A Little Ludwig Goes a Long Way

A smattering of opinions on technology, books, business, and culture. Now in its 4th technology iteration.

I keep Bumping into people using Vonage.

30 July 2003

I have recently been hearing a lot of positive word-of-mouth on Vonage DigitalVoice .::. The BROADBAND Phone Company…. People seem very enthusiastic about. I personally don’t quite get it – within our extended family, everyone has a cell phone with a huge bucket of minutes, they’ve moved their long distance usage to the cell phone, and so their local phone bill has dropped to the basic $20-30/month level. Thus Vonage has little draw for them. Maybe the excited users are people with a lot of overseas calling?

Good to Great

30 July 2003

Just finished a fast read of Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t. A solid, reasonable business book with good lessons for all size companies. I especially liked the first step that companies took – getting the right people on board. You don’t start by figuring out the strategy, you start by having a great team, and then build from there. Don Bradford recommended this book to me a couple years ago, thanks Don, worth the quick read.

AOL desktop spam

30 July 2003

B@$tards at AOL spammed my desktop with all kinds of ad links for AOL Broadband, during a minor version upgrade of AOL Instant Messenger. I got a link to AOL Broadband promo site stuffed into my start menu, slammed unto my links toolbar in IE, placed on my desktop, all pointing to some new exe on my machine – GtAOD.exe. I specifically said during intall of the AIM upgrade that I didn’t want any AIM icons spewed onto my system; does AOL really believe that, if I don’t want any AIM icons slammed onto my system (icons for a program that I am agreeing to install and that has real utility for me), that I am somehow OK with AOL Broadband icons slammed everywhere (which are just advertisements, for a service for which I have indicated no interest)? Dorks.