So much BS in this article but let's start with these 3:
1) "Products based on disruptive technologies are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and more convenient to use." How many more benefits can he put in that sentence? He's basically saying disruptive tech is typically cheaper or better.
2) "Make something the mainstream market doesn’t want now, but will want later." Trying to predict the future is just betting on luck.
3) That random functionality vs time graph. What is 200 Functionality?
Bonus: "If you want to get ideas for your $400 million startup, subscribe to my newsletter."
Since this article is basically a straightforward blog-sized recap of Clayton Christensen's _Innovator's Dilemma_, which is one of the more important business books in technology, it seems unlikely to me that the whole piece is "BS".
> Trying to predict the future is just betting on luck.
I don't agree. Lots of people "invent" things well before they are mainstream products. Invent in the sense that they see the problem they want to solve and know what would solve it, usually the issue is they don't have the expertise to build a product.
In that way, predicting the future is easy. If you sat 100 people down and asked them to invent (read: conceptualize) 30 products, I'm sure you'd end up with a decent number of ideas that will be worth billions in a decade or two when somebody builds them.
We are solving America’s skills gap by allowing job seekers to learn job skills online directly from employers. We are a small team, well-funded, and addressing a real problem. We’ve already established partnerships with leading employers such as Staples, GAP, Whole Foods, and Safeway, and the California Community Colleges have committed to roll out LearnUp to nearly 3 million students.
We are looking for full-stack Ruby on Rails engineers to join our Founding Engineering team. This is a key technical position with a huge impact on technical and product direction. The best fit would be someone with a strong understanding of web technologies who is entrepreneurial and enjoys shipping and learning on a daily basis.
Our current technologies include Ruby on Rails, MongoDB, Javascript, SASS, HAML, and AWS.
We offer competitive salary and sizable equity stake.
Cannot agree more with Tom Friedman and Van Ton-Quinlivan on this subject. Job skills are changing so fast that the only way to stay relevant is to be a continuous learner. I want to add that people need help figuring what to learn. This is why LearnUp.me (I work there) is working with California Community Colleges to help those that are "ready soon" and "far from ready" figure out what they need to learn for open jobs.
I had the same problems with the subject field and send button but it didn't take long for me to figure out the solution. Oddly, it seems very intuitive once I've figured it out.
Kudos to the Outlook design team for the clean UI that doesn't take long to get used to and is intuitive once you are used to it.
