Productivity Software

What’s In It For You from The Startup America Partnership

February 28, 2012

So how cool is this? The Startup America Partnership is offering a collection of real business tools and resources, mostly web-based, to help high-growth startups. This was announced at the White House a year ago this month. Here’s what I wrote then on this blog: The Obama White House [Feb. 1, 2011] announced its Startup [...]

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Folk Wisdom Reversal: Necessity Isn't the Mother of Invention

June 10, 2011

This will be hard for anybody under 50 to believe, but there was a time when word processing and spreadsheets were a real productivity advantage. Are you old enough to remember Visicalc, or maybe SuperCalc? In the very early 1980s, most business people still did budgets with paper and calculator. The spreadsheet power user was [...]

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The Best Business Boost is Quick Sales

February 16, 2011

(Bias alert: this post is about today’s new product release at Palo Alto Software, and I’m one of the owners, and a fulltime employee there. So yes, you bet I’m biased on this one. No, I don’t normally post about company-specific products. I don’t want to turn this blog into sales pitches. Still, today’s the [...]

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The Pull of Bloat and Feature Addiction

December 15, 2010

This one struck a nerve: This is by Jason Fried, founder of 37 Signals, in How to Kill a Bad Idea earlier this month at Inc.com. He’s talking about how software and websites grow too big. The software grows. Version 2.0 comes along. It does more than Version 1.0. More features, more options, more screens, [...]

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Guy Kawasaki and the Zen of Not Zen

July 27, 2010

I admit it. I got really jealous of all the Zen of this and Zen of that writing, dating all the way back to the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I wanted to like, tried to like, but couldn’t. Yes, I gave into the horrible temptation, and even posted Zen and [...]

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Easy Spreadsheet Plans a Session or Meeting.

July 19, 2010

I often have to engineer a workshop or presentation to fit into a few hours with topics divided into segments, and times set up for breaks. That’s just hard enough to do that I sat down the other day and looked up the Excel functions so I could set it up and then shuffle and [...]

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What Business Plan Software Shouldn't Do

April 5, 2010

The ideal business plan software doesn’t write your text or do your numbers. Instead, it helps you with the mechanics of managing the links between the different numbers, and the main topic outline, laying out the page if you need to print it, and giving you ideas, questions to answer, and suggestions. I just saw [...]

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Are You Kidding Yourself About Tools and Productivity?

March 23, 2010

Is this you?  Over and over again, you fall off on regular consistent organizational practices like to-do lists, emails, planning, backing up your computer … then you run across some cool new tool. You jump on the bandwagon enthusiastically, promising yourself that you’re finally going to get organized and stay organized. You spend happy hours [...]

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Pricing IQ Test You're Sure to Fail

December 9, 2009

I admit it. Pricing is often baffling to me. Test your pricing IQ by answering these 10 simple questions. 1. Why is an iPhone application expensive at $4.99 but a magazine can sell for $6.95, and a no-frills 20-ounce cup of coffee for $2.50 without anyone getting up in arms? 2. Why is a gallon [...]

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Goldilocks, Three Bears, and Productivity Software

November 24, 2009

You may remember that fairy tale in which Goldilocks got herself locked into a repetitive rut about choosing her optimal rocking chair, porridge, and bed softness settings. Every time, for every choice, first it was too little, too much, and then just right. There’s a lot to say about Goldilocks (and all of her consumer [...]

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