You know, in discussing things, people often discount possibilities that are considered to have an extremely low probability that are also irrelevant to the context of the conversation, so when the context is questions about Google response to potential tax increases in the UK, "Google will invest in the UK no matter what you guys do" doesn't, to a reasonable listener, equate to a commitment to staying engaged in the UK if the UK suddenly, rather than raising taxes that Google would have to pay, instead adopts Chinese-style massive political censorship that Google would have to actively cooperate with the authorities to enforce in order to be allowed to continue operating in the UK.

No it is defiantly a consumer product

Really, now?

Somehow i think the notion of 'no money' sits uncomfortable with advertisement companies, such as Google.

Companies are abstractions that don't have comfort levels. Certainly, profit-seeking investors in any company (not just companies that make money by selling advertising placement) would be uncomfortable with not receiving money for their investment, as would people working in most companies (again, regardless of what business they are in) in the present economic context. Whether those people would be uncomfortable with a context in which money was unnecessary is far less clear, and either in terms of investors, founders, or employees, I don't see any reason to think that what the company sells would have any bearing on how much discomfort the people involved in it would feel in such a context.

> What you say is true but unpersuasive. The surest way to win is to make sure everyone else loses. And that is why negativity works.

In a non-zero-sum game, the surest way to win can be to take action which increases the total reward pool, and making sure everyone else loses may be suboptimal (and can even be a way to guarantee that you lose.)

Recognizing the actual payoff matrix in the game is key to winning, and many many things (in business and elsewhere) are not zero sum.

After the police falsely accuse people enough times they will catch "somebody" upset enough to do something stupid.

When the police falsely accuse people enough times they will make "somebody" upset enough to do something stupid.

The problem is, those two things go hand in hand. If you don't understand the details of the technology, you're highly likely to miss a bunch of nuance in understanding how (and how much) it can solve your business problems.

There's an extent to which that is true, but that's largely what the CIO is for -- not to provide other CxOs with the technical details, but to have enough understanding of the technical details to be the executive with the understanding of the nuances of how technology can solve the business problem, and to be the repository of that nuanced understanding at the executive level, with the ability to articulate it at a level appropriate to the audience, which, in an executive context, is often going to mean losing some of the nuance to focus on non-technical explanations relevant to the decision at hand. There may be times when technical details are important to share, but that's going to depend both on the substantive context and the audience comfort level with technical details, and the CIO needs to be aware of both.

We are talking about the CIO here. Do you expect a CFO not to be able to read an accounting statement?

But the issue isn't about what the CIO understands, but how the CIO communicates with other executives particularly other CxOs.

The CIO should understand technology (and, ideally, should do so at least as broadly, though not necessarily as deeply, as any of his underlings), but also needs to understand the business context in which the firm uses technology and, even more importantly than just understanding, needs to focus on the business impacts of technology rather than the technology itself when communicating with other executives, and not divert communication at that level into technical details.

The summary (and the article, which is essentially the same fluff as the summary repeated several times--I RTFA'd so you don't have to) says to avoid technical jargon, which has actual meaning and is therefore terrifying to people who want to be executives

It says to avoid technical jargon, but not because it "has actual meaning". In fact, the advice it gives is just a specific application of the most basic communication advice ever, that is, "know your audience, and address what has meaning and relevance to them". Business executives don't care about the details of technology, they care about the whether and how that technology can deliver value in the context of their business problems. This isn't avoiding real meaning, its addressing relevant meaning.

If you didn't get that from TFA, you may have read it, but you certainly didn't understand it.

As nickersonm already pointed out: it's actually just WIN+TAB, not CTRL+WIN+TAB.

Win+Tab and Ctrl+Win+Tab are closely related, different effects.

If you're running on Windows 7 or Vista, press CTRL, TAB and the "Windows key" at the same time and watch what happens.

If you try "at the same time", its hard to guess what will happen; if press and hold in the order suggested by the order you put the keys, you get normal Ctrl-Tab behavior.

If you do Win+Tab you get a display of the open windows that you can page through with Tab as long as you hold the Win key
If you do Ctrl+Win+Tab (or Win+Ctrl+Tab, but the both modifiers have to come before the Tab) you get a persistent view of the open windows that you can either tab through or select with the mouse.

Come on, the damn summary already provided an Apple product that shipped for a decade or so that uses this idea.

For very large values of "a decade or so" (Hypercard was released in 1987, which is 26 years ago), and very loose definitions of "this idea" (while both have a concept called "cards", if you remember -- or use Google Image Search to discover -- what Hypercard's actual UI was like, there is very little similarity.)

Thank God someone's finally looking to the design of Google, so it will no longer be cursed with the most famously easy to use search page that every other search engine on earth chose to imitate.

Outside of the search page, many of Google's products UI's haven't been so great, and often related products had radically different UIs for similar functions; having someone in charge of design and an effort at a unified and consistent look and feel across Google products could be a quite good thing (and, IMO, has in terms ofboth consistency and keeping the clutter down as more features are added and more interaction between products; particularly, even core things like the search results page have gotten cleaner over the last few years, despite having more functionality available.

Seriously, Google has always been a favorite because of its good design.

True of the homepage, the original results page, and maybe early Gmail (though not really so much gmail or the results page by the time the design initiative was being pushed), but not much else of Google's.

And perhaps Microsoft is onto something applying it to current OS interfaces with Live Tiles.

Certainly Microsoft (and many others; they weren't the only ones doing similar things) were on to something a long time ago when they first came up with the UI design principles that evolved into the "Metro" design language, which whatever the problems are with the way they've done some of the concrete implementations, the basic principles are sound,

I disabled it through all possible means (disabled all cards individually, disabled cards/Google Now generally. It reduces their number, but not entirely... as I mention above, for example, I type "What time is it in California" and get a "card" saying "It's 5 oclock in California" or whatever. I don't want that, I want search results only

Those aren't Google Now, which is why disabling everything in Now has no effect on them. Those are search results (I think the cards are all technically part of Knowledge Graph) which (like the calculator results introduced much earlier) are core functionality of Google Search.

You left off the rest: "with his most mundane statements breathlessly repeated as though they were great wisdom." It's not Tyson's being an effective science popularizer that bugs me--I'm all for that--but the cult-of-personality aspect which seems to follow.

The two are inseparable in practice. Charismatic, effective communicators in any field generate cults-of-personality.