commbasics

The announcement of Steve Jobs taking another medical leave is an unfortunate but timely bit of news to put this series wrap up in perspective.  Jobs has established Apple as the leading consumer electronics company in the world.  For all intents and purposes, what Apple does drives the rest of the industry. Apple did not introduce the media player, it just made one that most people could use.  Apple did not introduce music sharing, it just made it legally acceptable.   Apple did not introduce the smart phone, it just made the smart phone practical for the mass market.  Apple did not introduce the tablet computer, it just reintroduced it when the public actually wanted one.  Jobs was at the center of all these decisions.  Important to note: Jobs is not an engineer.  He has some technical experience but he has stated the college course that was most responsible for the creation of the Mac was a calligraphy class he audited at Reed College,...

Salesforce announced yesterday at the Dreamforce Conference in San Francisco that a free version of their Chatter social collaboration tool would be available in April 2010 and it comes close to being a game-changer in the effort to monitor, control and use multiple social media platforms.  But the concept of “free” is loosely defined.   You don’t have to be a Salesforce license holder to use Chatter, but the company you work for does.  And you can only invite people within that social community to participate.  That means you can’t include any external business or personal contacts.  You still have to maintain your own method for managing that.   There are lots of free and commercial tools for that task.  Too many, in fact, and one is as good/bad as any other.  My hope for Chatter, when I started hearing about potential free management tools, was that it would be a way for common folk to get ahold of all that information without having...