Work(ing Title)

Sometimes an idea comes along that’s so dash cunning, it is both incredible and instantly understandable why it hasn’t reached mass adoption. The Wet-Wipe Manifesto sheds light on one of the clumsiest human behaviors with the excellent use of analogy.

Let it also be known that the first person I thought of upon finishing this read was my ludicrous coworker Rory Blyth.

[via kottke.org]

The loudest CEO around is hosting an employee town hall right now, and he’s addressing a handful of areas where Microsoft can make progress. When talking about search he highlighted an interesting principle, “The market leader has no incentive to disrupt.” While Google will obviously continue to throw maximum resources at improving their search abilities and their model of giving away developed software is hard to answer, they truely don’t want to see the game change.

There’s also a difficult lesson to take from the operating system business that can be applied here: Windows being the strong leader has been a good thing, but Mac OS X has been able to grow significantly through being the underdog and changing the game. It’s not hard to imagine Microsoft being in the same position relative to Google, which gives us huge incentive and opportunity to grow.

My father sent me the initial link to The Encyclopedia of Life on Wednesday morning, and it was one of those rare things that is so incredibly relevent I’ve been wanting to tell everyone I come across about it.

E.O. Wilson’s wish from TED2007 seems to have already sprung to live (someone please let me know if the site cropped up even before he asked for it), though right now there’s only the glorious concept video you see here, as well as a few demonstration pages.

I posted a piece about EOL on Channel 10 earlier today, and I encourage all of you to start telling people. Contribute in any way you see fit, because it’s probably the most accessible and important idea in the history of biology.

“Seriously, you want to project the image that you’re an idiot and that you think your title is admiral, because I would.”

Yesterday Rory thought it was high time he did some work, and so naturally, he chose to sit with me in our EvNet Lounge and conduct the strangest interview I’ve ever been a part of. His title bears repeating, “Jesse Lewin on knowing Steve Jobs, working at Apple, and posing with Bono,” as they are all things of which I am guilty.

Note the Helio and Twitter references during the interview, and otherwise just enjoy Rory talking a mile-a-minute. If you can’t watch the video in your browser, that’s probably because you aren’t using Internet Explorer with Windows Media Video. You can download the interview and watch it with VLC, or drop by your friendly software retailer and explain your problem. They’ll set you up with a little app called Parallels and sort you out ;)