Christian Long was one of the people who came on the tour of Printing for Less. He wrote up his thoughts (with a slant about it teaching him a lot about school design — Christian runs a company that explores that topic, so you can understand his filter there). I too came away with the same impression. This is — by far — the most impressive business I’ve been in. Not because it makes a ton of money (it only has $24 million in sales) but because of the approach it takes. I’ve spoken to executives at many of the world’s best or most respected companies like Target, Boeing, Nestle, Google, Amazon, Sun Microsystems, and fell in love with this little company. I hope to help make Podtech even 1/100th as fun a place. Also because it is being built in the absolute middle of nowhere without ANY geek infrastructure around it.

Andrew Field is my business hero.

Awesome post Christian. Thanks for putting to words thoughts that have been rattling around in my head ever since that tour.

Oh, and I love their dog policy. At the end it simply says “no cats.”

Are you trying to avoid work? You know, by watching stuff like Ze Frank and Rocketboom? Yeah, me too. Heheh. Well, Jeff Pulver, VoIP guru, has a list of Internet TV shows. Damn, if I watch all of these my own show won’t get done, won’t get on this list, and I won’t make my $.02 off of Google ads. Damn. Hey, Maryam, tell John I’ll be finished soon. I gotta do more, um, “market research” first. 🙂

Wired Magazine writes an indepth article on Sony’s PS3 and its fight against Xbox 360. I guarantee you that folks over at Microsoft are happy that Sony has tripped over their feet a few times. I remember meeting with Xbox folks a few years ago when Xbox 360 was only a dream on their whiteboards and they were expecting Sony to come out at the same time. They were hoping to beat them by only a few days. I don’t think they, in their wildest dreams, thought that they’d have a whole year headstart this time around.

I remember one guy explaining why the console manufacturers needed to have their console in the marketplace for four years before they’d start making profits. Microsoft learned its lesson by getting only three years last time (they came into the market a year after PS2 and always have been behind and lost massive amounts of money).

We still have two more years before we’ll really know if “being first” is the only strategy that matters in the game market. But the Wired article sure doesn’t make Sony look good at this point in time.

James Robertson chimes in too with a “PS3 is too expensive” post. I guess it depends how many people will buy $4,000 TVs over the next year. If you get one of those you’ll probably open a credit account. Then $600 more isn’t really that big a deal since that’ll probably cost you another $20 a month. At least that’s how I bought my Xbox and my HD-DVD. Best Buy gave me $10,000 worth of credit by filling out a simple form. Oh, yeah, sorry to pop everyone’s bubble that I’m one rich dude. It’s the American way: go into debt for your toys.