Category: Startup

From part of O’Reilly’s series Women In Technology:

Startups are—and to succeed, must be—meritocratic. Limited funding, time, and even office space restrictions don’t allow for hiring anyone who doesn’t add real value. Larger companies and firms have internal diversity goals whereas startups don’t have such goals in their early stages.

This is absolutely true.

When I started Mac-Sys Ltd back in June 2003, I made some mistakes – worse, I allowed friendship to define my hiring criteria – I was saving jobs and using my own savings as collateral.

Be honest with yourself and your business.

And, most importantly, if you are not adding value, it may be time for you to try something else.

Mr. Burns: I’ll keep it short and sweet — Family. Religion. Friendship. These are the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business.

Paddysvalley is the story of an economic invasion force consisting of a van-load of itinerent immigrant workers (who call themselves entrepreneurs).

Some of the names involved are clever buggers so they must be onto something smart (apart from Joe who’s on the list twice. Duh.).

Anyway:-

If you’ve been to Silicon Valley or know someone who might be able to help these poor Irishmen in their quest to improve the state of inward capital investment in Ireland then it would be really cool to make your mark and help out with the Paddy’s Valley To Do List

I’ve seen the odd IP from InvestNI and Momentum surf by this blog. It would be rather spiffing if some of you chaps could maybe assist – even with some names and/advice.

That’s what it’s all about after all.

Exploiting the negative is an interesting theory:

“If everyone tried following their bliss everyone would be trying to get to the same place at the same time. It’d be a fucking traffic jam. But since no one likes going into the negative there’s more room for opportunity – less competition, less traffic.”

This isn’t about trying to make lemonade because all you have is lemons though there are probably a hundred business plans out there which tell you how to exploit the fact you have a job lot of T-shirts/odd-sized boxes/carpet remainders.

This is about actually exploiting the negative. Look inside the places where you are lacking, where you have failed, and see what can be made of them.

It’s taken a lot of soul searching but it’s sorta worked for me. In many cases it’s meant letting go of some things which used to be vital to my continued existence.

For instance, dealing with separation and divorce means actually setting aside quality time with my kids rather than just living in the same house. The negative was unavoidable but I think it made a happier Dad and therefore happier kids.

Creating a profitable company frees you up a lot but when you fall out of love with the work you are doing, it means you can look for new challenges. You might learn to love the old work again, or you may find yourself a new muse.

Faced with a bad outcome, looking at ways to exploit it might just give you a renewed lease on life.

The Scobleizer writes: Doubleclick turned down Microsoft and were bought by Google instead.

I’d previously riffed off Paul Graham on this idea that Microsoft may actually be dying by attrition. I know there’s a lot of people who are wowed by WPF but I’m not particularly bothered and yet the same sort of thing from Adobe I see as exciting.

Part of it is that I really see no need to allow myself to get mired within a “Microsoft-built standard” even if they make it as open as an very open thing. I just don’t trust them. They’ve spent too much money and time trying to tie people to their products that I feel a lot of bias against trusting them in the future.

The idea that the movers and shakers might ignore Redmond is further support for PG’s assertion that Microsoft is Dead, even if just “figuratively dead”. I know I’m not alone in considering this.

But does this make us actually biased against Microsoft or are we just not part of the Windows ecosystem. I have friends in the IT world who would always consider a Microsoft solution and I have friends who would never consider a Microsoft solution. Very few of them are non-partisan.

I’ve seen things I liked and disliked. I wasn’t very impressed with Microsoft’s CRM solution. It just didn’t add anything that I hadn’t seen in a hundred other CRM solutions and neither was it the cheapest. And it required not only signing up to Microsoft’s CRM solution but to use it you needed to be running Windows servers, Exchange Server, SQL Server, Outlook on the desktop and Windows as your operating system. These additional requirements killed it for me. I just couldn’t work up the enthusiasm as each extra step was one more lock-in. And what, if in a year, they vastly increase their fees for these components? I’ve a heap of stuff invested and all my data locked in so either way I’m buggered.

So in the end it’s not that Google is not evil but more that Microsoft just isn’t anything to write home about. I mean, for example, their Mac Mojo corporate mouthpiece waxed on about how much they love Entourage. Big bloody surprise there. The team that built it, loves it. Whoop-de-fecking-doo. Entourage to me was the end of two useful email clients. Outlook Express for the home user (which was largely supplanted by Mail) and Outlook (which was a must-have app for any Mac user in a corporate environment). Entourage was a pale shadow of either and the additional insult of including Project Center for the “soccer moms” rather than actually building a version of “Project” for, say, business people who wanted to use a Mac in business, smacked entirely of market segmentation and trying to keep the Mac in the home and off the corporate LAN. Entourage was an insult and nothing from the PR mouthpiece of Microsoft can try and disguise it for what it is.

I still agree with Paul Graham. Microsoft isn’t dead in a corporate sense, but they have proved time and time again that they have absolutely nothing interesting to say.

This is a company that harps on about creating opportunities, unbridled innovation and unlimited potential. What they mean is opportunities for them, unbridled ways of exploiting the market and unlimited potential for profit.

[Update: The Lone Sysadmin adds a good ending:

The reason I can’t save my Microsoft Project file as a web page is then there wouldn’t be a need for the Microsoft Project Server 2007!

Microsoft: not interested in helping you just get your work done.

That’s just poetry.]

[Update 2: The Inquirer says:

Microsoft has lost its ability to twist arms, and now it is going to die. It can’t compete on level ground, so is left with backpedalling and discounts of almost 100 times.

What we are seeing is an unprecedented shift of power. It is also an unprecedented admission of failure. And the funniest part about the moves made? They are the wrong things to do. Microsoft is in deep trouble.

This is based on Dell offering XP-based system again and Microsoft selling Vista for $3 in China. Priceless]