#creepybutawesome

This is perfect.  These stories are like dinner with the perfect rare wine pairing.

Last weekend Delta failed miserably and treated my nearly 90-year-old grandparents terribly.  They delayed flights by a combined 8 hours, one of which was a 5 hour delay followed by a cancellation.  After the first delay and cancellation they left them to walk all the way across the airport, by themselves, to a shuttle that never came, to go to a hotel that was filthy for the night.  Only to have them wake up at 3am the next day to catch the next flight. 

Then the return flight was 3 hours delayed while sitting in the plane, at the gate, at which point they asked everyone to get off the plane with their luggage…

Fast forward to this week, and Amazon is basically failing at everything.  And we will leave it at that.

But it got me to thinking - certain industries can never win.  Everyone hates the airlines. Period.  JetBlue and Southwest aren’t exceptions. They’re just loved for “sucking a little less” than everyone else.  

Amazon has one major outage in recent memory, and the whole world freaks out.  Gmail (the completely an utterly free version of the service) goes down for 5 minutes and the world collectively has an aneurism.  

Twitter has downtime and people can’t help but freak out - and find as many crafty ways as possible to take jabs at everything about the company (business models, revenue, valuation, and so on) just because this completely free and awesome service went down for three and a half minutes while you were trying to tweet out a picture of the taco you just got from the Korean BBQ truck.  

Maybe these companies and these industries, can blame themselves for the unrealistic expectations that have been placed on them by their customers.  Maybe Gmail should have charged a monthly fee for access instead of innovating with ads so that you could have a free (and quite impressive) email application that you can access from any computer, anywhere across the entire globe.  

But regardless of the companies and the vendors… I still think the expectations are way out of whack these days.  

Most of the software we use today is free.  And it sure as hell isn’t free to build, or host, or maintain, or support. 

I know - Google NEEDS you to be a free user of Gmail so that they can sell ads.  But let’s be honest - you’re getting WAYYYY more than your money’s worth in that deal.  

And the same goes for the airlines.  You can buy a $200 ticket for a flight that gets you halfway across the country in 6 hours or less, but if the flight is delayed for 45 minutes, you (read: we) run to your iPhone and tweak out publicly on Twitter about how terrible [insert airline name here] is.  

If I were the airline… this would be my announcement on the loud speaker when there’s a delayed flight:

“Attention passengers of [insert airline name here] Flight 5075.  Due to mechanical issues, we have to delay your flight by an estimated :45 minutes.  We would love to get you and the 350 other human beings on this flight about 40,000 feet into the air right now, but we’re just not willing to risk 351 customer and 15 crew lives just to get you to Bismarck, North Dakota :45 minutes earlier.  We’d love to have you flying high in the sky, magically watching live satellite tv and enjoying complimentary wireless internet, all while drinking screwdrivers in reclining seats. But we’re first, and foremost, focused on keeping you alive today. 

Please be patient while we fix the minor mechanical issue. It should be fixed in about :12 minutes, but we then have to go through 33 minutes of highly-redundant government-mandated procedures to ensure that the repair was done correctly.  Once we’re done eating away at our tiny profit margins on this flight, we’ll hand out discounts and 33% refunds to the 50 most irate customers at the gate, and we’ll be on our way.  We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. And thanks again for flying [insert airline name here]. We know you have a choice of airlines when you fly, and we’re glad that regardless of how good or bad we did our jobs, you chose to bitch about us on Twitter today.”

Nonetheless… maybe if we were able to take a little step back every once in a while and look at the big picture, we might realize that our expectations don’t always match the price tag and VALUE of the products or services we’re using so frequently.  

This is hilarious - best Onion news brief in a while.  And regardless of what you think about the current state of publishing, you have to laugh at the fact that we’ve gotten to a point where we assume content should be free without ever thinking about how new/disruptive that concept is… at the very least we should all have a better understanding of why the content is free to us. (and perhaps then choose not to use an ad-blocker… or something to that effect).  

A more serious follow-up to the previous commentary on bubbles…

This is how you know we’re in a bubble.  It’s not that Color got $41M for no apparent reason.  It’s because the other “big” story below that on Techmeme is that MSFT finally figured out “Copy and Paste” for Windows Phone…

Conversations about smartphones are funny things.  They seem, at least to me, to be far more subjective than reviews or comparisons of any other type of device.  The problem is - everyone takes a side and conforms to predetermined comparisons without taking the time to question why two particular “features,” approaches, or qualities should be at odds with each other at all. 

Some examples:

• “Open vs. closed” 
• “Ease of use” vs. “Customizability” 
• “Plastic vs. Metal”
• “Tons of apps” vs. “Comparatively few apps”

And the list goes on.  

The problem is that being an “open” ecosystem is defined as “great” or “fragmented” depending on who you talk to.  And the only points that are left out of the conversations are rational thoughts like: “well, yeah, I guess there are a lot of people that would need that feature…” or “good point, I rarely use the phone to make calls, so reception isn’t as much of a problem for me.”  

My point:  nobody should have to agree that a certain feature or quality of  a product is purely good or bad - we don’t HAVE to have a winner chosen.  For instance - a very large display would be great for my grandmother, but terrible for me since I like to keep my phone in my pocket and have a pet peeve about keys and phones clanking around while a walk.  We both could benefit from the larger screen, but it only makes sense for one of us.  Typically we get all jazzed up about bigger displays - but if Dell has proven anything lately, it’s that bigger isn’t necessarily better.  

So if we can’t make a reasonably objective comparison between two smartphones, let’s pretend that they’re books, and provide a reviews in that context.  Below is a brief recreation of a typical review sizing up the iPhone vs. the Droid Incredible… but again - it has been re-written as if they were books.  (to be clear - this is not my review of the two phones, but a parody of the common ways that people compare the two)

iPhone:

• The book’s binding and cover are made of the finest leather available.  It’s great to hold and touch, and it opens beautifully. The leather is a perfect shade of rusty-brown, clearly showing that great care was put into its construction. Incredibly, even though the book is much longer than the Incredible, it’s only a little bit heavier.  This is really impressive design work.  
• The book is 1,000 pages long - several times longer than its nearest competitor.  All of these different pages give you lots of choices for pages to read - you can choose any one of the 1,000 pages at your leisure.  We have heard that authors from across the world are desperate to contribute new pages all the time.
• The pages turn quickly, without any lag or drag.  It’s truly a delight to breeze through the book from one page to the next.  This is particularly helpful for power readers.
• The ink text is vibrant - almost popping of the page with clarity and incredible brightness.  Another nice feature - the paper used on the pages is stain resistant. 
• Unfortunately, if you’re in New York or San Francisco, you can’t actually read the book there.  You would have to leave the city limits in order to read.  That said - you can still bring the book with you to those cities and use the book to secure a stack of important papers, or use the time to treat the leather on the cover with a moisturizing leather polish.  
• The table of contents is truly beautiful - in fact - many users say they don’t know how the could read before without book that had such a smooth and helpful table of contents.  
• Some people are reporting that when you hold the book on the binder, it all of a sudden closes on them and they lose the page they were on.  Apple has suggested reading at a table where you can place the book on a flat surface - and this seems to alleviate the problem.  

HTC Droid Incredible:

• The book has a nice binding and cover, but I’m not sure it will appeal to everyone.  After all, other bookmakers are known more for their design and cover materials.  I should mention that the cover of this book is made out of the same leather as the iPhone, but doesn’t come in the same color and shape.
• The Incredible is only 400 pages long.  I think most consumers would prefer to get more pages in their books, but 400 is still 300 more than most people read in a year… so I suppose this will suffice.  And there’s a fair amount of authors looking to add some pages to the book in future editions. 
• The pages in the book turn quickly - but it’s hard to tell if they turn as fast as the iPhone.  That said - you can turn the pages in 3 different directions and still end up on the next page.  While this is a unique feature, it’s probably too complex for some buyers.  
• The ink/text used in the Incredible is pretty darn good. It’s not as good as the iPhone, but since the average human eye can’t tell the subtle difference here, we will look past the difference here.  I should note that the pages are slightly larger on the Incredible - which typically would make it easier to read.  But since the iPhone uses such good ink, we can’t really give it points here.  
• You can read the Incredible in any city you want, which is nice.   But our sources say that New York and San Francisco are eventually going to allow you to read the iPhone within city limits.
• The table of contents is interesting.  You can shuffle the table of contents around and then somehow the rest of the pages will rearrange themselves to follow your new table of contents.  While this is neat, it’s way too risky for your average user, who would have trouble getting the contents back to the original order if  they were to move something by mistake.  The iPhone eliminates this problem by offering one standard table of contents that meets the needs of most every reader, of course.  

Sometimes you get a nugget of good advice in an very unexpected place.

Regardless of the spectacle going on around him, Conan managed to deliver a “speech” that I assume made a lot of politicians envious. There wasn’t a person watching that wasn’t moved by his words, or at the very least reminded that we have all become much too arrogant about where we find wisdom.

A late-night host delivered some of the best advice we could hear right now.  It applies to our political climate, our economy, and the tone of far too many conversations these days.

Hell, cynicism is running rampant in my generation.  We’re trying to build careers and lives in an economic, political, corporate and business environment being defined by rampant greed, diminished ethics, and profoundly short-term thinking.

And a late-night host shared a few words, putting his own plight in perspective, culminating in a piece of advice that is well-worth revisiting:

“Please don’t be cynical.”

I didn’t expect to get a sense of perspective from Conan O’Brien.  But I’m damn well gonna take it.

It’s easy to sit back and complain about the people running the banks, and easier to bitch about our politicians… taking a page from John Mayer and declaring that the “fight ain’t fair.”

But cynicism has permeated so much of our culture that it’s just starting to look like activism for the lazy.  And it’s leading to a lot of dead-ends.

If I learned anything after years of watching this late-night host, it’s that I’m far too cynical, far too often.

So… if those evil, greedy, miserable network lawyers don’t get YouTube to pull down this clip, I’ll be revisiting it from time to time to get an attitude adjustment. ;)

Conan O’Brien says goodbye and thanks to NBC and his fans