School: (Jack Reacher 21) by Lee Child
The Reacher books are my guilty pleasure. There’s a lot of doth-protest-too-much in how Reacher approaches the world. He doesn’t care about clothes, but he pays an inordinate amount of attention to clothes. Not in the otaku way that Gibsonian characters do. He just notices.
Do metrics matter?
Long story short: In Australia we have a metricised assessment of research quality that universities are compelled to complete. QUT recently put in a submission that basically said they think the metrics ERA tracks are not a very good measure of research quality. QUT also contrasts the peer assessments in ERA (which have been largely stable over time) with the more metricised assessments (which have shown improvements).
”Indeed, the stability of peer review assessments may be read as a commentary on the assumptions about the fitness of metrical approaches as proxies for underlying quality, particularly over time. The divergence has now widened to the point that the fitness of the metrics as proxies for quality requires empirical validation.”
Whoa. Once more for those in the back:
“the fitness of the metrics as proxies for quality requires empirical validation”
Design is about asking meta-rational questions
In poorly-understood domains, science requires a meta-rational approach to induction: in this situation, what method will give a meaningful answer? Can we apply statistics here at all? Why or why not? If we can, what specific method would give a meaningful answer, and what do we need to do to assure that it does? — David Chapman, Statistics and the replication crisis
I put it to you, reader, that any time we invoke a “design approach”, we are operating in a poorly understood domain and need to start with meta-rational questions.
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