Good Things – Bad Things = The Things

This is a pretty incredible look at (among other things) how their best player being such a massive defensive liability is just killing the Dallas Mavericks, whether casual fans are able to see it or not. 

I’ve absolutely played on recreational teams with this problem, where our best scorer and most obviously talented guy was pretty clearly the reason we lost. And I’ve seen in it non-basketball scenarios as well, like incredible sales closers who put up big numbers but suck the life out the rest of the teams, hurt our brand, etc. 

The real question for Luka is… is he willing to be different? Can he make himself valuable without the ball in his hands, or because he’s less talented in those areas, and excellence is harder to achieve as a result, is that just off the table and everyone else needs to somehow mitigate it?

Instagram: Now With More, Worse Ads

I’ve worked almost entirely in B2B (or B2B2C) software, so I’ve never had the now borderline cliche experience of working on a free application that starts off being exactly what people want, but is unprofitable, and then needs to be made incrementally worse — forever — first just to break even, and then eventually to grow profits ad infinitum.

At least when you just increase your prices, you can try to provide some additional value (as long as it costs less to provide than the size of the price increase) and wave your hands a lot and hope people accept the tradeoff. But with this, Instagram is just… worse. It’s not even debatable — the business makes tons and tons of money doing what it does, but if the product was worse it could make more. So they made it worse.

Writing user communications for this kind of thing seems like it would be absolutely soul-crushing. 

Dirty Basketball

When assessing the “dirty” aspect of a basketball play, a good but non-all-encompassing question to ask is “if I did this in a pickup game, would someone fight me”. The play in question one hundred percent qualifies, not because it’s so physically egregious (it’s not), but because it’s such an obvious cheap shot (the ball isn’t even in bounds!) that it’s clear the aggressor wanted everyone to know it was a cheap shot. 

This is not “I am a tougher basketball player than you”, this is “I can do whatever I want to you”. And look, I get that a lot of people are horrified by the Matt Barnes-es of the world imploring for some extra-legal, on-court revenge justice. I’m usually not into that stuff either, to be honest. But that’s only when the powers that be are making a real effort to regulate what’s happening to people on the court. If somebody goes after one of my best players, after the play, the league needs to throw him or her out of the game, period. Otherwise, the 12th man is coming out and putting the aggressor into the basket stanchion on the next play, and the league can sort all that out instead.

Can I Do This With MarsEdit?

I sure hope so. I am really sick of logging into bloated web applications. While we’re at it, let’s see if this can handle photo uploads. 

Godspeed, bits.