Visit to Exbiblio

I read that Universal Music is giving CDs a revamp for the download age - by which they mean putting them in fancier boxes. That’s nothing. Exbiblio, the company I’ve come to visit in Seattle, plans to give paper a complete overhaul, making your newspaper or your well-thumbed copy of War and Peace as interactive as anything on the net. Ambitious? Crazy? Certainly the first, and possibly the latter, but it’s going to be interesting to see them try. They are planning to unveil the development of their project, its ups and downs, its triumphs and failures via blogging.

As I sat in on a product development meeting yesterday, I was mighty impressed by their way of doing business. The cliches are true. These Seattle West-Coasters do lounge around in t-shirts clutching their take-away cups of (non-Starbucks) coffee, pausing to eat cherries and munch on organic musli bars. They would feel completely naked without their Apple Powerbooks open on the desks. But what impresses me is the complete absense of bull-shit from the conversation. It’s a very open way of business. They “push forward” and “push back” exploring the boundaries of what might be possible to acheive within an insanely tight timescale. There is no vanity or attempt to impress, but there is a sense of adventure and fun about what they are doing, and, of course, total, 100% dedication to the cause. This isn’t a job. It’s a mission.

This entry was posted on July 06th, 2006 and is filed under Blog Home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.