Category: Business

Categories
Business Development

Are you a farmer?

Wil Shipley: “If you farm, you’ll have to purchase seed up-front, and work on it for a season before you see any profits. And every season you’ll plow most the profits (literally) back into the land and salaries and your mortgage. You husband the soil to ensure that it’ll keep providing for you for years and years. If you’re lucky, and if you do a good job, you’ll gather a following, sales will increase, and eventually you may make a tidy living. But every season, no matter how rich you get, you’re going to be back out there, breaking your back and working with the soil. When you finally retire, if you’ve done a good job, the soil is as good as when you first got it, and your farm will live on.”

A great piece on nurturing software. Great software takes care and feeding, Wil is a great software developer, and continually turns the virtual soil of Delicious Library.

Take a few minutes to read the article, you’ll enjoy it.

Categories
Business

Blockbuster, dead

Los Angeles Times: “On Monday, the DVD-rental chain that was once the biggest name in American home entertainment will go up for auction after a planned reorganization under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection failed when its financial performance deteriorated faster than expected.”

At one time, not that long ago, I used to love going into Blockbuster on a Tuesday afternoon to see the new releases. Now it’s Netflix.

Game over.

Categories
Business

Organizing Chaos

Steven Vore: “I’ve tried, in most of the companies and groups in which I’ve worked, to bring some sort of organization and order to the information storage side of things. To various extents, I’d like to think I’ve been successful. To be honest though, I’ve had the most success when I’m working with very technical people who, by their nature, prefer order over chaos. When I’ve been working with more business-oriented or creative folks, they see less need to contribute. They’re often grateful when I’m able to find things for them, but they’ve just not been as willing to invest the time to keep things tidy. Different personalities, different priorities.”

I’ve found this to be the case in the last two companies I’ve joined. Both have managed to get it together using Wikis and internal communication tools. I myself prefer Wikis, the free form nature suits my scattered brain. When documenting things I find it difficult to order my thoughts, so I don’t try. I write everything down as it comes to mind and order it later.

Categories
Apple Business

No Briefs on the App Store

BriefsRob Rhyne: “I feel like we’ve all been here before. Another App Store rejection and another post on my (barely can be called a) blog. Since this is likely my final tome on the subject, I’m opting for a simpler approach. Instead of a rambling post about my continued woes of app review and more logical pleas for guidance from Apple, I’m posting a FAQ. A place to direct people as more of them discover Briefs and wonder what could have been.”

This is one of those sad times for Indie Developers. Briefs is a great application that could give designers and developers the freedom to play with design concepts before actually committing to them. It’s just darned sad to see something that could be so useful not make it to the store.

Rob, I know it wouldn’t be the same, but you should grab Chameleon and make it run on the Mac. Then you could at least distribute it from your company website. You could even wrap your work in an emulator-like window so people could get the effect.

Categories
Business

It’s not the Technology

Robert Scoble: “Microsoft’s technology just isn’t used by many serious web companies that I know. Stack Exchange and PlentyOfFish are two notable exceptions and neither is located in Silicon Valley and they hardly are companies with the scale of MySpace used to have (more than 50 million users).”

Stop right there. There may be a lot of problems inside MySpace, but pointing the finger at a technology stack just isn’t logical. People blamed Twitter’s problems on Ruby, I seriously doubt it had anything to do with the language. Microsoft creates serious, large scale, server software. As a platform .NET is just as good as any LAMP setup you could point a finger at. So don’t point a finger at the technology stack, point it at the team behind the code, and the management.

Watch out! It's a blog fly!If the team is not able to design a complete system that can scale you’re eventually going to run into a brick wall. I’m not sure why MySpace can’t convince quality Software Engineers and Infrastructure Engineers to come to work for them, but that will kill a large scale system faster than anything. Couple that with a large amount of turnover and you’re in for a catastrophe. Scaling for a million users is challenging, much less 100 million, and it takes constant care a feeding, just like a child.

I can buy the argument the team wasn’t right. I can buy the argument the team didn’t understand the technology. I can buy the argument the system was poorly designed. I just can’t buy the argument it had anything to do with the technology stack.

Update: From Jeff Atwood on Twitter.

“look, if Facebook and Wikipedia can build generational empires on PHP, quality of tooling is *utterly irrelevant*. It just is.”

Categories
Business Development Life

Tech Job Destination, Detroit

Bloomberg: “Expertise in cloud computing, mobile software applications and energy management are in demand in the Motor City as automakers replace car stereos with Internet radio and gasoline engines with motors powered by lithium-ion batteries. Technology job postings in the Detroit area doubled last year, making it the fastest-expanding region in the country, according to Dice Holdings Inc. (DHX), a job-listing website.”

This is not something I expected to see, ever. Detroit reaching out to software engineers, building cloud services, and mobile software.

Since the last Detroit post was a bummer, I thought I’d post something positive to even things out.

Categories
Business Development Indie

Chameleon – A UIKit for Mac?

The IconFactory Chameleon Project!
Chameleon: “If you’re an iOS developer, you’re already familiar with UIKit, the framework used to create apps for the iPhone, iPod and iPad. Chameleon is a drop in replacement for UIKit that runs on Mac OS X. In many cases, your iOS code doesn’t need to change at all in order to run on a Mac.”

BRAVO IconFactory!

My wife already said no to a $250.00 T-shirt. Darn.

Categories
Business

Short sighted in San Francisco?

TechCrunch: The city isn’t thanking Twitter for bringing all these high paying jobs to San Francisco, either. Rather, some supervisors don’t want the tax break at all, and seem quite willing to see Twitter bail to tax-free Brisbane. Says Supervisor John Avalos: “Who are the [Twitter] investors? Probably some of the wealthiest people in this country. And we are giving them more wealth.”

Categories
Business Life

Franken on Net Neutrality

Politico: “I came here to warn you, the party may be over,” Franken said. “They’re coming after the Internet hoping to destroy the very thing that makes it such an important [medium] for independent artists and entrepreneurs: its openness and freedom.”

Bummer.