It's been demonstrated over and over again, but businesses refuse to learn the lesson: Homogeneity is its own punishment in the world of business. From the Washington Post today:

[T]he experience of the past year suggests that we desperately need to bring more women into leadership positions on Wall Street, in politics, in regulatory bodies and in American life generally. For decades, corporations and financial firms have sponsored expensive training programs to promote more women into their ranks. They have launched much-needed maternity policies and flexible work arrangements. Most of these initiatives, however, have been pursued to make life easier for the women involved — or, more cynically, to remove the threat of lawsuit or adverse publicity for the firms.

The financial crisis has exposed a quieter but equally pressing concern: We need women in leadership positions not only because they can manage as well as men but because they manage differently than men; because they tend — over time and in the aggregate — to make different kinds of decisions and to accept and avoid different kinds of risk. We need women who will say no to bad decisions based on male-dominated rivalries and clubby golf course confidences. We need women to blow the whistle when risks explode and to challenge the presumptions that too many men, clustered too closely together and sharing a common worldview, can easily indulge.

As the constant wail from Wall Street should remind us, diversity isn't just nice in theory. It makes for better business.

There's a related question here which no one is asking, which is whether the economic catastrophe facing the global marketplace is a result of a failure of white culture in America. The media is always quick to ask whether problems like violence plaguing minority communities are symptoms of a toxic culture in that community, but I haven't seen any questions to that effect in regard to this financial meltdown.

I've written a good deal about monoculture on this site over the years; The correlation between diversity and success has been repeatedly demonstrated.

A few weeks ago, I asked the people who follow my Twitter account to describe the difference between lemons and limes. My immediate prompt was because I was trying to explain that some languages use the same word for both citrus fruits, and others only have a word for one or the other, and thus are forced to use descriptors to distinguish between which one is being specified.

But the responses I got back ranged from charming to insightful, and all demonstrated just how strongly lemons and limes affect our senses. Here's a sample of the responses from Twitter and Facebook.

The literalist:

• baffled: Easy: lemons are lemony and limes are more limey

The bitter-sweet battle:

• ericagee: Limes are a little bit sweeter and a lot bit tarter :).
• antichason: lemons have a bitter undertone to the sour, while limes are sweeter. Which is why limeade will always be superior to lemonade.
• choirshark: lemons vs. limes: lemons are rarely tasting bitter to me, lime do sometimes

The poets:

• freshelectrons: limes have a little taste of moonlight and silver in with the sunshine / citrus aromatics
• Wiley Wiggins: Lemons have a sweeter darker flavor, Limes are sharper and metallic, the sweetness is married closer to the acidity. The acid in lemons is fruitier.

A few charming responses:

• gwentown: Easy: limes are better. [I loved the blatantly opinionated response here.]
• danwolfgang: lemons are great for lemonade, limes are great for marinades. [This sounded like Dorothy Parker to me.]
• otherniceman: lemons }{, limes () [Obviously nerdy, but still somehow clearly correct.]

And then, those that were least literal and perhaps most evocative. These caught my eye because (at least as I read them) they seemed like totally unselfconscious responses based on how we perceive the taste and smell of these fruits.

• redmonk: limes taste rounder.
• JonathanDeamer: EASY. Limes taste more green.
• Harold Check: Lemons taste yellow. Limes taste green.

Thanks to everyone who responded. If you're looking for a scientific distinctions between the two species, you can consult your favorite reference materials to learn about Citrus aurantifolia or C. latifolia (limes) and Citrus limon (lemons). A quick Google search for comparisons between the two fruit will yield a large number of people saying that limes are just unripened lemons. These people are stupid and should learn from the wisdom of the folks I've quoted above.

Please (re-)visit Dan Cook's seminal Nintendo's Genre Innovation Strategy essay from 2005. It's chock-full of his signature revelatory insights, in this case inspired by the excitement and skepticism surrounding the announcement of the controller for the Nintendo Wii (then known as the Revolution).

Among many other inspired moments, Dan offers up, early in the piece, two key points.

• The increasingly hardcore nature of the game industry is causing a contraction of the industry.
• New intuitive controller options will result in innovative game play that will bring new gamers into the fold.

He goes on to describe the evolution of individual genres within the gaming industry, reaching a conclusion that was surprising to me, but that intuitively felt correct upon re-reading:

As the less hardcore players burn out on the game mechanics of their favorite genres, they too are at risk of leaving the game market. The result is a steady erosion of the genre’s population.

What is left is a very peculiar group of highly purified hardcore players. They demand rigorous standardization of game mechanics and have highly refined criteria for judging the quality of their titles. With each generation of titles in the genre, they weed out a few more of the weaker players.

This made me think of the recent innovations around the iPhone and, particularly, the games that have been created for the iPhone app store. Prior to the iPhone's release, high-end mobile phones had, essentially, become a really specific gaming genre, catering to hardcore "players", consisting of tech reviewers and industry analysts whose tastes had evolved as all genres must. "They demand rigorous standardization of game mechanics and have highly refined criteria for judging the quality of their titles. With each generation of titles in the genre, they weed out a few more of the weaker players."

The iPhone was about Nintendo-style innovation, applying the same rules that Nintendo has, and achieving a quite Nintendo-like result of producing a device that is fun, satisfying, and very inexpensive to develop innovative games for. As Dan says about Nintendo's history of innovating in controllers:

One of the easiest ways of creating a new genre is to invent a new series of verbs (or risk mechanics as I called them in my Genre Life Cycle articles). One of the easiest ways of inventing new verbs is to create new input opportunities. Nintendo controls their hardware and they leverage this control to suit their particular business model.

And this is exactly what Nintendo has done historically. The original Dpad, the analog stick, the shoulder buttons, the C-stick, the DS touch pad, link capabilities, the tilt controller, the bongo drums … the list goes on and on.

The touchscreen and tilt sensor in the iPhone are just another in the series of controller innovations, and they've yielded the results that these inventions always do. Only, instead of Mario being the brand that benefits from this new set of verbs, Apple is the brand that benefits.

And all of this confirms my suspicion that the iPod and iPhone are not only designed to be subscription hardware that you repurchase constantly, but that Apple is deliberately creating their devices so that the only way you can level up in this game is by buying a new iPod or iPhone.

It's worth concluding with one of Dan's final points:

Nintendo’s strategy of pursuing innovation benefits the entire industry. It brings in new audiences and creates new genres that provide innovative and exciting experiences. The radical new controller is a great example of this strategy in action.

Surprisingly, this also benefits Microsoft and it benefits Sony. As the years pass, the hard core publishers that serve mature genres will adopt previously innovative genres and commoditize them. Their profits will be less, but they’ll keep a lot of genre addicts very happy. Everybody wins when a game company successfully innovates.

I see both of these strategies as a necessary and expected part of a vibrant and growing industry. Industries need balance and Nintendo is a major force of much needed innovation that prevents industry erosion and decline.

According to Amazon's account of holiday bestsellers, "Nintendo Wii dominated the top sellers in video games and hardware including the Wii console, the Wii remote controller and the Wii nunchuk controller." Worldwide sales of the Wii are nearly equal to sales of the Microsoft XBox 360 and Sony Playstation 3 combined.

If you'd like to open up the package for your licensed copy of Microsoft Windows Vista, you only need to follow these three helpfully-illustrated steps.

"The Windows Vista box opens with a swing-out section that holds your DVD and manuals. The box has two security seals that need to be cut or removed before it can be opened." The first time I opened a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate, it took me a solid 5 minutes to figure out how to do it without breaking the box.

In a blog post that I wrote for work today, I had occasion to use an interrobang as part of a title. Hooray! A chance to exercise some pointless effort in pursuit of typographical correctness.

But chasing down that obscure character led me to thinking about an opportunity that still exists for all the type designers out there. Does any commercially-available font out there do a good job of anticipating modern uses of text like smileys and texting shortcuts, and create styled characters or ligatures for them?

We will increasingly see marks like :) and "B4" and "OMG" showing up in print or in styled text online, and that means we should have appropriate typography to represent these words and phrases as our language evolves. This, of course, would also require a Unicode character representation to be added for common smilies, just as one was added for the Euro symbol when that currency was introduced.

The Euro mark also offers us an opportunity to avoid a mistake made when that symbol was introduced. The familiar € mark was unfortunately introduced more as a logo than as a character, meaning designers were initially discouraged from tailoring the presentation of the symbol for appopriate display in the context of a particular font.

With smileys, and especially with new text ligatures from characters that would never have been paired up in the past, we have the chance to see font designers interpret these new parts of the language in the context of type designs that may have existed in some form for centuries. That promises to be fascinating!

Of course, I'm far from an expert about type, let alone about design in general, so maybe someone's already doing good work in this realm, and it's just escaped my notice. Either way, I look forward to finding out when I'll be able to use typographically elegant OMGs and ;)s on my blog.

One of my recurring fascinations is people creating works of art using common productivity software. Office Tools of Expression as a review of this medium that I wrote last year, and Excel Pile offered an overview back in 2004.

Today, the idea of using office software as a means of expression is popping up more and more frequently. Danielle Aubert released 16 Months Worth of Drawing Exercises in Microsoft Excel about two years ago, as a fifty-dollar coffee table book offering exactly what the title suggests. Writer Response Theory presented a terrific overview of the work at the time, as well as an interview with Aubert:

I started making Excel drawings, never spending more than 30-40 minutes on each one, and I tried not to get hung up on whether I was making non-representational versus representational versus abstract versus systems versus typographic drawings. I just made drawings about anything that I thought might be pleasing in some general way. After a while I started to copy one day’s drawing into a spreadsheet for the next day’s drawing because I found that that way the drawings could build on themselves and maybe become a bit more complex. But really my main objective when I began making them was to experiment with making ’small art’ - or the equivalent of my friend’s small poems - in Excel.

And then, for the holidays this year, the Google Docs team has gotten into the game. They've released "Collaborative Spreadsheet Art", a winter-themed piece created by four artists working simultaneously in the web-based spreadsheet app. The introductory movie is only a minute long.

The Google Docs holiday site offers more insights into the creation of the work, including a look behind the scenes. Now I'm just waiting for the various web-based art programs to make performance videos of people using their tools to do calculations and analyze data.

If you're really taken with this stuff, my earlier post gathers up a list of interesting links about office app art.

In the middle of this year, in observation of his retirement from Microsoft, I wrote Bill Gates and the Greatest Tech Hack Ever, one of my most popular posts and one that I've had a number of people personally mention to me that they appreciated.

So, I was delighted to see Dale Doughtery's appreciation of Bill Gates. Dale's my favorite blogger on O'Reilly's popular Radar blog, and this post shows why: A keen focus on the implications and sustainability of our choices in the tech industry.

In many ways, Gates represents the "best of us" -- it's not just what he's doing but how he thinks about what he's doing. He's a curious geek. He wants to find interesting problems to solve. He believes that smart, self-motivated people working together can make a difference. Bill Gates reflects the best qualities of a generation that has grown up finding the innovative ways to apply science and technology to impact our everyday life in mostly positive ways.

Even better, as pointed out by my friend and coworker Michael Sippey, one of my heroes, Dan Bricklin, showed up and weighed in on the post as well.

People who are into journalism and newspapers and the web and the death of print have been all a-twitter over the NY Times story today about the triCityNews, a little alt-weekly in Monmouth County, New Jersey.

I spent a good bit of time in Monmouth County years ago, when I was a consultant and had a client there, but unfortunately my tenure in the area predates the triCityNews' era of journalistic service to the community. So I was interested to see what was so notable about this little paper.

The Times bemusedly profiles the little alt because, it claims, the triCity "shuns" the web. They quote Dan Jacobson, owner and publisher of the paper, at some length in the piece. I've concatenated all of Jacobson's quotes in the article together here.

Why would I put anything on the Web? I don’t understand how putting content on the Web would do anything but help destroy our paper. Why should we give our readers any incentive whatsoever to not look at our content along with our advertisements, a large number of which are beautiful and cheap full-page ads? [W]e want people to think of Asbury Park as the center of the universe.

I don’t allow our name to be used on any kind of content on the Web — not bulletin boards or listings or anything. I don’t want anybody to connect The TriCityNews and the Internet. I don’t want anything that detracts from the paper and the presence of those big, beautiful full-page ads.

There may come a time when the Web is all there is, and we will try to adapt, and if we don’t, well, hey, we had a great run. But right now, the Web makes no business sense for us.I just get on the Web site [of other newspapers], I look at what I need to and I never look at the ads.

Right after we started, the dot-com bust happened and we have been running scared ever since. We live off the land and run it very lean. There is no debt, our office in downtown Asbury Park is very small, and we have never raised our rates, so people tend to stick with us regardless of what is happening in the economic cycle. All of us are pretty happy with our lifestyles — I was able to quit practicing law quite a few years ago — and are thankful that we seem to have secure jobs and what seems to be a good future in a pretty tough industry.

In all of his quotes about the web and his business model and other newspapers and his big, beautiful full-page ads, Dan Jacobson never once mentions serving his community, researching a story, publishing information of any utility or value to his audience, or actually committing any act of journalism.

That's not to say Jacobson doesn't value journalism. It's just that it's absolutely clear that his priority is his advertisers. Thus, I submit that the triCityNews, while certainly a paper, is likely not a newspaper. I would ask for clarification or rebuttal, or seek evidence to dispute this conclusion by looking in the paper itself, but that's not possible for those of us not physically located in its distribution area. I would invite Mr. Jacobson to respond in person here to this assertion, but I don't want him to compromise his apparent belief that the audience he serves doesn't not seek clarification of information through the web.

I do, however, invite David Carr to explain his belief that this constitutes a "ray of light in [his] e-mail [sic] inbox". I won't hold him accountable for the headline on the story; we all know to blame the editors for that. But even a lighthearted story should have at least its fundamental assertions somewhat resemble the truth.

And, as a minor side note to Mr. Jacobson, whom I suspect may read the response on the web despite his contempt for our medium: The word "plog" is currently the subject of a trademark application by Amazon.com. They are an online concern that has apparently found a way to make money merchandising products online, even when they aren't making use of big, beautiful full-page ads. Just as someone will succeed in doing in Asbury Park, someday soon.

Related: I've rambled on about alt-weeklies and incuriosity in the past. Considering how well-known alts are for being politically liberal, it's interesting how culturally conservative many of them are.

I regularly use about a dozen different social web services, with dozens more that I have accounts on. Historically, I've used one of a very small number of photos of myself as my avatar or user icon on these websites.

The other evening, I spent about an hour replacing my image on as many sites as I could find, because I thought it was time to replace my photo with a picture I discovered a few weeks ago. It's the awesomest photo ever.

'Sup, dog?

A few weeks ago, as a surprise gift for our anniversary, my wife got us a night's stay at the Revolving Hotel Room, part of theanyspacewhatever exhibition at the Guggenheim.

Created by Carsten Höller, the room is a remarkable art installation that also happens to be a complete room suite that you can stay in for a night, letting us live the dream of camping out in the museum and sneaking out among the exhibits while it's closed.

I had no inkling of the plan, just being told by my wife when to be ready to go out. Adding to the surreality, the BBC was there to greet us, filming our entrance and initial encounter with the exhibit for their video segment.

I had been inclined to write a Yelp-style review of the stay ("The continental breakfast served in the morning was serviceable, but our room didn't even have a television!"), but since the Revolving Hotel Room is sold out, it seemed as if that would be unnecessary. As it turns out, the signature revolving motions of the platforms that hold the furniture in the room are barely noticeable once you're asleep, though when you're awake it's very easy to observe how quickly you're moving. In fact, that only thing that might have kept the night from being restful was the noise generated by the other exhibit pieces, echoing through the giant open rotunda of the building. But we had a friendly attendant/guide/security guard who, after escorting us through a personal tour of all the exhibits, graciously turned off all the artworks that used bright lights or loud sounds.

Right when we returned from our stay in the room, Alaina posted a brief writeup as well as a photo set on Flickr including some images and video from our vantage point staying in the room. Since our stay was only the third night the room was open, not many reviews or images of the exhibit had filtered out, so we inspired quite a few follow-up stories, from Gothamist's salacious take to Art21's more analytical look. Art21 also hints at the part of the experience that perhaps lingers with me most: The other exhibits we took in.

Being able to see the museum uncrowded and unhurried by the usual crush of competing patrons was the most memorable and distinctive part of the experience. We could take our time, really appreciate the works (as well as the incredible architecture of one of NYC's signature buildings), and form our opinions without the awareness of thousands of people around us. The fact that, to me, many of the works seemed informed by the short, text-heavy world I live in, all a blur of Twitter updates and SMS messages, made the exhibit in its entirety particularly resonant.

The truth is, the Guggenheim as a space makes a terrible hotel. The room was hardly secluded, the amenities were perfunctory, and while the bed and chairs were comfortable enough, the gracious staff was the only part of the experience that compares to the quality of other fine hotels. That being said, I'd stay there again in a second.