• Quality is when your customers keep coming back.
• You exist to Benefit Your Customers. Where is the benefit? Make sure you know, and they know.
• Do things the right way, an every step, immediately.
• Be responsible for the work you create.
• Try hard to genuinely receive and digest the information your customer is trying to give you.
• As a leader, take small steps, and reduce the risk to you and your customer at every opportunity.

I’m both *so* impressed, and *so* disappointed.

So much about the system as a whole, the hardware, OS and software, is beautifully polished, but there are such stupid problems.

The most daily irritating is using the keyboard to navigate around sentences. This behaves differently depending on which application you’re using. I’ve got dozens of possible combinations in my head now, which is REALLY annoying.

What bothers me most of all, however, is the HEAT of the thing. It gets uncomfortably hot under the wrists. I mean *uncomfortably hot*.

I returned my first MBP after only a few days, because the CPU was running at 97degrees C, and although the replacement is far better (barely ever tops 79degrees) a LOT of that heat is coming out through the “oh so clever lets use the case and your wrists as a heat sink” design.

Then, the accessories. The keyboard on the 13 inch MBP just doesn’t have enough keys, especially thinks like PgUp and PgDown.  Having tried a couple of other cheap keyboards for compatibility, OSX just won’t accept them. I’m having to buy a 50 EUR mac keyboard, to go with the 30 EUR mac headset and the 30 EUR VGA adapter.

I actually feel that Mac are very good at giving you *nearly* what you want, so that you will buy their upgrades with a high degree of probability.

I had to take photographs of some quite large objects (about the size of a Planter, weighing about 100kg) today as the material provided by the “professional” was nonsense.

I figured out a few things as the afternoon went by.

1) It doesn’t matter what quality of background you have, so long as it’s roughly white and has no sharp knicks (and has a rounded back instead of an abrupt edge). We simply suspended a roll of painter’s paper from a window sill.

2) Work with manual exposure times (e.g. 1/50th), upping them until the whitish background you’ve used is absolutely totally saturated white (so you don’t need to cut stuff out later in photoshop).

3) Use clouds (if you’ve got any) to provide diffuse light. Strong sunlight creates strong shadows, which is, again, a drag in photoshop.

Many of the results (particularly from the later photos after having a change to learn a few tricks) were really looking super professional!

Almost all taxes used to be placed on specific things, like a tax on selling Tea, or Trees, or Clothing.  For anything sold, the business would have to pay the appropriate tax/taxes to the government.

Clearly, very complex, destabilising (can easily skew prices in the market place), and prone to fraud (what? that wasn’t a Teabag wot I sold, it was a taxable Parrot!).

In the 1950s the French switched to a more generic system, which has been adopted by most of the world in the meantime.

The idea is that the “Value Added” is taxed, irrespective of what the product itself is.  What’s “Value Added”?  If you bought a bunch of parts and people’s time for 1000 EUR, and then sold them for 3000 EUR, you’ve increased the value of the parts and people’s time you bought from 1000 EUR to 3000 EUR – irrespective of whether it was tea bags, elephants or parrots. Tax the increase. But wait…. that’s only the first idea.

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Search Engine Optimisation in contended market spaces, without the backup of social media, is increasingly difficult.

Social media in this sense being people blogging / twittering about your products, to them using formus and suchlike.

This dynamic, whereby search engines promote those companies with the most loyal, talkative and supportative consumer communities, will force companies to expand the involvement of their customer basis. In turn it seems likely that this will indeed have a very positive effect on greating genuinely good customer relationships and customer experience.

Thanks to David’s twitt for the link   http://www.clickz.com/3633291

ISO9001 is too complex, and document managment is too strict a mistress… but firms still have the problem… how do they coordinate/collaborate, where one of the most significant questions is – how do we preserve enough meta-data that people don’t have to be constantly asking each other how to do things!

Can we create processes, loosely structured by semantic tags and related through time?  Networks that describe what was done, how, and which try to organise meta-data (e.g. a table for things that a product description must contain) – and/or ask you to create such things?  How many processes can there be in a typical business type?

Is this a project which could be organised through the GA or IQU? Maybe test on http://semanticengines.com/api.aspx

It is easy to make the mistake of talking about “you” and “your firm” first, seeing the world from your own perspective… yet a visitor or customer is seeing you from a completely different angle.

In a product text, for example, it is fatal to start with : “We are proud to present…” or “The Gizmo345 is the ultimate in…”

Equally, many of the more unimaginative advertisers haven’t quite got their head around the principle, expressing the customer perspective through their own perspective : “You are a young cosmopolitan adventurer. You want a product that does X. You have found the right place”…  This easily comes across as arrogant.

The clue is to resonate with what the customer may be likely to think/percieve using statements for an opening. This must relate to the factors they are most likely to be seeking to satisfy. For example : “Perfect for visitors.” , “A beautiful colour for everyday”, “A robust solution ideal for ….”.