I'm not a woman, but I agree this is a great strategy to consider. I think one of the reasons that both Pinterest and Instagram caught so many of the startup & wantrepreneur crowd off-guard was that their success, to a large extent, came from a predominantly female user base, and typically feminine interests. Google, for all it's strengths, is mostly run by intelligent but geeky male nerds. Same for Microsoft, Amazon…
Dear Marissa: Think Different
41–50 of 72 posts
Re: Dear Marissa: Think Different
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not? Pandering to a demographic is an old and common tactic to sell more goods. Want to sell auto and power tools to women? Just change the style a bit: http://www.tomboytools.com/
Pandering to a demographic is fine as long as you actually respect the people in that demographic. Too often (especially in tech) people make something pink and assume that women will buy it, regardless of how good it actually is.
Re: Dear Marissa: Think Different
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember when I interned at Yahoo! several years ago, Yahoo! Shine, their women's lifestyle portal, had a fairly large audience. According to Alexa, it's still one of their larger web properties: mail.yahoo.com 48.76% login.yahoo.com 29.14% yahoo.com 24.39% search.yahoo.com 19.22% answers.yahoo.com 16.42% news.yahoo.com 15.16% sports.yahoo.com 6.35% finance.yahoo.com 6.25% omg.yahoo.com 5.86% my.yahoo.com 4.71% in.…
just went there now and were visually raped by a huge background-ad by Disney and Verizon. Don't recall seeing those for a while now; thought horizontal background ads were a thing of a past. Learnt something new today, but definitely won't go back there in next couple years.
Re: Dear Marissa: Think Different
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
just went there now and were visually raped by a huge background-ad by Disney and Verizon. Don't recall seeing those for a while now; thought horizontal background ads were a thing of a past. Learnt something new today, but definitely won't go back there in next couple years.
Please don't use the word "raped" in that context--as there are some people on here for whom that word conjures up a much worse image.
Re: Dear Marissa: Think Different
#45Err, Yahoo is making less profit, but it's still making $1B profit on the bottom line last year. Why is everyone acting like it's on it's beyond redemption? Sure, Yahoo and Microsoft are boring, but they're still profitable. http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/financials...
Re: Dear Marissa: Think Different
#46"What if Marissa made it known that Yahoo would be the best tech company in the world for hiring women execs, putting women in leadership positions, and advancing the opportunities for women in the workplace (as Sheryl Sandberg is so well-known for promoting at Facebook)?" Sounds discriminatory to me.
This presupposes that the industry-wide preference for male employees is not discriminatory, which scarcely goes without saying.
Re: Dear Marissa: Think Different
#47Dave, just curious, did you properly capitalize and punctuate this or did Svbtle do that for you?
personally, i think proper grammar is mostly a waste of time... as has happened previously, its use will be eroded by pop culture and mainstream behaviors rather quickly.
also, for some reason i think capitalizing the word 'I' is somehow king of arrogant. don't know why that is, but just seems that way to me.
Re: Dear Marissa: Think Different
#48Dave, just curious, did you properly capitalize and punctuate this or did Svbtle do that for you?
nope that was me, not svbtle. just occasional change of pace, maybe give the trolls less to blather on about (altho seems like i got plenty of shit for using too much pink). personally, i think proper grammar is mostly a waste of time... as has happened previously, its use will be eroded by pop culture and mainstream behaviors rather quickly. also, for some reason i think capitalizing the word 'I' is somehow king of…
Just a bit of literary criticism here, take it or leave it: when I read the classic articles on your site, with the ransom-note formatting, the presentation often overwhelmed the content. I mean, anyone drawing that much attention to their rejection of social norms must mean that to be the primary purpose of the performance. I often slogged through -- and it was a slog -- to get at the meaty arguments hidden somewhere in the pink/green/etc text.
I'm totally on-board with grammar being essentially arbitrary and fluid (this is a True Statement about material reality), but given that this is true, the Dave-maximizing approach is probably not to say "stufz da grammerz!!1" but rather to write well-enough-to-be-understood and not care about the occasional transgression or three.
(There are other writers who make the stylistic choice to be near-perfect paragons of English grammar -- that totally works, too. It communicates something a wee bit different, for example that one is really going for university professor levels of erudition, but that works for some people. PG's writing style, for example, causes me to pull out a dictionary if I see a spelling mistake because it means there is probably a word I haven't learned yet. On the other hand, I generally tend to aim for about a 98% on the mechanics of standard English, don't sweat the last 2% all that much, and frequently break the rules for comedic/dramatic/etc effect. It's much more noticeable when you aren't breaking the rules all of the time.)
This is entirely compatible with continuing the iconoclastic Dave McClure branding, because that branding is a consequence of thinking fairly radical thoughts and articulating them, rather than being entirely a consequence of the packaging of thoughts that are under the surface exactly the same as every other VC's.
Re: Dear Marissa: Think Different
#49Dave, just curious, did you properly capitalize and punctuate this or did Svbtle do that for you?
nope that was me, not svbtle. just occasional change of pace, maybe give the trolls less to blather on about (altho seems like i got plenty of shit for using too much pink). personally, i think proper grammar is mostly a waste of time... as has happened previously, its use will be eroded by pop culture and mainstream behaviors rather quickly. also, for some reason i think capitalizing the word 'I' is somehow king of…
a person could be stylistically arrogant, eg they are creating through their subcommunications (body language, overuse of first person pronounces etc) that they care about their own position greatly and think of themselves as important. (which may or may not be justified view of course - most often not)
i suspect many would align with that view of arrogance. perhaps it is also possible that a person could come across that way, but in fact be humble in what the objective facts they are making.
and vice versa..i've seen a few people who are charming, friendly, likeable and they don't 'feel' arrogant, but yet making the most arrogant claims, if you stop and think about it.