www.cutter.com/offers/
This is an article I wrote for the Cutter IT Journal.
Hopefully, amusing but serious. Take the theme of Hitchcock’s movie and apply it to the relationship in the enterprise between marketing and IT.
Monthly Archives: February 2015
Crummycook rears his head: Stuffed Cabbage
I’ve been trying to find time to do CrummyCook some more, and was able to make something last night.
Stuffed cabbage, to be exact.
My mom made an unbelievable stuffed cabbage, at least in memory, so the benchmark was high.
I took a recipe from The Joy of Cooking, which also loomed large in my childhood. My brother David and I had a scheme to cook everything in Joy and got as far as a couple of recipes. Story for another time perhaps, especially since David died 47 years ago yesterday.
Here’s how it looked. The look was good, true to my memories of long ago.
Debbie liked it, or said she did. I thought the sauce was a little bland. To my mind, I didn’t put in enough salt and brown sugar, so the sweet and sour flavor was off a bit. I guess the upside is it didn’t give me heartburn.
All in all, a good job on a personal classic. And looking to do more CrummyCooking in coming months.
Gearing up to review “Superintelligence”
I’ve been finishing up this book during the week.
The gist of it is: “What can we do now to prepare for superintelligent AI’s who may not have tender regard for us humans”?
Right off the bat, let me say that I’m glad someone is thinking about this. For reasons that he details in the book, Nick Bostrom believes that we need to be talking this rather abstruse topic before a superintelligent AI comes on the scene, because it could happen pretty damn quickly. It’s a worthy argument.
“Service as a Software”
As an investor, I’ve run across a species of startup — and sometimes even more than startup — that acts as if it were a technology-powered platform of one sort or another, but is in fact a group of staffers frantically updating, tweaking, massaging, typing in commands, etc. behind the scenes.
I’ve started calling this kind of a company “service as a software”.
There’s some reason to do so. SaaS companies are famous for having revenue leverage; once you’ve signed up subscribers (and provided they don’t churn) your revenues from them recur without any new cost or effort on your part.
Service-as-a-software companies are just the opposite: you never get out of the customer-acquisition cost, because keeping customers going requires labor power every step of the way. Instead of recurring revenue, these businesses have “recurring CAC”.
Write in with your favorite examples of “service-as-software”…