karlkrantz
Telling people that the affiliate program will be closed to them in 30 days would have been a lot nicer than telling people that their income stops effective immediately.
Yesterday both accounts were closed with no advanced notice and my business model is effectively broken. While I support Amazon for taking a stand, I'm angry at Amazon for not giving some sort of warning to affiliates. It also seems like they wasted a good opportunity to get people who are most passionate about the issue to make some noise for them. The could have sent emails to affiliates as the issue was unfolding, and instead of the short and rather unfriendly letter to affiliates saying "your contract has been terminated". They should have used that notice to give people more information and phone numbers and other contact details about who is behind this.
Seems to me like big chain stores buying protectionist legislation and selling it to voters as "protecting small business", while in reality they are protecting yesterday's dinosaurs and screwing forward thinking Internet based businesses.
Short and useful to startup folks is the goal.
I think the book does look at it in a objectified way, and in the signature Seth Godin way that is both simple and deep for his fans, and too obvious to his critics.
Note that The Dip is actually a super short book, maybe 75-80 pages. To veer off topic a bit I think this in itself is interesting, and a trend I'd like to see more of. Not just because people are busier than ever, but because publishers push writers to "fill out" so many business books when the core point could be made in less than 100 pages. Some ideas are complex and require 1000 pages, many could be done justice in a few chapters.
Things that stood out for me:
It is REALLY small inside, I bumped my head both times getting into the plane, and they just laugh and said "first time?"
Passengers were all 50-70 year old white men, no women at all on either flight I was on, I was the youngest person on both flights.
Takeoff is violent, Landing is more Violent, the Concorde was just not designed for low speeds. I thought something was wrong both landings, but that is just the way it lands. It felt like slamming into the ground at 100 MPH.
The windows were really tiny, just a few inches wide and probably thicker than they were wide. The view outside was amazing and you really had a sense of being at the edge of the atmosphere, but it was so hard to see it through the tiny little windows.
It was pretty amazing to be at a 9AM meeting in Europe and then make it back to New York for a 10 AM meeting.