These are the movies I have seen:
71
It Follows
The Woman in Gold
Ex Machina
Avengers Age of Ultron
Spy
Inside Out
The Gallows
Trainwreck
Mr. Holmes
The End Of The Tour
American Ultra
Pawn Sacrifice
Sicario
Roger Waters' The Wall
The Martian
He Named Me Malala
Steve Jobs
Crimson Peak
Bridge of Spies
Spotlight
Spectre
Hunger Games: Mocking Jay Part II
Krampus
Trumbo
These are the movies I still have to see this year:
Macbeth
The Big Short
Concussion
MI-5
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
And these are my predicted critics' Oscar favorites for 2015:
99 Homes
Freeheld
End Of The Tour
Steve Jobs
Brooklyn
The Danish Girl
Room
Trumbo
Carol
Joy
For me this is a very short list, which defines why 2015 was so bad for movies. And the worst movies I saw were without doubt, The Avengers and Spy.
Friday, November 20, 2015
Thursday, November 05, 2015
Dazzled by the Flashing Lights of Mediocrity
So Twitter took away the Favorites star and replaced it with a Likes heart. This tells us many things. And most of them are bad.
The Arrogance of the Wrong Management
A company may initially provide a Social Media service to users, but it is the users themselves who shape that Social Media platform's ethos and culture. They take it, and organically use the features provided to create interesting communities and unexpected usages of the software. And people like the platform. And the number of users grows. And the service is a success.
Thus it was with Twitter.
Then there is an IPO and the initial geekiness that drove the platform's creation is lost in a haze of quarterly reports and stock price expectations. And you bring in management who supposedly know how to run publicly traded companies and they fuck up what differentiated the service and made it special.
How? Via late night brainstorming sessions and workshops to come up with exciting ways to keep the platform "relevant" and "buzzing" And what ideas and innovations do such corporate-driven events tell you to do?
They tell you: Copy Facebook. Remove the favorites star and replace it with a "likes" heart. FB has likes, we should have "likes" too.
And a feature is wiped out and morphed into something no user ever requested and no user ever wanted.
Innovation is not driven by copying. It is driven by addition.
But, after an IPO and putting the Wrong Management in charge, the safe bet, the copying of features, becomes the order of the day. And a pseudo-stability of the share price is maintained by timidity. But bonuses all round! That's what counts right?
---||---
The Mediocrity of Unnecessary Changes
So the changes come in on the platform, and your millions of pretty contented users collectively shout "Why?" and "What are you doing?" and "That was working fine you stupid idiots!".
There is a direct relationship between tinkering with changes no-one asked for and pissing off your users to the point of their leaving you.
This tinkering with software is now what laughingly passes as development. Companies are not developing anything. That is all done before the IPO. What they are doing is very little, changing interfaces and pissing off users.
And this mediocrity of unnecessary changes plagues once innovative outfits that are now treading water and saying "innovation" but no longer doing anything innovative.
---||---
Agile Software Development
And my biggest bugaboo that allows unnecessary tinkering on the edges of your product? Tinkering that produces maximum anger in your users? Agile Development! Fixed in the next build. New app! New app! New app! This methodology of software development is a recipe for bad software. Heck, updates come out so regularly from some companies they are actually screaming "We make unreliable stuff!" to anyone who cares to listen.
And now, users have to take some blame. Because they don't complain about poor software quality because they have now an almost Pavlovian acceptance of bad products and services when they hear "Fixed in the next build".
You know what? IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN RIGHT IN THE FIRST BUILD.
---||---
Please Twitter do not go down this road. Yahoo! went there and you know how successful that was.
The Arrogance of the Wrong Management
A company may initially provide a Social Media service to users, but it is the users themselves who shape that Social Media platform's ethos and culture. They take it, and organically use the features provided to create interesting communities and unexpected usages of the software. And people like the platform. And the number of users grows. And the service is a success.
Thus it was with Twitter.
Then there is an IPO and the initial geekiness that drove the platform's creation is lost in a haze of quarterly reports and stock price expectations. And you bring in management who supposedly know how to run publicly traded companies and they fuck up what differentiated the service and made it special.
How? Via late night brainstorming sessions and workshops to come up with exciting ways to keep the platform "relevant" and "buzzing" And what ideas and innovations do such corporate-driven events tell you to do?
They tell you: Copy Facebook. Remove the favorites star and replace it with a "likes" heart. FB has likes, we should have "likes" too.
And a feature is wiped out and morphed into something no user ever requested and no user ever wanted.
Innovation is not driven by copying. It is driven by addition.
But, after an IPO and putting the Wrong Management in charge, the safe bet, the copying of features, becomes the order of the day. And a pseudo-stability of the share price is maintained by timidity. But bonuses all round! That's what counts right?
---||---
The Mediocrity of Unnecessary Changes
So the changes come in on the platform, and your millions of pretty contented users collectively shout "Why?" and "What are you doing?" and "That was working fine you stupid idiots!".
There is a direct relationship between tinkering with changes no-one asked for and pissing off your users to the point of their leaving you.
This tinkering with software is now what laughingly passes as development. Companies are not developing anything. That is all done before the IPO. What they are doing is very little, changing interfaces and pissing off users.
And this mediocrity of unnecessary changes plagues once innovative outfits that are now treading water and saying "innovation" but no longer doing anything innovative.
---||---
Agile Software Development
And my biggest bugaboo that allows unnecessary tinkering on the edges of your product? Tinkering that produces maximum anger in your users? Agile Development! Fixed in the next build. New app! New app! New app! This methodology of software development is a recipe for bad software. Heck, updates come out so regularly from some companies they are actually screaming "We make unreliable stuff!" to anyone who cares to listen.
And now, users have to take some blame. Because they don't complain about poor software quality because they have now an almost Pavlovian acceptance of bad products and services when they hear "Fixed in the next build".
You know what? IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN RIGHT IN THE FIRST BUILD.
---||---
Please Twitter do not go down this road. Yahoo! went there and you know how successful that was.
Wednesday, November 04, 2015
Bank of America - A Definition of Bad Customer Service.
Dear Bank of America,
AFTER I phone you to say I will be using a credit card for large purchases, I DO NOT want any transactions denied at the POS. And doubly, AFTER I get the transactions allowed at the POS, I DO NOT want a hold put on that credit card and to have to log on to your website the next day ( WHERE I CANNOT SEND AN EMAIL to complain ) to clear that hold.
This is pisspoor Customer Service. Really, really BAD.
AFTER I phone you to say I will be using a credit card for large purchases, I DO NOT want any transactions denied at the POS. And doubly, AFTER I get the transactions allowed at the POS, I DO NOT want a hold put on that credit card and to have to log on to your website the next day ( WHERE I CANNOT SEND AN EMAIL to complain ) to clear that hold.
This is pisspoor Customer Service. Really, really BAD.
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