Their positioning is crystal clear: “the tablet for the enterprise.” Of course, the iPad is on its way to being a tablet for the enterprise. But for those who think that business requires serious, consumer-unfriendly tools (IT departments, that’s you), Blackberry’s positioning is just the ticket. No doubt there’s some acronym-laden maintenance procedure that IT folks will start to require now that it will ship on the PlayBook.

The coverage on the NYT’s Gadgetwise blog made two interesting observations about the killer feature of the PlayBook: tethering it to an existing Blackberry to get an Internet connection.

First, Research in Motion’s “priority” seems to be keeping current Blackberry users loyal. But few people are likely to rush to buy a Blackberry so they can tether it to their new PlayBook. If Research in Motion is just playing defense, they’re going to get rolled.

Second, because the PlayBook doesn’t connect directly to cellular data plans, it seems unlikely that cell phone makers will promote the PlayBook. Given that cell makers are Research in Motion’s only distribution channel, what is the go to market strategy for the “PlayBook”?

We’ll see how Research in Motion answers those questions next year, when PlayBook actually launches. Until then, it’s a useful reminder how much a large installed base and well-defined channels can distort corporate strategy when new competitors emerge. Geoffrey Moore wouldn’t be surprised at all.

Projectionists took four minutes to change films, so he and the other volunteer speakers to those large captive audiences were simply known as the Four Minute Men. (Of course the name also was meant to recall the Minute Men back during the American Revolution). They used just one or two slides. The entire program cost the government just $102,000.

Those volunteers were an important part of the Committee on Public Information, a federal propaganda agency run by a journalist named George Creel. During the war there were about 75,000 Four Minute Men, who gave an estimated 755,000 speeches to a total audience of 314 million people. The average audience was 416 people. On the average everyone in the US got to hear 3 speeches.

The whole post is worth reading at The Joy of Public Speaking.

Location:Whitehall,United States

He provides four sample questions that are well worth remembering for a kick-off meeting:

• “What is the one thing we must get right to make this website/application worth undertaking?”
• “How does your organization define success? What is the role of the website/application in achieving that success?”
• “What aspects of the internal culture or external environment could put this redesign/application at risk to fail?”
• “(Follow up question) Assuming we mitigate that risk, what would exceed your wildest dreams?”

I think there’s a lot of promise in the facilitation games he suggests for design-oriented kick-off meetings. I can imagine those activities engaging a large group and at the same time giving them sympathy for the challenges that designers confront. It’s easy for a client to imagine himself as a brilliant creative mind until confronted with pencil and blank sheet of paper.

It looks like his site GoodKickoffMeetings.com is stocked with plenty more good ideas for facilitation games. I could invest a lot of time there.

The first approach achieves the appearance of simplicity by shoving complexity into places where it is unmanaged or poorly managed. It’s a form of denial. That sounds bad, but simplicity by denial is often the most efficient solution. It achieves a good outcome without the cost involved in optimization.

We tend to over complicate our lives. Even (or maybe especially) our businesses. Often the greatest cost of doing without is the pain of knowing you’re doing without. The demands of “More” is the siren’s song of our age of abundance.

There are times, however, when the first approach is more costly than it appears. Simplicity through one-size-fits-all denial shoves complexity into spaces where it is unmanaged or poorly managed. While it solves a subset of the problem, it often makes other aspects of the problem worse. Sometimes the costs of the “simple solution” dramatically exceed its benefits.

When are reflexive efforts to simplicity through denial counterproductive? When the “needless complexities” actually turn out to be important parts of the problem. The trouble is, with our fondness for “more”, it’s hard to figure out whether a particular complicating detail is “needless” or “important.”

The only way through that challenge is to pay careful attention to your edge cases. Ask “What does this have in common with core examples?” “Is this really an edge case, or evidence that we haven’t formulated the problem elegantly?”

How much longer they can continue to rely on the best sales force they never had to pay is open to question. One would think that IT departments would catch on that the priorities Microsoft has educated them to care about entail significant hidden costs. And if IT doesn’t get it on their own, one would think that their increasingly tech-savvy CEO’s would find someone who does.

Maybe, just maybe, the company that can’t manage to knock off a two-year old Motorola mobile phone design after reportedly spending hundreds of millions isn’t best equipped to understand what features are beneficial in a mobile tablet computer.

But it’s good to see Microsoft confident again. It seems like just yesterday they were predicting 80% market share in a couple of years in mobile phones. I wonder how that turned out?

Ouch. Not only did this traders’ drunken black-out purchase lose $9.7m and lead to a $7.6m loss for the year for his firm, it also moved the global price of oil $1.50 overnight.

Amazing. In other news, Steve Perkins was relieved of his job as a oil futures trader last year.

Count me with the neighbors who are “concerned about nuclear reactions taking place near their homes.”

The match has now past nine hours. The fifth set is longer than any other match played at Wimbledon this year. They’re in danger of being stopped for darkness for the second day in a row.

Even more remarkable? The Wimbledon Live Blog reports: “There have been no toilet breaks in this match, not one.”