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Popular Posts
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Why Nobody Can Copy Apple
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Friday was my last day at Amazon
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I sincerely tried, but I still hate Linux
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I’m Betting on Control4
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STOP 0xC2 aka BAD_POOL_CALLER Blue Screen and bad memory
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Work Backwards From The Customer
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You are Thinking of Your Career Trajectory Wrong
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Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit
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The 5 Ps: Achieving Focus in Any Endeavor
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Merit Badges – A Mental Model for Success
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Retail Pricing, Markup, and Margins
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The Job Decision Matrix
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Customer, Business, Technology, Organization (CBTO)
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Why Sr. People Leave MSFT in September
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Windows Phone is Superior; Why Hasn’t it Taken Off?
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Category Archives: Business
Open Office Hours with Charlie
December 22, 2020
Business, Career, Clarity of Thought, Customer & Product, Leadership, Organization & People, Startups, Technology & Execution
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Last month I offered “office hours” to anyone who wanted to chat with me. It was an experiment to see a) if interesting people would reach out, b) if I could be useful to these people, and c) if I’d …Continue reading
Mechanisms
March 6, 2020
Mechanisms are complete processes built around a tool, owned by a leader, that get adopted broadly and are regularly inspected, and improved to ensure things get done, not because everyone has good intentions, but because the elements of the mechanism structurally force the desired behavior. “Good intentions never work, …Continue reading
Kindel’s 2nd Law
Kindel’s 2nd Law – Companies with a subscriptions-based business model eventually behave in ways hostile to that company’s customers. Charlie Kindel – July 2019 Woot! I now have two laws named after me. This law was originally coined in a …Continue reading
Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit
March 13, 2019
We’ve decided to adopt Amazon’s Leadership Principles at Control4. For a while we debated creating our own, or modifying Amazon’s, but in the end we decided just running with Amazon’s as-is would work best. Last week I sent a mail …Continue reading
Kindel’s Law
Kindel’s Law – Every payment system eventually becomes an anti-fraud system. -Charlie Kindel, 2013 I’m not sure how this law thing works. But I’m jealous of folks like Moore, Atwood, and Shannon. I think everyone should have a law named …Continue reading
Customer, Business, Technology, Organization (CBTO)
April 21, 2018
CBTO = Customer + Business + Technology + OrganizationContinue reading
Businesses Buy Differently
My post on Why Nobody Can Copy Apple has become one of the most read posts I’ve ever written (thanks @gruber). Commenters are asking me “Can you describe more what the behaviors are that are different when building for business …Continue reading
Why Nobody Can Copy Apple
Horace Dediu has written another brilliant piece titled “Why doesn’t anybody copy Apple?”. As he points out, Apple is fairly unique in its command of vertical integration and many people point to that as the “why”. However, Horace also admits …Continue reading
Paying Developers is A Bad Idea
The companies that make the most profit are those who build virtuous platform cycles. There are no proof points in history of virtuous platform cycles being created when the platform provider incents developers to target the platform by paying them. …Continue reading
Retail Pricing, Markup, and Margins
Tom’s Hardware is generally really solid. But they should stay focused on technology because this post is seriously absurd: “More than two years after the introduction of the iPad, Samsung appears to be very confident in the tablet market and …Continue reading
A Mouse and Keyboard Don’t Make a Hardware Company
Microsoft is not, and never will be, a hardware company. Please don’t go off saying “what about Xbox or mice & keyboards?” Microsoft does not really want to build & sell hardware. Surface is akin to Google’s Nexus; a ‘north …Continue reading
The Five Big Guys
I’m working on writing up my thesis on the future of the consumer technology business and have convinced myself that there are 5 companies that stand to dominate. I call them The Five Big Guys. This post lays the ground …Continue reading
Brand is a Critical Part of the End-to-End Experience
A commenter on another of my posts asked me to explain further why I think “brand is as much a part of the end-to-end experience as the user interface, device, OS, apps, and services.” I took it as a challenge to …Continue reading
Be Either an App or a Platform, Not Both
If you think the thing you are building is both an “app” and a “platform” you will fail. Oh, and if you think it’s going to be a just a platform, you will fail too. (Update: April 6, 2012 – …Continue reading
