Category: Commentary

Gavin Shearer, a Seattle Microsoftie who is, you know, partial to a Mac or two, comments on the recent “Get a Mac” adverts which are riffing off the Switch campaign from a couple of years back.

He says that the Windows folk are now seeing the Mac as a real alternative for once. This is kinda cool because the Linux/BSD folk have been seeing the Mac as a real alternative (for the laptop/desktop) for the last five years.

I think BootCamp goes further though. Steve Jobs, at the fateful “war is over” speech nearly a decade ago, was unerringly accurate with his prophecy (though it’s hardly prophecy I suppose as he is the director and tailor of his destiny). Microsoft is not the enemy as BootCamp proves. The enemy is [insert any PC manufacturer here]. This means there is zero chance that Apple will license Mac OS X to Dell. Sure – it means Microsoft will lose some people to Apple’s OS, but there’s also the chance that there’ll be a couple of million more Windows sales in the near future. Spooky to think that the people driving Vista sales in the next couple of years are more likely to be Mac users than traditional Windows users. Spookier too to see the report from Intel that working with Apple is making them take heat/performance/portability concerns a lot more seriously!

Gavin finishes off revealing someone at MS’s TechEd conference did their presentation on a 15″ MacBook Pro running Windows XP. We have been seeing this with the Linux crowd. Is it uncharitable to say that Windows people are 5 years behind them in technology adoption?

Technorati Tags: bootcamp

I think there need to be a serious change in the way PR and branding companies work.

Traditional PR speaks to me of Press Releases, champagne receptions, dead tree mailshots and funny little pointless desk accessories emblazoned with our brand and logo.

Seriously. They spoke to me of this.

I can’t think of how much out of our plan that would be. Our business cards are the only dead tree products we plan to produce. We’re intending to be 100% Bedouin so desk accessories would be useless. Mailshots? For an internet company? Sure we intend to have a SyncBridge launch party but that’s more to do with being the only Mac software company in Northern Ireland and wanting to do something with the local MUG involving an all-new branch of CocoaHeads as well as my friends in Mac-Sys the only Apple Authorised Service Provider in the province. Yeah, sure, that’s closer to traditional PR but the people turning up I consider to be my friends!

I read a couple of PR blogs. One I recommend is Piaras Kelly: Public Relations from an Irish Perspective and I also read Guy Kawasaki’s Blog for extra inspiration. There’s a couple more but these ones are always worth a look.

The Scobleizer, arguably the hottest tech news this quarter, speculates Microsoft holds traditional PR in unreasonably high esteem and they should be paying more attention to the grassroots. He cites Apple and Google as companies which have ensnared the grassroots.

I think it’s deeper than that, of course.

Microsoft has lost the Alpha Geeks. In their place they have trolls like Dvorak, Thurott and Enderle who spend a lot of time thinking of ways to rile up the Mac and Linux crowds who are still not wise to their tactics.

I know some smart people who swear by Microsoft and sometimes I wonder if my faith is misplaced.

If you consider yourself an entrepreneur, achieve something by reading this entry on the Creating Passionate Users blog.

We’re traditionally taught that we have to under-promise and over-deliver if we want to create satisfied customers. We have to exceed a customers expectations by setting the expectations correctly.

Well, this post says BOLLOCKS to that.

We should be aiming to create CUSTOMER DELIGHT through the use of unexpected context. What the heck does that mean?

The most sterling example is – imagine an airline allowing you to change your economy flight ticket without slapping on a huge fee? Imagine if, due to the fact “a filled seat now is better than a filled seat later today”, they actually gave you a credit on your account?

I have some ideas on this but I’ll need to check with Aidan later on whether we can do them. I think it’d be cool.

MJ and I spend a lot of time talking about software development trends, the web (and the various buzzes around web 2.0). Robert Scoble blogged about the problem facing every tech company, and it got me to thinking. How much do people in the IT industry actually know about the trends in their own industry? (Infurious is not a web 2.0 company. We’re writing software for the Mac. We just happen to be passionate about innovation and shiny new toys :-))

I went around the office today (in the day job), and asked people here what they know about web 2.0, blogs, tags, etc. No-one that I spoke to had any real idea what I was talking about. These are not stupid people, nor are they ignorant, they just don’t read blogs or get involved in the web community. One person actually said “web 2.0, what’s that?” when he overheard me talking about it.

The point I’m trying (poorly) to make is that it doesn’t matter whether someone outside a target market knows anything about your product or trends, etc. It’s ensuring that people within your target market/industry do know about you, your product, your buzzwords or whatever. And that target market might not be what you think it is – it could be argued that most people in IT would be market for web 2.0 (I know it’s not a product, but I’m extending the idea of brand to include buzzword). And yet, a large section of the IT industry won’t care, even those who write web-based applications for a living.

Before identifying how to market your product, you need to know who you’re marketing to. I struggled with this while writing SyncBridge, because I thought the product was for people like me, where “me” means a software geek. MJ steered me right (after several discussions) that the product was for people like me, where “me” means a person who relies on a Mac for daily work – in our case, mostly SMEs in print, media, design, etc.

How do we intend to market to those people? I’ll leave that to MJ to post on another day 🙂

Technorati Tags: web2.0, syncbridge

I am looking forward to this book. Guy Kawasaki just gave a brief review on his blog.

The inspiring bit, I guess, is Woz??????s thoughts on being a great engineer:

• Don??????t waiver.
• See things in gray-scale.
• Work alone.
• Trust your instincts.

I sometimes think I am too negative in my attitude towards ideas. (Sorry Aidan, I don’t mean to be). I’m just a little set in my ways regarding some things and I think sometimes I carry it off with valid arguments and I really try not to railroad. I have a “vision” how things should be and I’m honestly not inflexible, I just see the vision as somewhat uncorruptable. I can be convinced and I can even bend my own vision (as he knows).

Anyway – Woz struck me as the archetypal geek. Enthusiastic. Eager to please. Instinctual. Self-driven.

I wanna be one of them. 🙁

I got an odd call today which reminded me of an odder conversation last week.

Last week, an ex-employee in my day job called by and told us that the CEO one of our partner/competitors was swanning around one of thir clients telling them how he was going to buy us (my day job company). Odd chap I thought and then I mused out loud at how much I’d let it go for. It gave me a little laugh, a bit of gallows humour and a brief thought about exit strategies for companies and entrepreneurs. And I did wonder what I’d do with my half 🙂

This week, one of our customers was informed through the grapevine that they had just been bought out by another company. Of course it wasn’t true. We think.

It made me wonder how much of the rumour scuttlebutt was part of the exit strategy of companies that were built to flip (and be bought out). It wouldn’t seem to be prudent to try and manipulate the market with something as simple as spreading rumours.

Aidan and I have discussed our exit strategy. At this point, just because I’m idealistic – mine is likely to be retirement or death. I can afford to be philosophica about it after a rough day today and possibly a rough evening ahead. Wish me luck!

This long article comes on the heels of the last one and is based upon a CNN Money article about mistakes small businesses make. Here’s some of my take on it.

1. Too Little Cash
Being under-capitalised is a pain. I’ve seen this in my day job. There’s jobs we simply couldn’t take on because we needed to extend insane credit terms to big businesses. Being a small business with shallow pockets meant we simply couldn’t do it. So – we walk away. And that’s not even touching on the idea that we have to make enough money to pay people, including the pound-of-flesh due to the VAT man. Buy what is essential. Listen to the second thoughts you will get when signing a cheque. Hold off on online banking for the same reason. It’s too easy to spend money!

2. Thinking Small
To some degree this is inevitable. If you have two engineers and you have work enough for 4 engineers coming in each week, then your guys are always going to be behind. Likewise, if building a service, you have to consider some sort of scalabilty. It would be terrible if the reason you missed out on the $million IPO was because you skimped on the server and were only able to handle 100 people.

3. Skimping on Tech
The article makes a big deal out of laptops, Treos, blackberries and wireless. I’d suggest that you seriously look at laptops (especially cost effective Macs that can boot any OS) and leave the Treos and Blackberries out for the time being. They’re an unnecessary cost in terms of up-front cost as well as subscription and IT resource costs. Consider going Bedouin (a bit like Infurious which in many cases puts the ‘bed’ in Bedouin). Get them laptops. Or a desktop with a monster screen. Leave the Treos and Blackberries to the sales guys that you’ll be hiring much later. And get a reliable email server. I’d suggest you outsource that! Small businesses have no business running their own mail server these days unless it’s actually a core function of their business (i.e. they make mail server software related stuff).

4. Underestimating the importance of sales
Remember those sales guys? This is where I say that you have to back them up except when they start to demand Blackberries and other macguffins (because I know that they will blame the Blackberry for losing the vital email that lost you the deal that would pay salaries for 6 months). Cut through the crap. Have a simple and solid infrastructure and make sure the printer works all the time. Sales people are impatient. And as long as the product you’re making makes more than you spend to make it, then you should do okay. In small businesses, cash is king. Make sure you have enough to cover everything. That means sometimes using your sales people as credit controllers and telling them to get the money in rather than just getting the sales in.

5. Losing Focus
It’s very simple. Have a vision. Follow it. Review it after some time. Does it make sense to realign the company along one product. Do you rebrand the entire company? Do you treat yourself as a product company or a portfolio company? Make sure you talk among your team about what happens when YMG come along and make a big offer for your little company. Make sure you talk about what happens if, after two years, YMG has NOT come along with the big offer and you’re still pulling 80 hour weeks for minimum wage.

OK
In closing, we make a lot of decisions in Infurious because they seem fun. We’re interested in the journey of how to “live the life” as much as we are interested in the actual achievement of the goal. We’re trying new approaches on the development side as well as new approaches in the marketing side. We’re not doing things conventionally as a brief conversation with a professional marketing person (for a big drinks company) discovered. She was horrified at our marketing approach (then again, her ideas revolved mostly around nightly promotions in bars, sponsoring race cars and television advertising). I’m not sure she “got” what we’re doing here. I’m not sure she saw the “fun” side of it! Thanks for the ideas, Anya!

Business 2.0 has an article on how to start your startup.. It’s never been a better time to start a tech startup according to them and the costs for doing it have more than halved compared to Bubble 1.0. They do say that it’s as hard as ever to succeed (though logic would say that lower barriers to entry would mean more entries which would mean more competition which would mean its harder to succeed, but I digress).

The article has links to a series of articles designed to help you go through the process of putting together a business. It briefly explains the pitfalls as well as touching lightly on the fun parts.

Anyway, for some it will be a clip’n’save article especially if you’re early down the road to starting your business