Product Chatter - Stuff about Products

Today’s announcement of Google acquiring Motorola Mobility for $12.5B was quite a surprise and has all sorts of angles to consider as to why and whether it’s good or bad.   Here are just a few ways to look at it.

I recently read a magazine profile of some existing Sears & Roebuck Homes across the US.   You read that right - Sears used to sell houses - in kit form via mail order.   They offered over 300 styles between 1908 and 1940 and sold an estimated 70k-75k Sears houses, with many still in existence.   Sears and their mail order catalog business started over 100 years ago and became THE original long-tail leader.  Interestingly, their beginnings look similar to Amazon.

Two of the hottest trends in technology these days are mobile apps and cloud services, with both driving us into what is already being dubbed the "Post-PC Era".    Our center of the computing universe is quickly moving from the desktop with local apps to a mobile, always connected, distributed framework.   To accomplish this, mobile devices need the support of cloud services.

One of the reasons I started this blog was to provide some rants or raves on specific products that I use.   This post is on Kinect and a few other Microsoft products that I've used recently.   I, like many, am a heavy user of Microsoft's products for professional and personal  use, but not always a happy camper.   Here's to acknowledging some that stand out.

I read a very rousing blog post this week by April Dunford @ RocketWatcher - "Why Most Marketers Suck", (note - she's a product marketer) and which was commentary on yet another post.  She did a good job of laying out the problem when trying to hire a good marketer.   I saw direct parallels to hiring product managers.