Misc. Ramblings

I know I'm probably giving my 11 regular readers (as opposed to you irregular ones - ed.) whiplash by breaking one of the 10 rules of blogs by not focusing on only one topic. But hey, that's the way my mind works. I'm interested in all kinds of things (and he can't avoid talking about them - ed.).

So I was surfing the 'net reading that preeminent business commentator Robert Scoble and came upon a link to the Dilbert Blog. From there, I followed a link to a cartoon called "Pearls Before Swine." The cartoonist uses the metaphor of animals and their stereotypical characteristics (e.g., rats are, well, ratty) to make social comments that are funny and insightful. For example, this panel with a crocodile made me laugh. Then think about how sometimes people end up in the jobs they have.

Getting back to Mr.Scoble, he may have hit on one of the major paradoxical truths of successful businesses in Robert Scoble's post on, among other things, Google. The truth? That if you focus only on making money, you won't make as much as if you focus on making stuff that people want to use and are therefore eventually willing to pay money for. In the case of Google Maps, the primary customer may not even be the average person. Perhaps the money is on the cool applications that can be built on top of Google's Maps. But there is no way even Google can predict which types of applications would work well. So, the genius of Google is in creating the infrastructure that developers then use to create their own applications which fill a need and by doing so, creates oodles of money for Google. It may sound like the same thing, but it's not. Deciphering the difference is the difference between being fabulously successful and wondering what happened to your job.