Ideas from Mark Stout

There is a lot of hoopla on the web tonight. Apparently it was twenty-five years ago today that the famous 1984 ad ran during the Superbowl, letting the world know that the Macintosh would change our world starting the next day. The next morning, a handful of stores had Macintoshs ready to show the world. One was Macy's in San Francisco at Union Square. Macy's then had a prestigious store with-in a store selling IBM PC's, and Compaq's. Not many stores outside of IBM's own then could carry the PC. It took a name like Macy's, a dedicated store and sales people largely recruited from outside to entice IBM to partner with Macy's. And now, with Apple. The previous Thursday or Friday we'd gone somewhere like Burlingame to see the new computer. As I recall, we knew almost nothing about it going in. I signed my first NDA that day. I am pretty sure we saw the now famous ad. Then they took us into a classroom. Each desk had a Mac box on it. We were ins...

It took only one trip to convince me. If you travel, especially on business, you need a smart phone. As a backup, I did my standard business trip preparation, meaning mostly a file with copies of flight itineraries, rental car confirmation, hotel confirmation, and a string of Google maps to get me from Airport, to hotel, to meeting site, and back to airport. For the first time, I also moved a PDF of that information over to the Instincts data card. I also made sure I had the addresses of my way points (airport, hotel, meeting site etc.) in the GPS Navigator. A last minute glitch showed the value even more of having a smart phone. The night before I left, I realized I couldn't drive my car to the airport--my teenage son was going to need it in my absence. Likewise, it was not easy for anyone to take me to the airport, so I figured out how to get there using a train into the city, and another mass transit to the airport from the city. Being able to access their respective web page...