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Anil Dash

A Blog About Making Culture

Monoculture Is Bad For BusinessJanuary 5

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

The Difference Between Lemons and LimesJanuary 4

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:

Phones are For Hardcore GamersDecember 30 2008

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

How To Get WindowsDecember 30 2008

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.

Fonts for Contemporary UseDecember 29 2008

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