Microsoft made oneNote, one of the apps in its Office suite, free. Why? As Alex Wilhelm at Techcrunch reports:

Microsoft wants to drive OneDrive usage, an experience that is tied closely to OneNote. So the company lowered friction to entry by increasing its platform support in OneNote and by ending pricing questions. No matter where you want to use the service, you can, and Microsoft would like to welcome you into the larger Office-as-a-Service world with open arms.

Microsoft may be down but it’s not out. If it will just stop obsessing over operating systems the company could still do amazing things. A focus on services instead of operating systems is a huge step in the right direction. And as many people have pointed out, the new CEO came from Azure, one of its very successful services.

I saw this news yesterday and had to smile: the SAT exam is being redesigned to better match school work. That’s exciting alone because it has been woefully out of touch with the real knowledge required to do well in college.

In particular, this caught my eye (emphasis mine):

The changes are extensive: The SAT’s rarefied vocabulary challenges will be replaced by words that are common in college courses, like “empirical” and “synthesis.” The math questions, now scattered across many topics, will focus more narrowly on linear equations, functions and proportional thinking. The use of a calculator will no longer be allowed on some of the math sections.

For any of you who have been long-term readers of this blog, you know I spent about 1/3 of Infinity Softworks’ history in math education. What we found is that schools will only use in the classroom what is allowed on the exams. Because the AP, SAT and ACT exams only allow hardware calculators, then only hardware calculators are used in the classroom.

We came very close to upsetting this apple cart. Our software on a PalmPilot was approved for trials on AP exams but before we could implement it Palm fired their education team and the College Board backed out. A decade later and there still are no software calculators available for any of these three exams. In fact, I believe we are the only company in the world who has software calculators available in any standardized exams [1].

The best thing that could happen to classroom advancement of mathematics is the elimination of these calculators on these three most critical exams. It’s like using DOS in a windows world. Most students are turned off by the 30-year old technology more so than the topic. Removing them from exams would open up a world where software could penetrate the classroom, and students could finally get back to learning math rather than learning which buttons on their calculator to press.

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[1] A version of powerOne is available in CLEP exams and in the Praxis, Texas and Georgia teacher licenser exams.

Jeff Vogel wrote this incredibly awesome post about sanity and development within small (indie) companies. He particularly focused on gaming but its applicable across the board:

The Internet exists to crap all over everything. And Flappy Bird is simple, silly, derivative, and casual-friendly, so it was sure to bring the self-styled Defenders of Gaming out of the woodwork.

…

Dong Nguyen quit. A fortune coming through the door, and he walked away. As I write this, Flappy Bird has been removed from app stores.

Think about this. I mean you, personally. Think about what it would take to make you run from a gold mine like this. Really. Think about why someone would do this.

This is not about money.

If you’ve experienced any time as a public figure, especially one that is mainly hated on, it makes a lot of sense.

Dong Nguyen is a young guy. He wrote a game for fun, put it out there, and found himself at the target end of a massive wave of attention, much of it negative. I can’t stress enough how insanely terrifying this can be, and he wasn’t ready.

There’s a reason most companies put other people in charge of answering customer questions, not the people that wrote the app. Customers, frankly, forget that there are people on the other end of that line. They forget that while they may not like the decisions made, there is a person on the other end who did like the decision and worked his or her butt off to make it work as well as they possibly can.

I incurred this wrath when we launched powerOne version 4. Some of the emails were scathing, hateful pieces of junk that really didn’t deserve a response. They were completely disrespectful of the company and product, assuming we didn’t give a crap about our customers and were pissing on them on purpose. They were also disrespectful to me personally since I wrote the app. In my case I was lucky as I understood that these customers were upset with change, period, and were upset because a product they loved was changed [1].

Yes, it was on a much smaller scale than Flappy Birds’ “feedback.” But it didn’t make the vitriol hurt any less.

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[1] I was able to adjust the app and satisfy those who didn’t like the changes.

via David Smith