There's nothing there. It's a single paragraph, surrounded by ads, that says absolutely nothing of value. It's grammatically correct. English is fine. But it says nothing.
I wouldn't consider one text-link-ad as surrounding the post. Maybe others would...go figure.
The post is actually 109 words, more than a third of the Gettysburg Address - nearly half. Thank goodness Lincoln didn't post his speech here...I can imagine the comments :-)
The message is simple, no one cares about your product or service - that's the biggest shortcoming of hi-tech companies, they think their speeds-feeds-features-functionality matter. They don't. What matters is what you can do with them and what you do for your customers. In the case of selling to businesses, it's what you do to enable them to do for their customers - internal and external. Your product or service is irrelevant beyond its ability to achieve something of value worth paying for.
"I wouldn't consider one text-link-ad as surrounding the post. Maybe others would...go figure."
We just have a different definition of "ad".
"Upcoming Events", the big Flash thing, the one that's bigger than the total size of your article, on the right: That's a big ol' ad.
"Site Sponsors", also an ad.
"Recent Readers", a big giant ad for MyBlogLog.
The P2P news submit assault at the bottom of the article. That's a whole lot of little bitty ads.
The Sitemeter tag. Little bitty ad.
My definition of "ad" is "anything on the page that serves to take my attention from the content and place it on some other service or product for the obvious gain of someone other than me, the end user." Almost everything else on the page is "ad-like" (things that look like ads and serve to distract from the content on the page, like the "Meet our editors" self-congratulation bit) but only the the above are "ads".
Nothing personal, Jim. I enjoy your posts here at News.YC a lot. I'm sure you've got some great articles in you. This just isn't one of them. And, the page could use some simplification so your poor users don't feel assaulted. I had the same problem with Joomla...it took me months to get it simplified to the point where I didn't feel blinded by all of the crap on the page. ;-)
It is a bad sign when you have to say "Think about it". It's like when someones says "Get it? <repeats punch line>. Get it?" after an unfunny joke. Maybe if you added some real-world examples of what you're trying to convey that would help it feel more concrete.
In this case "think about it" is appropriate because too few people take time to "think about" their customer's customers.
Jim's point is that too many vendor focus on what they do not what their customer's really want. This post is not meant to be a book or a seminar lesson. Just a brief thought stimulator. The message is clear as is. No examples are needed (IMHO).
Nothing there!? Are we reading the same post? It doesn't take thousands of words to make a point.
I think this short post makes a very cogent point. I rarely hear anyone talking about helping their clients to better serve their customers. But in B2B that's the whole game. If your B2B client can't attract and keep their customers then they can't be your customer for long.
Remember, we're in business to help our customers solve a problem or create an opportunity. If our customers are also businesses, that means we ultimately have to help them serve their customers better. That's how we help them solve a problem or create an opportunity.
If you fail at this, you'll fail in your business, eventually.
