"Art of the Start"

Ok, I admit it. I used to be a Mac-aholic. An Apple Macintosh lover to the extreme.

A little background. Somewhere deep inside, I have the need to solve other people's technology problems. I got paid to write books to teach others how to make good use of technology in their lives.

So when I was introducted to my first Mac, I made it my mission to convert the brainwashed masses *cough* Windows *cough* to Apple. It's a better machine, I told everyone, sooo much better/easier. You'd be a fool not to rush right out and buy one. (Of course, I was cured of my Apple Fever a few years ago, but that's another post.)

Anyhoo, I made a few converts along the way, and at some point tripped over the name Guy Kawasaki. Big time Apple evangelist, paid to spread the Mac love full-time. I mean, how cool would that be? To fall madly in love with a technology company and then get paid to infect them with the virus of your vision -- that a Mac could make you both much cooler, and much more productive?

I read a few of his books, and recently picked up his new "The Art of the Start" for a song on eBay. This is, of course, a funny, insightful read -- just what you'd expect from Guy.

But a passage on page 36 had me laughing so hard I had to drop the book to catch a breath!

Keep this in mind -- on Y2K my wife and I moved to NC from Silicon Valley so I could start a new job with a company called bigchalk.com. Here's the passage that made me LOL, from the chapter entitled "The Art of Positioning":

"AVOID THE TRENDY. With hindsight, we made two mistakes naming Garage Technology Ventures when we started it in 1997. First, we initially called the company "garage.com." Unfortunately, dot-com acquired negative connotations when the Internet tide went out because it came to stand for companies run by people with business acumen in markets without business models."

Dead on Guy! There's more...

"The second mistake was lowercasing the "g" in garage.com. It was a silly act of pseudohumility, but those were silly times. The problem with lowercase "g" was that it was hard to pick out in blocks of text. The visual cue that the word was a proper noun wasn't there--you'd think that someone named guy (sic) would know this. Also, no one could really figure out what to do when a sentence started with "garage.com" -- should it be capitalized or not?"

"The bottom line, in hindsight, is that you should come up with a name that will endure for decades, and save your cleverness for the features of your products and services."

Amen Guy! bigchalk.com (See? what do I do there?) was rife with outbursts from fellow content authors, wondering what to do with that ever-lowercase-b. Eventually, about a year into the company, the bosses decided we should cap it when we start a sentence -- but honestly, I do what I always do in weird situations involving text/grammar I don't fully understand: I rewrote the text so bigchalk.com always appears somewhere inside of the sentence.

Problem solved!

And that, my readers, whomever you are, is today's trip into Tim's sordid .com past. ;)