I’ve been keeping up with Carsonified lately, the small team behind Future of Web Apps, Future of Web Design, Vitamin, and much more. They’re another one of those great small companies that gets things done the right way, without any bullshit.

Ryan Carson wrote a post recently about PR people, and he quoted Robert Stephens (founder of Geek Squad):

“Marketing is the price you pay for being unremarkable.”

I love sayings like that. Simple, true, and inspirational. I had never really thought about it, but it’s true. You only need to market yourself if you don’t otherwise stand out in the crowd. He references another small team, 37signals, who are also uniquely remarkable. They create simple, useful apps for small businesses. They’re not for everybody, but for the people that use them they’re a godsend (most of them anyway).

I think we need more companies like Carsonified and 37signals. We need to move away from larger market-dominating companies that try to please everybody with overly complex software, and move towards smaller companies that meet the needs of smaller groups. If there are enough of these small companies going after certain market segments, people will end up being happier in the long run. At least I think so.

I know it’s just a pipe-dream, but I think we’d truly be better off with fewer big companies, and more smaller companies.

That is all.

In Windows XP, there was a set of “PowerToys” provided by Microsft which were geared towards more advanced “power-user” features.  One of these was a nifty little tool called “Open Command Window here”.  All you did was right-click on a directory and you could open a command prompt with the current path being active.  Turns out that in Vista, this is built-in, although it requires an extra keypress.  Hold down Shift as you right-click and you’ll get a beefed up context menu that has an “Open Command Window here” option.  That is all.

A moment of silence for the first graphical web browser.  AOL, who owns Netscape, has officially discontinued support for the browser.  Thanks to Microsoft, who started shipping its own browser with Windows, effectively winning the Browser Wars of the ’90s, Netscape no longer has (and hasn’t had for a long time) a decent market share.  Thankfully, though, we have its offspring, Firefox, to keep us happy.

Goodbye Netscape, it’s the end of an era.