Ever wondered what the essential difference is between Apple and Microsoft?

Here they are, in their own words.

When people hear the word bootstrapping, they usually think of starting or running a business on a small budget. That would certainly be one application of bootstrapping, but the concept of bootstrapping goes much further.

A video of Dan Pink speaking about how we (“western” businesses) destroy creativity when we attach rewards to it. Fascinating look at the science behind something many of us feel is true- intrinsic motivators spur creativity while extrinsic ones dampen it.

People are mostly reactive. Given the choice, they may choose not to react, not to buy, not to engage- but when the moment comes, they simply react to whatever stimulus is acting on them. That’s why people who buy from telemarketers put themselves on the DO NOT CALL list. That’s why people get so annoyed about junkmail, when it’s pretty easy to just throw it away.

That’s why people use all sorts of filters- they don’t want to be acted upon, because they know they will react in some way: join, buy, give, volunteer, change, or grow in some way.

Your job is to make it past the filters so that you can move them to action. Join your community. Volunteer for your cause. Buy your stuff. Check into your rehab program. Get baptized. Whatever.

If you start paying attention to all the blogs, the tweets, the updates, the articles, the e-books, the workshops, the seminars, the newsletters, the videos, the podcasts, the lifestreams, and every other form of new media madness, you’ll be told (and start to believe, mind you) that in order to become a Thought Leader you have to blog and tweet and update and write articles and ebooks and run workshops and seminars and send out newsletters and record videos and podcasts and lifestreams and generally go completely mad with new media.

Well… Maybe.

Attention Annoying and Condescending Web Masters:
Your days are numbered.

We know your tricks. We know why you still use straight HTML instead of CMS. We know how you scare us into worrying about site breakage. We know how you hack together poorly written HTML files with half-done CSS and deprecated style tags. We know why you have thrown us into the dark pits of Go Daddy and Network Solutions… all so you can be the one, the only guide capable of navigating us through your obnoxious mix of bad design, arcane coding, and poor user interface. Shoot- if my only option was Go Daddy, I’d probably pay someone else to do things, too.

But as I said, your days are numbered. The rise of easy to install, easy to customize, and easy to maintain CMS solutions means that your clients can and should be able to make updates, add content, and do minor tweaking without your hourly rates. At the same time that technology has made the job of web self-mastery much easier, the economy has made the monthly expense of a “Guru” incredibly unappetizing.

Even online, details matter. Unfortunately, because the way website layout works, and boxed-in goodness of web page templates, it is hard to control every little detail of how a web page displays. But you have to try, of course. I’m in the process of adding service menus to the Social Bootstrap website, so that people [...]

A bunch of people will continue to figure out how to get stuff for free. A bunch of other people will continue to pay for stuff. A bunch of other people will figure out how to get whatever they want (money, power, influence, love) by giving those other bunches the stuff they want. And bunches more (who can’t figure anything out) will try to figure out how to force all this stuff from happening.

I just read Seth Godin’s post about Risk and Reward. He talked about the trade-off between Risk and Reward, and how you have to take on additional risk in order to get additional reward. (Which is true.) And he had this nifty graph: Minor quibble- Traditionally, Risk is charted on the x-axis, reward (return) on [...]

Blogging is dead. Myspace is dead. Even Ebay is dead. Nobody is using Internet Explorer. Nobody reads books anymore. Everybody is on twitter. Everybody has an iPhone. No, wait- you should be lifestreaming. No, wait- you’ll be left behind if you don’t implant a chip directly into your brain that syndicates your sensory inputs, thoughts, sexual arousal state, and bladder/bowel contents to an RSS feeder running on Web 3.7 technology.