Q: What are the best ways to research the competition?
When it’s time to size up your opposition, consultant and author Becky Sheetz invokes the wisdom of ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu: Know your enemy, and know yourself.
Hire your competition’s top salespeople -- or at least invite them for lunch, dinner or cocktails. “It’s a great conversational way to find out stuff you may not otherwise be able to,” says Sheetz, author of The Art of War for Small Business.
When a potential customer declines your business, find out why -- and how your offer stacked up. “It’s more important to find out why you lost,” Sheetz says, “than why
you won.”
Intelligence gathering typically involves strolling through competitors’ aisles. No store? No problem. Hire consultants to make phone calls to your competitors, to learn how they operate.
One of the things that has really annoyed me about running Firefox on Vista is that Internet Explorer looks really slick with the Aero Glass extending down onto the entire navigation bar… and Firefox just looks pathetic sitting next to it. Thanks to the Glasser extension from my new favorite person
Have you ever noticed that many files don’t seem to work in the Preview Pane in Windows Vista’s Explorer? Until recently the only way to work around this was a painful registry hack… but now there’s a utility that will let you easily add file types to the preview list.
One thing I like to do is point out the extra software applications try to sneak in during installation. Especially it that software can definitely be considered “Crap-Ware”. I have found a couple of instances of this while reinstalling Trillian on my Vista machine.
If you’ve been a reader of this site for any amount of time, you are probably familiar with the Keyboard Ninja concept… we like to feature all sorts of ways to quickly access applications or functions with complicated shortcut keys. But what about regular people? Isn’t there a simpler solution?
This article was written by MysticGeek, a tech blogger at the How-To Geek Blogs.
This article was written by MysticGeek, a tech blogger at the How-To Geek Blogs.
I have played with various distributions of Linux for the past 5 years. I would dabble in Red Hat running a web server, install Mandriva (Mandrake at the time) in a dual boot with XP, and actually build a kiosk for a tech school in my area using Suse Linux. I have also ran various versions on
We’ve covered how to access the Windows Vista Calendar using the keyboard, but what if you wanted to assign a single keystroke to pop up the calendar? Yeah, sure, you can just click it with the mouse, but where’s the geek fun in that?
My new friend Sue asked me the other day how to customize icons on Windows XP, so I thought I’d write up all the ways to change the icons, both by using the built-in methods and also with additional software.
One of the few things about Vista that just drives me crazy is the problems with Windows Explorer. I prefer to use Details mode for certain folders, but it seems like Vista constantly “decides” that the folder should show a different set of columns than what I had previously chosen.