Less than a week after the Big in Japan team decided to build and launch ServiceGuy, the final logo has arrived. Thank you for your comments, suggestions and ideas. I personally liked the Lego looking guy, but I understand why the logo below was the final choice:
Hopefully ServiceGuy grows on you. It is not certain that ServiceGuy will catch on outside of Dallas, but the team is excited enough to invest a week of their lives to see. The guys are in Portland for RailsConf and should start in earnest next week.
I’ve never been a Linux fanboy, fact is I don’t really care. All I know is that open-source works, the model the cost the power. It all works, very different from the Microsoft model. And as Microsoft begins to succumb to it’s own bloat and deceptive and destructive practices it takes one last snip on the way down. Shameful. This line, is just laughable given the speaker - Ballmer you’ve tried so hard to screw computing America.
Microsoft counters that it is a matter of principle. “We live in a world where we honor, and support the honoring of, intellectual property,” says Ballmer in an interview. FOSS patrons are going to have to “play by the same rules as the rest of the business,” he insists. “What’s fair is fair.”
Ha.
No one ever claimed breaking up was easy. In the case of JPG magazine it can get down right ugly (worse than a tiff). I noticed a new Flickr screenshot from Tara Hunt showing that she had deleted her JPG account. Why would she do that I wondered, and I as read on I realized that two of the founders Derek and Heather Powazek had left the company.
Evidently the magazine began as a small project sold through Lulu.com. The project turned into a major magazine and the new management team really wanted to get away from the ‘down and dirty’ history of the publication (amaturish digest printed periodically). The decided to focus on the future and market to a broad ‘Barnes and Noble‘ audience. Derek and Heather didn’t agree with the direction.
Paul Cloutier, editor and publisher of JPG, explains that JPG is three things:
Paul suggest that, "Without you [the community], we’re nothing. Turns out lots of JPG’s community liked the history of the magazine. Evidently, for many, the people in the community were more important than the new marketing strategy. So what did they do about it? They left the community ~ publically. There is a Flickr group dedicated to people who have left JPG magazine’s community (more than 236 strong) as seen below:
I suspect that there is much MORE to the story than is reported by Derek in his blog, but to be clear JPG reall f’ed up this one. Shame on you Paul ~ don’t walk away from your community…
Craigslist is a small company, fewer than 25 employees generating more than $25,000,000 in revenue. Their website offers, largely free, classified ads in more than 450 cities and is the top ten most trafficed internet sites.
The success of the site is likely due to the fact that the company has NOT tried to maximize revenue. The site charges nominal fees for job posts in seven cities and for real estate listings in New York ~ every other listing is free. Analysts estimate the site could be worth hundreds of millions in revenue if the company would simply add texts ads on the site.
Business Week is running an interview with Craigslist CEO, Jim Buckmaster titled, "Craigslist’s Ongoing Success Story." The story explains,
Craigslist.org CEO Jim Buckmaster has been called many things: anti-establishment, a communist, and a socialistic anarchist. Traditional businesspeople are often confounded by the company’s business model. After all, the online classified advertisement site over which he presides consistently ranks among the Internet’s most trafficked sites, yet he remains decidedly uninterested in monetization.
Perhaps we should all take a hard look at Jim’s (and of course don’t forget Craig) strategy. Maybe leaving a little on the table allows us all to eat. Had the company focused on monitization from the start the site might not generate more than $1MM per employee, much less hundreds of millions of dollars.
On the Biggu Blog we are asking for comments on the various logo design concepts for the ServiceGuy concept. Please comment there, but here are the logos:
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