If Yahoo! buys Hulu it will be plunged into a nasty, long-running fight between media companies and distributors—not the sort of thing a Silicon Valley firm is used to handling. Probably better to stay clear. Schumpeter, The Economist - “Beware the Hulu hoodoo”

This makes complete sense to me. I’ll explain with an analogy. When you first got high-speed internet at home, you likely spent the first week downloading every MP3, video game, or movie you ever wanted. Eventually, the marginal utility of downloading an incremental bit of data fell, to the point that your actual data usage probably wasn’t much greater then what it was when you only had a dial-up connection. In that sense, your “engagement” dropped.

The Chronicle of Higher Education discusses the negative effect laziness is having on undergraduate business education. I’ve always thought that an undergraduate degree in business only makes sense if a student is planning on going directly into a profession like Accounting. And even then, it’s a stretch. Business Educators Struggle to Put Students to Work

Just finished with web 2.0 expo (SF). The conference was not well attended, probably the result of bad timing (right after SXSW) and a name that was AWESOME in 2007. That said, here are two of my favorite presentations. There were others, but the presenters haven’t posted the slides. 1. Cindy Alvarez, “But How Am I Doing Compared to Other Companies?” If you do any A/B testing, conversion optimization, or direct-response online advertising then you will find this useful.

The nerds were right.

People chase investors, but your best investor is your first real customer. And your customers are also your best salesmen. http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110201/how-great-entrepreneurs-think.html

I’ve been spending a lot of time helping one client with their 2011 Product Roadmap. Although we’re not “doing Agile,” I’ve introduced them to the product backlog. So far it’s been a powerful planning tool. So Scott Sehlhorst’s post on how to prioritize resonated with me. When creating a backlog, or managing features, you need to remember that feature priority is a tool to be used to plan your work. Don’t get too specific about the exact rank of individual items, and remember that the eventual order of implementation should reflect what from a business, technical, and user perspective.

nationalpost: Starbucks has announced its new, largest-ever drink size: the Trenta. For iced drinks only, the voluminous beverage will debut in 14 U.S. states in February. But how big is it?

Programmers write code, QA specialists (really just a specialized kind of programmer) make sure that it works, designers create flows, layouts, copy and graphics, and sales people sell. Sure, someone needs to keep an eye on costs and revenues, and manage the business - but that’s not what most product managers do. So do we really need product managers? Or do we just need someone to make sure that someone is leading the team and taking accountability for delivering something that consumers want and customers pay for?

tpdsaa: Submitted by @tomheg