Pursuant to my earlier post on Penguin books and disruptive design and distribution methods, here’s a nice collection of Penguin book covers from over the years. Hat tip to Dan Hill at City of Sound.

(Uncharacteristically short post for me, but I got to use the word “pursuant”, so it’s not all bad.)

frog design has launched a new newsletter, frog designMIND, and in this inaugural issue I have an article on wicked problems. If you’ve read my earlier posts on wicked problems and liked them, then this is a handy one-stop-shop compendium, with a bit of evolution, refinement and expansion. Check it out!

There’s also a survey we are running on challenges of managing innovation in business, so if you have a few moments it would be great to have you fill that out.

Something I try to constantly impress on clients is that everything you do and say as a company says something, regardless of whether you intend it to or not, and whether you’ve consciously tried to manage that communication. Lack of attention to a particular customer touchpoint, be it packaging, website, service call or the product itself, is as much a message as is putting a huge amount of care and attention to those same things. It just says “we don’t care about you” rather than “thank you” or “we appreciate you.” Since you are putting those things out into the world anyway, it’s far better to make them good and consistent rather than bad and lumpy.

Check out this list of worst political websites graciously put together by Cnet. Their commentary is spot on and priceless. You will not enjoy 10 minutes more than perusing through these (especially in the US, where you might have heard we have an election coming up soon).

You’d think politicians, who are primarly in the communications business, would be better at this type of thing, but then I guess I give too much credit. But really, if Mark Foley can figure out IM at his advanced age, you’d think some of these people could drag their websites out of the circa 1995 era animated “under construction” signs. While we need to spray some Tufte on James Wright’s site (bold and underline and CAPS and multi-color, with Comic Sans used on a single line for emphasis in between Times Roman!), I think my favorite, being a dog owner, is that of Shawn O’Donnell of Virginia, who gets his dog to write his blog for him. And not just one posting. Oh no. The whole darn shooting match. Check it out.

OK, so shamelessly jumping on the 5th anniversary of the iPod here, but what can I say? Just about every client that I meet with today wants an iPod for their industry, regardless of what that industry is. A few years ago I regularly included a few slides in my Powerpoints about why the iPod sucked, to provoke a reaction. For the record, the list included such things as:

1. Too few features, too high a price
2. Too easily scratched
3. Can’t replace the battery
4. No way to attach a belt clip
5. Simple operations, like activating shuffle play, required multiple menu picks

The next slide, of course, detailed why the iPod had rapidly ascended to massive dominance of the portable mp3 category, slaying more established players before it. We all know those reasons: system integration, iconic style, $10 million ad campaign, and an inventive interface (though I contend still not that good to use over the long haul, despite improvements).

It all seems so obvious and inevitable now, but let’s not forget that when the iPod was introduced it was seen as far from a sure thing. It was announced at a press-only event, not a big hullabaloo event like MacWorld, was considered over-priced and underfeatured compared to other products from Creative and Archos, and the fact that it was only available on the Mac platform vastly limited its appeal. And this was the same Mac platform that had vultures circling, as it had not nearly recaptured the cachet that it did today. OS X hadn’t even come out yet - that was still over another year away. iTunes had been out for a little while but hadn’t exactly set the world on fire.

(Macworld has some nice coverage of the mixed reviews the iPod got at the time, along with a timeline of its introductions, and more general coverage.) 

 Wired also has a good article about the development of the iPod. There’s an interesting note at the end of it about the name, which was originally trademarked for an interactive kiosk which never saw the light of day. I’ve heard before that iPod was not the first choice (a rather plain name which was already taken, as I recall - if anyone can point me to the facts on this, I’d appreciate it), but hadn’t heard this twist before. Sometimes it really is better to be lucky than good…

 [UPDATE: Really good article over at Adaptive Path’s blog on Steve Job’s speech/demo of the iPod at its introduction, with a breakdown of how it’s a model of a good product pitch, and how to embody your company and customers’s values in a way that is not obnoxiously focused on the bottom line.]

Very interesting article in the Los Angeles Times (thanks Dan Hill) about Google’s shift from product development to feature development. Even the founders of Google are confused by the vast array of products they have released over the last year and they are now seeking to stem the tide and focus on maturing the products they do have. (Or perhaps they were just spooked by the impending $1.65 billion they were about to spend on YouTube a few days after this article appeared.)

This quote in particular stood out:

Analysts said Google was fighting a problem that had historically plagued technology giants, many of which became so enamored with innovating that they forgot to create products that people would really use. “They created a bunch of crap that they have no idea what to do with,” Rob Enderle, principal analyst with Enderle Group, a Silicon Valley consulting firm, said of Google. “What a huge waste of resources.”

Google admitted this year that its internal audits discovered that the company had been spending too much time on new services to the detriment of its core search engine.

Google is a great example of a type of company I’ve written about before, one for whom innovation is not the hard part any more, and who finds itself in a state of innovation surplus. Now the challenge becomes matching the panoply of innovations to the business goals, otherwise you run the risk, as Google is doing, of losing focus and confusing customers.

(Clarification on what I mean by innovation surplus as I wasn’t as clear as I could have been in the article on CPH127: I’m not implying that there are problems not being addressed by innovation, or that we’ve solved all problems, or that all companies have more innovations than they know what to do with. But increasingly there are companies, like Google,  that are in this situation of innovation surplus, and it can place an enormous drain on resources, as Google is finding, and diffuse the focus on what the company is about.)