Author: Victor

Hmmmm, we just received a message from our COO, but it was sent from his assistant’s email account and titled, “Announcement from [COO’s name]”. Is this guy too busy to type his own emails, even the once-in-a-blue-moon emails to the entire company?

Mark at Creative Good sent me $25 worth of Flooz (thanks Mark!) and I spent it all on Godiva Chocolate for myself. I even sent myself a gift card:


Because you work

so fucking hard

eat some damn

chocolate!


Last Christmas my girlfriend and I gave my grandmother a jar of homemade grape jam. My grandmother recently celebrated a birthday, she’s about 88 years old now. She said, “I’ve never liked peanut butter and jelly, but these days sometimes I make myself half a sandwich to have with my medicine.” This makes me very happy to think of her eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the first time.

Michael “Lance” Newby writes regarding my comment on Austria below:

>>We pull our guys from Austria in a show of unsupport for a very “far right

>>wing”, yet freely elected govt, then we coddle, schmooze, and placate an

>>authoritarian, communistic, oppressive (enough adjectives), and THREATENING

>>China?

>>

>>99% of the United States has absolutely no idea of how incompetent our

>>foreign policy has become.

Funny, I’ve never thought of our foreign policy as really being a policy, because it’s never been consistent in my eyes. Rather, it seems like a bunch of tiny, unrelated agreements. I guess it was around the time other countries demonstrated nuclear arms capabilities that America started treating countries on a case by case basis.


Date:
Sun, 20 Feb 2000 20:59:29 -0800 (PST)

From:
Victor Lombardi

Subject:
great ad!

To:
feedback@match.com

I had to laugh at (and I mean at) your ad (enclosed).
It seems to imply (by using a pull-down menu and not
check boxes) that people who want children are neither
intelligent nor financially secure. Are you trying to
tell us something ;-)


I was in a meeting recently with just people on my project team. We were talking about the redesign of a client’s homepage. There were 12 of us. 12, to talk about one page. Granted, it’s the one people see most and the client is huge, but 12 people? That’s just way too many.

Cool – web-based way to test for open ports on your computer.

Working like a madman the past couple weeks, and just managing to keep the stress in check – no time to take time off. Note to self to expect proper compensation come review time!

Wow, I was in a meeting with a client recently going over the usual tactical stuff, when their senior manager came in to observe. At one point someone asked his opinion on the big picture, and he talked for about 15 minutes, blowing our minds. The coolest idea was doing for employees what Epinions does for products, compensating the best work and raising it to the top of the heap.

We used to bitch when our company was called a “web design shop,” since we’re much more than that. But it’s scarier to be called a management consultancy. Our struggle is to take Anderson Consulting’s business without becoming Anderson, which of course would be yuckie.

Whew, just when I thought I’d never make it to the end.


The Word of the Day for February 5 is:


susurrous \soo-SURR-uss\ (adjective)

: full of whispering sounds


A topic we talked about with Peter on his recent visit (see below) and I want to make note of…He criticized how companies like Schwab would contract companies like Razorfish to create their web UI. His main point was that it’s ridiculously inefficient to draw this line between server-side programmers, project managers, et al at Schwab and the project managers, info architects, designers et al at RF, which could be located 3000 miles away, instead of hiring those people at Schwab at keeping them a few cubicles away.

I countered that constructing web UIs is not Schwab’s core business, and that we at RF can leverage experience from building many web sites. Peter said it _is_ their core business now, since the interface is now so important to their business model. Others pointed out that finding talent in the web design field is hard even for fun, hip, profitable companies, and not many folks would leap at a job working at Schwab alongside those wild and crazy Mutual Fund managers.

It’s an interesting question – where a company draws the line between building internal competencies and outsourcing. In this case, I think the issue is not just competencies, it’s culture. Company policies and atmosphere designed to please that 45 yr old fund manger with a Lexus and two kids in the suburbs are not the same policies and atmosphere that please the 22 yr old designer with a love for the club scene and her first apt.

I just now connected this idea with the internal situation at Razorfish. We started off a badass creative firm that didn’t bother with anything more technically sophisticated than the occasional database-backed site or the accompanying strategy. Now we’ve buffed out both those strengths pretty well, and in the process we’ve grown up and acquired some of those 45 yr olds with kids and Lexi. So far so good, but it’ll be interesting to see what happens over time. I think we’ll have to make a more concerted effort to keep pushing the creative envelope.

Remember back when the Net was young and everyone was publishing lots of great stuff for free? Now the web seems to mirror the off-line world more and more, where lot of us have the power to publish but, feeling overwhelmed by mass media, we don’t anymore. I think forums such as epinions give the common folk the opportunity to publish again and, in this phase of commercial web publishing, be rewarded for sharing their experience.

I think when a friend is in need of help, you don’t run away (Austrian Govt Sworn In, U.S. Recalls Envoy), you stay and offer support, because it’s then that they need you most. Austria is the Prodigal Country.