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The fine folks at the Mozilla Foundation are encouraging everyone to pledge to download Firefox 3, when it’s released later today. If you’re interested, you can pledge at the Download Day 2008 web site. It’s a nice site, with a real-time map showing pledge totals per country, and it has a lot of juicy, AJAX-y […]

…that there were usability problems with Vista. This is an illustrated tech support article explaining how to open the Vista box.
Others have written about the problems with the Vista (and Office 2007) box, as representative of Microsoft’s desire to do everything different this time around. What Microsoft has fogotten is, that if you are going […]

John Gruber at Daring Fireball has an excellent article about the implementation of the new ringtone service for the iPhone. Between the sporadic performance, the uninformative error messages, and the bizarre terms of service, it’s clear that Apple just got this one wrong.
To be fair, Apple is hamstrung by the limitations that the labels […]

During the course of my career, I’ve encountered a handful of developers you could build a company around. Unfortunately, I’ve always managed to encounter them after someone else had already built a company around them.
These coders have the design skills, coding abilities and customer awareness needed to create amazing products.
I worked with Brian Bucklew at […]

First time around, say the late 90’s, we got one thing right and a lot of things wrong. What we got right was the idea that if we gave something away for free, and got a lot of users, we could make money off them.
What we got wrong, was that we had no idea how […]

I may be late to the party, but I see that Hillel Cooperman has left Microsoft and formed Jackson Fish Market. Best of luck to Hillel, Walter and Jenny on becoming the next 37signals.
I met Hillel about 4 years ago at a Microsoft partner preview for Windows “Longhorn,” which later became Vista. (I still have […]

I wrote a while back about Geomas, and the patent they acquired for local search. Even though US patent criteria require the invention to be non-obvious to be eligible for patent protection. That claim was pretty specious in 1999 when the Geomas patent was issued.
It was even MORE non-obvious when ANOTHER patent was issued for […]

The guys at Red Gate have organized the “Business of Software Conference” to be held October 29-30th in San Jose, California. The speakers list was apparently cribbed directly from my RSS reader! (I must be the only one who reads all of these people regularly, right? Right?) The list includes:

Joel Spolsky
Eric Sink
Guy Kawasaki
Rick Chapman
Dan Nunan
and […]

Scott Berkun (The Art of Project Management and The Myths of Innovation) has outlined the development methodologies that we all know, but never discuss. For example:
Asshole Driven development (ADD) - Any team where the biggest jerk makes all the big decisions is asshole driven development. All wisdom, logic or process goes out the window when […]

I don’t try to hide my love for technology that lets people work from anywhere. If the best developer I can find for a project is in Anchorage, Alaska, and I’m in Florida, why should I let something like 4,787 miles get in the way? Seriously, we have all worked in jobs where everyone is […]

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• Welcome

  
  • I'm Bob Crosley. Since 1995, I've been involved in the web and software development as a developer, project manager, program manager and product manager.
  • I'm obsessed with usability, interopability and great design. I want to build great software. Software that users LOVE!
  • These are my thoughts on everything great, and not-so-great, about this business.
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  This site represents my own analysis, opinions and sarcastic rantings. In no way does it represent the official, unofficial, or even unintentional positions of any past or future employer.