My Squeezed Books

davidw's latest comments

Summary: The Wisdom of Crowds 2 months ago

I think a lot of these books are worth reading if you’ve got the time and like to read, like me. The ones I’ve summarized, at least, are generally well regarded, which is why I got them in the first place. That said… some of them are also big ideas that have been stretched out in order to fill up a book.

Summary: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't 3 months ago

What information did you like specifically? I found it a nice read, but found the book to be very “summarizeable”, in the sense that there wasn’t that much information for the volume, and I was, I felt, able to capture a lot of it fairly easily for this summary.

A few of his conclusions are interesting, and maybe a little bit counterintuitive, such as leaders who created success that outlasted their tenure (I’m very curious to see what will become of Apple once Steve Jobs leaves for whatever reason), but by and large I didn’t find this to be a particularly enlightening read.

Summary: The Wisdom of Crowds 11 months ago

I’m going to try a different approach with this book. Instead of reading it and then summarizing it, I’ll add to the summary as I go along. For the impatient, the wikipedia page is pretty good.

Feel free to jump in with your own edits to the summary, and comments about how you utilized the ideas in this book, or whether you disagree with his thesis.

Summary: Crossing the Chasm 11 months ago

This is an interesting take on Crossing the Chasm:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/rethinking_crossing_the_chasm.php

His point is that perhaps there are simply too many apps being aimed at early adopters, and so they are likely to have less attention to dedicate to each app, increasing the likelyhood that any given app will fail. The big assumption in his logic is that there is a fixed-size pie of early adopters to divy up. Is that true, or is it possible that there might be factors that increase (or decrease) people who act as early adopters?

Summary: My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley about 1 year ago

Joel Spolsky has a review of the book that isn’t very flattering:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/29.html