It was pretty basic, and damned effective. We had an online request system with three priority levels (Low, Medium, High), and a warning that choosing the incorrect priority level for your project would cause it to be delayed. If someone chose High priority when we knew that it wasn't (like they wanted a test server to play with), it instantly got demoted to Low and the customer had to wait an extra week for it to be done.

After seeing their co-workers low and medium priority projects being completed long before their own, most people took the hint and started categorizing their requests properly. The ones who didn't waited a lot. Sure, they occasionally bitched to management about the delay, but we usually had the work done before our management even bothered to respond to their complaint.

Or, they could be competing with Netflix for the "Worst technology business decision of 2011" award.

I heard that they have a statue this year!

I've tried taking notes on a smartphone, and found that it just doesn't work quickly enough. It takes at least 2 seconds to unlock the phone, at least 2 seconds to launch the notepad application, and then you have to worry about "Take car to garage" becoming "Take carp to garbage" thanks to the smartphone's lousy touchscreen keyboard and autocorrect software. It doesn't matter if you have an Android phone or an iPhone... they both have similar issues with this.

By the time I have the note on the phone listed correctly, you've wasted 30 seconds and might have missed else something important if you were taking notes during a meeting. With a notepad and paper, I'll have it jotted down in under five seconds and I can review it immediately without having to unlock the damn phone and launch the note taking app again.

Hell... I would have been happy with just the dust resistant paper and the food dehydrator that they made the pizza with.

When they sold out, started "reviewing" chain fast food restaurants, and started giving "Best Of" awards to places like KFC and Burger King.

I wonder how much the big fast food places paid off Zagat to get their stickers in almost every corporate owned fast food place out there?

I'd think that Portal (another Valve game) is a good example of a short game that "works". Sure, it only took under 10 hours for most people to complete, but the everything in that game was well polished and enjoyable to play.

If the Call Of Duty and Battlefield franchises were fighting over a small 1% of the Third Person Shooter market like the desktop Linux distributions currently are, I'd think that people would be worried about their future growth prospects as well.

Hell... My Braun cordless toothbrush has inductive charging, and it's probably 15 years old now.

How many people really care about how thin their tablets are? I know that I don't, and I'm an iPad owner. It's not like we're going to be sticking these things in our pockets and that extra 2 mm of case depth is going to put a crease in our pants pockets.