Robbie MacKay

I recently read The Dip, a great little book by Seth Godin. It inspired these thoughts about tall poppy syndrome in New Zealand.

Tall poppy syndrome refers to the phenomenon where high achievers and/or people who stand out are criticised or resented for their talents or achievements.

We often talk about tall poppy syndrome and how bad it is.

The fear is that if we standout someone will cut us down.

It occurred to me however that the real crime is not that people cut others down for doing well or standing out. I honestly don’t know if people really do that.

The crime is that we let that stop us from standing out.
We let them cut us down.

And then we teach each other (and our kids) to be worried about people cutting us down and to be careful about standing out.

At the moment it doesn’t matter if people cut us down or not, we never do anything to stand out anyway.

We are still afraid, and we are letting that control us.

So start standing out, start doing great things.
If someone cuts you down? – Challenge them to better you instead
If someone thinks you’re great? – Celebrate with them, thank them.. and show them they can be great too!

What do you think? – Comment and let me know

Note: I’m going to try and post updates every Wednesday so look out for another post in a week

So I came up with this a while ago but never got around to posting it – on looking at it now I think maybe it would be more appropriate to call them distributed applications not portable applications, however I’ll run with the name I started with.

I’ve been thinking about the trend lately to build things as web apps rather then desktop apps – or the create web apps which attempt to replace desktop apps.

I love alot of the new apps coming out – but I think people are missing part of the point.

The cool thing with the spead of the internet is the possibility of ‘portable’ applications not just web applications. What do I mean? Well I think there is an opportunity for applications that are portable (or distributed) – in that you can access your data anywhere from any computer. This also requires that applications are portable in that they run on multiple platforms. This class of ‘portable’ applications includes web applications but it also includes desktop applications which store data on the web.

Mozilla Firefox is heading this way with their Weave project – which lets you store your settings, bookmarks, etc in the cloud, Chandler (which I’ve blogged about) also fits this category.. Technologies such as Adobe Air show a lot of promise in making these kinds of desktop apps easy – especially desktop apps that are an extension of a web app.

Personally I’m a fan of both desktop applications which distribute your data – partly because I so often crash my web browser so having an application running seperately can be more useful. And also I find that applications which sit in the background  work better as desktop apps – such as time trackers, or twitter clients – they can sit in my windows status bar (or equivalent) rather then being a tab in the browser.

Hopefully we will see some great portable applications in the future
I’ve certainly got a few ideas I’m playing with. Let me know about any portable apps you’ve found or ideas for apps you’d love to see!

P.S. – I’d also welcome any comments on improving my writing, etc.