DAN

To pull this off Dropbox must manage incredible volume and stunning complexity—while making that all simply disappear to anyone using the service.

About a decade ago, in a conversation with a co-worker named Barry Lank when we were at Gannett, I marveled over what made the perfect email. (In the late 90s, email still held art status.) Such an email had to be meticulously and deliberately made to appear as though it was haphazard. Kind of like a Disney experience — so easy to the one enjoying the experience, but an orchestration of significance to pull off behind the scenes.

I'm discovering that the same goes for technology businesses now, as so well articulated in the above quote from Forbes' profile of the awesome app Dropbox.

Take a look at the home pages of Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox and Google. Get the idea? A ton of complexity covered with brilliant and simplistic user experience. It's a prerequisite for success in the digital world.

[Boston Red Sox Owner Tom] Yawkey was not just a racist, in other words. He was a racist who put his hatred of black people ahead of his desire to make money. Economists have a special term they use to describe this kind of attitude. They would say that Yawkey owned the Red Sox not to maximize his financial benefits, but, rather, his psychic benefits. Psychic benefits describe the pleasure that someone gets from owning something — over and above economic returns — and clearly some part of the pleasure Yawkey got from the Red Sox came from not having to look at black people when he walked through the Fenway Park dugout. In discussions of pro sports, the role of psychic benefits doesn't get a lot of attention. But it should, because it is the key to understanding all kinds of behavior by sports owners — most recently the peculiar position taken by management in the NBA labor dispute.

Malcolm Gladwell - author of the Tipping Point, among other dialectic doozies - makes a funny, if not factual case that most sports teams' owners do not approach the business as, well, businessmen.

I don't subscribe to the notion as widespread as Gladwell likes to make you think (as if all of the maxims in his clever and popular books are laws of physics). Nevertheless, it's an interesting point - and one I would agree with in limited circumstances.

For instance, his paradigm would apply to me. If I owned a team, it would be the New York Jets. And, my sole motivation would be to beat New England. (Thanks, by the way, to @edwardtlynes, an avid Patriots fan, for calling this piece to my attention.)

If you sell lemonade for $1 and it costs $800 to make it, that’s not a great business.

Wow! Just wow!

Mashable did a piece today on StorageByMail.com - a company that has fashioned self-storage into a Netflix-like model. The company allows customers to ship boxes to storage using prepaid shipping labels and online inventory management. It costs $29.99 per month for five boxes of any size or weight.

This is a clever idea. To me, what's important, is that it shows there's still diversity in smart start-up concepts that aren't just Web-only apps.