Table or Booth?

Earnings-Based Consumption

We cannot spend our way to good economic health, even in the short run.  We have to produce.

John Stiglitz, Chief Economist of the World Bank from 1997 - 2002 took callers on CSPAN this morning, one of which was a democrat who suggested (paraphrasing), "With the economic downturn and the tax payers being the problem, with the bad mortgages and such, why not just give every American one million dollars? Then people would spend money, helping businesses, and letting people keep their houses and jobs."

Why stop at one million?? Why not 10? How about 100 million? We'd all be set for life.

I'm all for consumption as a important part of market health. However, the problem with consumption based on money given versus money earned is that, when given, you have no skin in the game. No risk taken. This changes everything. If you lose it all because of a bad decision, oh well. 

With money earned, you have a vested interest in not seeing it disappear. With money earned, you do your best to get the maximum value you can for every penny. This kind of incentive works.  Money-given based consumption eventually reduces productivity to point of total dependency.  This is socialism and, as history shows, has a strong track record for destroying markets.

Enterprise Bearware

The price customers pay for software and the level of usability they get with that software is inversely proportional.  As long as it solves a big business problem or two, it doesn't matter how easy it is to actually use the stuff.

Hurricane of Hope

If you haven't seen Robert Tracinski's controversial piece about the New Orleans disaster, check it out.  Whether or not you agree with his position, it's atypical, intelligent commentary on the matter.

Google's Invisible Hand

"So far they have only demonstrated excellent intentions, but the invisible hand of the market is quite a thing, and you often find it stuck right up your ass, or in your pocket looking for your wallet"

- Paul Ford, about the Semantic Web, Google and their increasing control over the dissemination of internet data.

It makes me wonder: will Google's dominance inevitably become a dangerous thing?  Or will the invisible hand eventually demand safer alternatives as well?

Keeping it Fresh

"Selling web-based software through ISPs is like selling sushi through vending machines"

- Paul Graham, in Hackers and Painters, Big Ideas From the Computer Age.

He makes a good case for owning the hardware as well as the software.  From a startup perspective, I can see how it would be tempting to do otherwise and consider outsourcing this.

Open-Source Forces Commoditization?

OReilly recently reports that JBuilder is open-sourcing their IDE.  Is this more proof of IDE commoditization?

It makes me wonder; does open-sourcing force commodization?  You might argue this as a tactic used by second or third place competitors to grab market share, forcing the commoditization process.  It's hard to argue that this can't at least be partially successful.

On Career Choices...

"One of the most valuable things my father taught me is an old Yorkshire saying: where there's muck, there's brass.  Meaning that unpleasant work pays."

- Paul Graham, Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas

A few other useful programming career-oriented links:

• How to Keep Your Job
• Discussion with Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt
• Advice from Monster.com
• Paul Graham: Hackers and Painters
• Keep Offshoring From Taking You

Standing Firm in Software

Dr. Tony Evans once said, "When it comes to taking a stand, too many of us have our feet planted firmly in mid-air."

He meant it in the context of knowing your faith and standing by it when, maybe  even especially when, it's not popular.  So true.  It reminds me of my beloved U.S. Marine Corps motto: "Semper Fidelis," which means always faithful.  But that was another time and place...

It's worth considering that standing firm applies to many things, not excluding software.  So how are we supposed to do this, exactly?   

Open-Source: Offense or Defense?

Simple economics apply to any software strategy and should not be ignored.  This is equally true with respect to open-source software. Using it is often a no-brainer.  Building on top of it requires more deliberation but is still a fairly straightforward decision.  The harder question to answer is "Why might I contribute my software to open-source as a part of my business strategy?"

Eclipse Con 2005: Tim O'Reilly Keynote

Tim's perception of technology patterns is truly remarkable.  Here's a distilled list of operational principles he offers for gaining competitive advantage:

• Embrace the value chain: Proprietary applications -> build on -> Commoditized technology -> build on -> Single-source suppliers.
• Design for Participation by architecting for easy incorporation into larger system.
• Design for Usability by releasing early and often, where users submit bugs and solution suggestions.
• If your business is being commoditized, focus on testing, assembly, and integration so user's can have the best of the market's commodities.
• Give users choices but not too many by offering products in proven configurations (standards).  As new configurations emerge support them.
• Since today's applications are internet based, treat them like services (not artifacts) and add features as a part of the normal user experience.  Tim calls this "The Perpetual Beta".
• Add value to your product by incorporating user-data.  Good example: amazon  Bad example: Barnes & Noble.
• Set aggressive defaults for aggregating and incorporating user data to improve the overall value of the application.  These can be unobtrusively configurable.
• Design applications for n-devices.  Today's software is above the level of a single device.
• Reduce complexity and barrier to entry for third party developers by explicity supporting emerging classes of applications (see PHP, Ruby on Rails).
• Be the single-source supplier for an essential subsystem of a bigger, open system.  Examples: Intel -> the CPU, Cisco -> Internet, Navteq -> Mapping
• If you can't own the data, own the registry.  Examples: Google -> Searching,

Tim started the presentation by quoting Jeff Hawkins, the author of On Intelligence saying "All the brain knows are patterns."  It's patterns like these here that will determine the very success or failure of today's technology companies.  If you can think of others or have comments, please add them here or ask Tim.