barretts

It's not just about selling. I was a journalist for many years, and the worst kinds of visualizations and charts were just data dumps. The best kind had a point of view, or tried to make sense of the data and tell a story with it.

Now, if you distorted or hid conflicting data in the process of doing this, that's obviously bad; but data presented with a point of view can be good, because humans innately respond to stories. It's up to the reader/viewer/listener to think critically about the story.

Your snark is unwarranted and unfair. Few people have been to a Tufte conference, but many more are (at least vaguely) aware of his distaste for PowerPoint. Making the tool/use distinction explicit will help more people think critically about what is good and bad about PowerPoint specifically and presenting data generally.

Good for you for assuming the best in people.

Well (if verbosely) said.

I'd suggest you re-read the review. She only points to one inaccuracy -- the timeframe when Bezos read Remains of the Day. Stone has acknowledged and corrected that fact for future editions.

Everything else she says is subjective. She thinks Stone portrayed Amazon as a cutthroat, sinister culture; she tries to re-frame it as an Edenic workplace. The truth is probably somewhere in between, but her version is certainly not a fact.

She actually only refers to one specific fact that can be checked -- when Bezos read Remains of the Day. Everything else is just her attempt to re-characterize the environment at Amazon, which is subjective, not factual. (She also has some interesting, though biased, comments on the process of non-fiction writing.)

I totally agree that "thought" verbs are tricky, and different news organizations have different rules regarding them. But I wanted to correct the notion that it is "unprofessional" to profile someone without interviewing that person. Gay Talese and Esquire would certainly agree with me, as would decades of journalistic norms.

http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ1003-OCT_SINATRA_rev_

If you'd read the article you'd note that he barely addresses her or her status, and primarily responds to her review and elucidates his reporting process.

I quoted that line because I think it usefully reframes the conversation. Journalists certainly can be biased, but the good ones try very hard not to be. Spouses by definition are biased.

There's something slippery about the way Mrs. Bezos writes as well.

She says: "Readers should remember that Jeff was never interviewed for this book."

She conveniently elides the fact that Brad Stone has interviewed Bezos several times for previous articles, and has written about Amazon for a decade or more.

It is certainly tricky, however, for an author to suggest he/she knows what a subject was thinking/feeling in the past.

You are 100% wrong. Stone interviewed Bezos many times over the years, just not expressly for this book. (Bezos refused.) Bezos did give permission for many of his friends and colleagues to speak to Stone, so he did cooperate in a fashion.

Reporting on a subject without interviewing them is so common, and so necessary, that journalists have a term to describe it. It's called a "write-around."

Full disclosure: I worked with Brad Stone for two years.

The book author Brad Stone (who I used to work with) responded to Mackenzie's review and I think his comment is spot-on:

"I'm certainly less biased than Jeff's wife."

http://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-wife-reviews-book-...

Pogue is an okay journalist, but great at building a personal brand, which now extends to books and the conference circuit as well as writing.

I spent seven years as an editor at top NYC magazines, and saw time and again that great journalists - even great brand-builders - aren't usually great at creating and managing new ventures. There are exceptions, though, and I hope Pogue is one of them.

My initial reaction to this headline was, "Orwellian doublespeak at its best," which is of course the hoped-for response.

On second thought, I don't see why this matters. Facebook transparency matters only to Facebook account holders. And it's free to create an account if you don't have one.

Getting mad over this would be like getting mad when the government releases electronic data sets, which of course means you have to have a computer (and computer savviness) to access them.

That doc looks great, definitely adding to Evernote. Thanks.

It's a jump to go from saying it's not "everything" (which it isn't, and which I don't claim in the post) to saying it's bad advice. From my experience helping friends who had no idea how to manager their options and whether to exercise them and even how much they're worth, this information would have been very useful. What do you think would be better?

That's a fair point, I didn't really take AMT into account. Feel free to leave a comment on the post, it's useful information.

Agreed, that VentureBeat article is very useful.

That's fair, but my understanding is that employees don't get liquidation preference - investors do. So yeah, if there's a lot of stock out there with liquidation preference, your employee options can be worth a lot less. But as far as I know, there's no way to determine that ahead of time.

That's good advice, but I still think it's useful to know the company valuation at grant time -- just as a baseline.

Why, simply because it's hosted on a different domain? It seems to help people reach an audience wider than they would otherwise, which is anything but bad for branding.

I don't know the details here but this missive reads like that of someone who failed and turned to the litigation system for revenge.

The idea of marking major drafts is genius. It's a happy medium between the show-you-every-change-you've-ever-made approach of Word and the latest-version-is-everything approach.

I would recommend integrating with publishing services, so I can edit my, er, drafts in Draft and then hit a single button and publish to WordPress, Tumblr, Medium, et al. once I'm happy with it.

i wish i could believe that. in the 1950s, the U.S. produced 60 percent of global output and had no real international competition, thanks to the destruction in europe, russia, asia, etc. today it produces 18 percent and americans compete against chinese for jobs. i guess that seems like a better explanation for the plight of the middle class than saying we no longer believe in that "a rising tide lift[s] all boats."

i was at the talk and yes i think he misused "network neutrality." he seemed to be talking more about regulation, and government pressure on telcos to keep prices lower than what the market could bear.