So, I needed to view a PDF on a new machine today and, of course, I head over to Adobe to snag a copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader, or Adobe Reader, or whatever it’s called today. Version 7 is out now, unbeknownst to be me, and Adobe has apparently invented more reasons to increase its version number, system requirements, download size, memory usage, and decrease everything desired: speed, ease-of-use, and simplicity. And I still don’t use a single feature that I didn’t have in Acrobat 4. I haven’t been to Adobe’s campus, yet–is it right next to the freeway? Whatever the case, there’s got to be some seriously potent fumes running through their offices to explain the horrible trainwreck that Adobe Reader has become.

In my typical, ever-so-slightly dramatic fashion, I typed in “Adobe Reader is a bloated sack of crap” in Google and found a host of sympathizers and recommendations. A kind commenter on this post over at Rick Strahl’s blog pointed the world to a free PDF reader called Foxit Reader. Weighing in a whopping 1.6MB (compared to Adobe’s 20M–or 28MB depending on which option you select), Foxit Reader downloads in a blink of an eye and performs amazingly well. Suddenly, your Dual Core processor actually feels faster than your old Pentium 3 did with Acrobat Reader 5. Foxit is beating the pants off of Adobe with their own technology…badly. This is how is should be done, folks.

So, I’m trying to find some decent Jazz tickets the other day and I run into their captcha test. That’s “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart”, of course. Unless you’re the programming-type, this will probably help:

Over the course of my visit to Ticketmaster, I probably fail the test 25% of the time. Me, the programming-type, with 20/20 vision, and an itch to buy some egregiously overpriced tickets. Sites add these tests to their submission forms to keep sneaky people from doing things in an automated fashion, like posting comment spam on blogs on a massive scale. That’s nice and all, but it has gotten out of control on some sites to the point where users are regularly failing these tests multiple times in a row. That’s a serious impediment to users who are trying to give you money. Ticketmaster execs, I’ll bet you a cup of Starbucks per day for the rest of your life: you are losing a measurable amount of revenue at your captcha test screen. (more…)

Love him or hate him, Bob Parsons is an interesting guy. I was browsing his blog last night and caught an old post of his about Sony (How Sony Got to be Great). He quotes Sony co-founder Masura Ibuka who said, “You never succeed in technology, business or anything by following the others.” I love this concept. Not that it should be your only modus operandi, but it counter-balances the tendency to try and stay up on every little thing happening in your markets and paying acute attention to your competition. More innovation, less imitation.

I read this post and thought about Van Halen (of course!). I’ve heard that Eddie Van Halen doesn’t listen to other people’s music much and certainly not for inspiration. I heard this from a critic who was whining about how Van Halen sounds the same after x number of albums. The beauty of this is that Van Halen sounds like Van Halen and nobody else. It wouldn’t be the same if the guys had tried to imitate Led Zeppelin. Van Halen would be a watered-down copy of the original like so many grunge bands where in 1993.

Bob then goes on and talks about how he has applied the principle inside of GoDaddy. From a IT standpoint, a lot of times it’s easier to just use whatever solutions are hot this month, especially where open-source is as prevalent as it is. But, sometimes is makes a lot more sense for your individual firm to go your own way. This was certainly the case at First Health, where I developed a Learning Management System for e-learning across the enterprise. There were numerous solutions commercially available. But we had a pretty clear vision of what we wanted and the other solutions were essential square pegs for a round hole. So, we went our own way, developed our own system, and in the end, there was nothing like us around. We offered a uniquely rich and interactive form of online training and our users loved it, after being subjected to the common, dry, ‘page-turner’ stuff for so long.

Also, it makes me think about market evaluation. I personally get caught up a lot in thinking about potential markets and their viability. The thing is, a lot of entrepreneurs I know didn’t spend a lot of time thinking if the market was truly a good opportunity for them or not. They just got to work. Skip the analysis paralysis. Action first, Guy Kawasaki-style. Of course, I don’t advocate reckless enterprising, but it’s a great counter-balance to getting caught up in details and information that doesn’t necessarily (have to) matter.