So one of the thoughts that naturally occurred to me is that there’s at least some small chance that Cylon.local won’t be coming back; perhaps the resurrection ship was simply too far away when the dreadful moment arrived.

I’d just bought a Mac Mini for my parents this past Christmas, so I already know the value proposition of replacing it with the latest model.

But, while I’m entertaining the notion of replacement hardware, it occurs to me that Dell rolled out a competitor a few months ago, called the Inspiron Zino HD. Now don’t get me wrong: I’m quite happy with the Mini’s performance over the last four years, and I’d be happy to keep it for as long as it’ll stick around with me, but any sensible man would think to check in on his options.

So I Google mac mini dell and learn the product’s name. Another query with its name serves up a link that takes me directly to the Zino’s product page on Dell’s website.

I’m checking out the product description, the product porn (the photos gallery), the product video, and their convincingly-constructed selling points — everything’s looking pretty swell. “Not bad-looking,” I find myself thinking, “It’s got native support for HDMI… it’ll run Boxee and iTunes… what’s it cost?”

And then it hits me like a brick between the eyes:

There’s no way to buy this computer from this page. While many manufacturers have individual “catalog” and “shop” pages for any given product, it’s astounding just what a pain it is to actually get from the Zino’s “catalog” page, to its “shop” page in Dell’s online store — there wasn’t a single link on that page to take me straight to a purchase opportunity.

Here’s a screenshot of the full page, so you can hunt around for yourself:

Salesmanship fail

And what makes this perhaps most embarrassing of all is the fact that Dell’s primary sales model has been direct-to-consumer, from the day they opened their doors for business.

• The Open Government Directive (download as pdf, txt, doc or view on Slideshare)
• The Open Government Progress Report to the American People (download as pdf or view on Slideshare)

The post also includes a video of the live online chat in which federal CIO Vivek Kundra and federal CTO Aneesh Chopra announce the Open Government Plan, during which they fielded some questions in realtime from Facebook and Twitter.

Speaking of the value proposition of the initiative, Chopra explains:

So it’s having the conversation with each of our leaders to find out what are the big objectives that they wish to tackle on behalf of the President’s agenda, and in support of the American people. And how can the principles of Open Government, and in particular the datasets, allow others in the ecosystem to support — and advance on — those activities. We just can’t afford to have a federal government solution for every issue. By relying on the ingenuity of the American people we can advance these policy priorities in new and more creative ways.

I also particularly appreciate their speaking to an attempt to raise the quality of published data, particularly after it was discovered that some folks had provided shoddy data to Recovery.gov earlier this year.

Not sure how I’d feel about each app having its own keyboard, but who’s to say which details would make it into the shipping version, and which not?

Tim’s thoughts here echo, add flesh around, and enhance some concepts that will be discussed in the piece that I’d been writing throughout parts of my recent vacation to Greece.

A more concise summary of these ideas is also available for those with time constraints (4 mins):

Although he amusingly paints the behavior of folks annoyed with unmet expectations with absurdity, his insights actually led me down a different path of reflection: the importance of the art of managing expectations.

Nearly any undesirable situation can be dealt with more gracefully, with the application of effective expectation management.