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It’s 2007, guys. Related posts: The Broadband Blueprint (re DETI Telecoms Consultation) Ugh. More Flash. Do not read. BBC in new internet strategy with C4 and ITV… So they called it an iPhone
It’s 2007, guys.
Via Daring Fireball, Evan Williams writes about writes about why startups should go to Silicon Valley In my case, anyway, Silicon Valley (or thereabouts) was exactly where I needed to be. The fact that I tried to start an Internet company in Nebraska for three years before coming out set me back at least three … Continue reading “More waffle about Silicon Valley”
Via Daring Fireball, Evan Williams writes about writes about why startups should go to Silicon Valley
In my case, anyway, Silicon Valley (or thereabouts) was exactly where I needed to be. The fact that I tried to start an Internet company in Nebraska for three years before coming out set me back at least three years—three formative years, no less, for the Internet (and for me). There was no reason, at 22, with a sense the Internet was going to be big, not to get my ass out here and get whatever job I could until I knew enough to go on my own. By staying in Nebraska, I relegated myself to spectator, even though I was trying to be a participant.
It’s important to remember what I said before about Silicon Valley. Holywood is to Silicon Valley as hopeful actors are to nerdy guys with the next great idea.
People don’t realise what we’ve done’, said Steve Jobs The blog over at Rixstep says: for once Steve Jobs does know what he’s talking about even on a technical plane – see his ‘Mother of all Demos’ run of NeXTSTEP 3.3 if you don’t believe it. People do not realise what Apple did with the … Continue reading “I know what they did….”
People don’t realise what we’ve done’, said Steve Jobs
The blog over at Rixstep says:
for once Steve Jobs does know what he’s talking about even on a technical plane – see his ‘Mother of all Demos’ run of NeXTSTEP 3.3 if you don’t believe it. People do not realise what Apple did with the iPhone. What did they do? They used NeXTSTEP – and no, most people don’t realise what NeXTSTEP is either.
Is everyone on the same page here?
This year, Apple moved the API to 64-bit. They made it easier and easier to develop for.
And they put NextStep on a phone.
*thinks about it*
Being an early adopter is nothing to do with the quality of software and all about mindset. From 42: This fucking sucks, but serves me right for being an early adopter. Nope. You’re not an early adopter. You made mistakes. You allowed Time Machine to access your cloned backup which thereby invalidated the whole point … Continue reading “Early Adopters”
Being an early adopter is nothing to do with the quality of software and all about mindset.
From 42:
This fucking sucks, but serves me right for being an early adopter.
Nope. You’re not an early adopter. You made mistakes. You allowed Time Machine to access your cloned backup which thereby invalidated the whole point of cloning it. You made it “not a clone”. You may have removed a directory with a simple rm command but, yeah, it borked something up. The lesson here is don’t mess with things unless you’re sure AND always have a backup. I’m a bit dubious about this idea of zombie processes surviving a system restart. I mean….you what???
Being an early adopter is all about attitude. You have to be prepared for thing not working the way you assume. There’s a horde of people backing out of Leopard because their VPN doesn’t work. The truth is that we got rid of Internet Connect so the settings for a Virtual Private Network are now available in the Network pane of System Preferences and not in their own application. There’s other things that are bugbears for people and I use that term accurately.
A Bugbear is a legendary creature comparable to the bogeyman, bogey, bugaboo, hobgoblin and other creatures of folklore, all of which were historically used in some cultures to frighten disobedient children.
If you’re not sure, then hold off upgrading. Rely on your local AASP or the Genius Bar in your local Apple Store to advise you. Consider the applications you use most frequently and research whether they will break. There was a lot of FUD about Illustrator CS3 and Leopard with one local expert crowing about it (the way he’s crowed about every upgrade and indeed claims to have Mac OS 9 machines running because Mac OS X failing is inevitable). Turns out it works.
My own move to Leopard has been seamless and I’ve spent the last week helping people realise that different is not bad and in many ways can be better. They just need to unlearn some old behaviours. Beware of cottage wisdom from non-specialists. The same folk who would have forwarded the idea that zapping the PRAM and rebuilding the desktop database were the only ways to resolve issues will fill your head full of their voodoo (like one individual who invented a new six-key keyboard shortcut…)
Check your apps and when done, upgrade. Keep your backup untouched for a couple of weeks until you realise you’ve forgotten about it. Then move on.
The problem with being your own boss for a few years is that you get used to some things. In some cases it’s setting your own hours though your hours can be dictated by your customers. You at least have the choice whether you want to attend to them rather than kowtowing to their every … Continue reading “Being your own boss”
The problem with being your own boss for a few years is that you get used to some things.
In some cases it’s setting your own hours though your hours can be dictated by your customers. You at least have the choice whether you want to attend to them rather than kowtowing to their every whim. In an ideal world, customers are a positive relationship but it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that money changes hands.
I have a practice that tells me to focus on the core business and don’t be afraid to give away business that you don’t want to do. Mac-Sys did really well a few years ago by being up front with a new sector of potential customers. We had no interest in dealing with Windows clients. And there were numerous companies out there with a couple of Macs surrounded by a few dozen Windows PCs. We didn’t want to take on the PC companies who were servicing the Windows PC so we offered to work with them. This had the benefit of the PC company being able to service their clients better – their Mac clients didn’t feel ignored and the PC company didn’t feel threatened by us. This same practice has prevented me from making costly mistakes in diversification.
Other benefits can be in the decisions on how you do business and not just what you do. Allowing yourself to move out of ethically grey areas and into the clear. This means, for example, not spamming your client list or not stealing their content as a recent storm on the Irish blogosphere indicates – this can be bad for business.
You can also fire your customers. Seems like a common theme everywhere but Northern Ireland. The worst thing you can do as a company is allow your employees to retaliate when there’s a storm brewing. As the boss, make the decision on whether the business with this customer is worth the grief. If it is, make it up with them. If not, kick them the hell out. There will always be a “worst customer” so think carefully.
More satisfying however is to fire a bad supplier in my experience. Imagine my joy when a market research firm acting on behalf of my business bank called earlier this week to gauge my opinion of how they were doing. This is a bank that, when we needed them to help us, grabbed us by the short’n’curlies and yanked tight. They offered us the Small firms Loan Guarantee where the government underwrites the loan, but only if we would further underwrite it by supplying our own security – so if we defaulted, the bank would get paid twice. When we wanted a card swipe machine so we didn’t have to deal with cash and cheques, they tried to levy a 10%+ charge per transaction on us (where the norm is about 2%) and told us it was standard policy. When we worked our butts off and repaid everything, including what we realise now was a crippling interest rate, they refused to change. So, loan free, this year we walked and took our business elsewhere. And when I was finished rating them poorly in their scores I was asked by the market researcher, Dave, if I minded them contacting me about the poor ratings. I replied: If they dare. I’m really looking forward to that call.
The biggest benefit I found was that it was much easier to realign business process or, in the vernacular, cut through the crap. The ability to see a bad practise isn’t always easy. It requires you to question the way you do things, sometimes even undermining your own decisions. You shouldn’t feel emotional about this – it’s about fixing problems and at the time the decision may have seemed totally sensible and, in some cases, your only option.
Living with other people’s bad decisions is harder. And rationalising decisions made by committee, or worse, by culture is really really hard. I wish I’d counted the numbers of shrugs I got from senior people here when I’d asked why they were doing things the way they were doing things. The stock answer seems to be because it’s the way things have always been done.
This brings me to the subject of change.
One of the defining qualities of a manager seems to be in the management of change. For many cases of management, you could substitute “coping with” or even “suppression of”. Change tends to start at the top with the people least qualified to define it. Then the sequence of moving that change down to the individual producers, the people who will implement the change, will pass it through several stages of watering it down as well as self-interest allowing the change to be used for political or career purposes. The most important thing in managing change is buy-in. And by that I don’t mean lip service during a meeting. It has to be a change that everyone will see as a benefit. And if there is no benefit to the people who will make the change, why the hell are you doing it?
Make change for the better. And be sure it will make things better by checking the status of the change during and afterwards and comparing it to where you were before you started. If it’s not making things better, stop doing it. Getting past your own ego is the biggest challenge you’ll ever face.
Did you know that there are more iPods in Northern Ireland per head of population than in any other region in the UK? Interesting statistic. (Comes alongside the likelihood that there’ll be an Apple retail presence, either reseller or Retail Store) in Belfast by the end of 2008.) Related posts: Tom Raftery on the Nokia … Continue reading “Interesting iPod statistic”
Did you know that there are more iPods in Northern Ireland per head of population than in any other region in the UK?
Interesting statistic.
(Comes alongside the likelihood that there’ll be an Apple retail presence, either reseller or Retail Store) in Belfast by the end of 2008.)
As you can tell I’ve been reading a lot from the 37signals blog this week. The title of this post comes from their post about Why Enterprise Software Sucks. A few years ago everything was about the Fortune 500. Even I, as a lowly network engineer, had some familiarity with it. We’d all heard most … Continue reading “The Fortune 5 000 000”
As you can tell I’ve been reading a lot from the 37signals blog this week.
The title of this post comes from their post about Why Enterprise Software Sucks.
A few years ago everything was about the Fortune 500. Even I, as a lowly network engineer, had some familiarity with it. We’d all heard most of the names for sure. The 2007 list, for example, looks like this.
As a small Mac-focused company, there’s very little that we can target at these immense corporations. For one thing, they are pretty much standardised on Windows. That kinda kills any development stone dead. There’s some work we can do in the enterprise space which is platform-agnostic and we probably have a leg up on many in our position.
But is this where the money is?
I don’t think so.
Landing those big deals with the big companies out there lands you in a world of competition – where you’re often competing with the staff inside the company for work (which can make co-operation very difficult).
There are literally millions of companies out there and everyone, especially small businesses aiming to start to make it big, should be aiming at the SME (Small to Medium Enterprise) sector. These companies have more limited budgets it’s true, but they are also much more in need of external expertise.
I said on a forum I run recently:
90% of small businesses don’t need to run a mail server on site. That sort of thing should be outsourced.
The other 10% are, of course, Microsoft Certified Partners….who insist on installing Exchange on a DSL line…
Outsourcing is a dirty word in many areas. It reminds me of my experiences with Compass, Nortel, CSC, IBM, Flextronics and other companies who I had dealings with. I’ve been outsourced and I’ve witnessed outsourcing and I have never found the process to be fulfilling or enjoyable. Quite the opposite. It ruined working relationships, built up hostility within teams and fostered a Can’t Do attitude in almost every case.
In these examples, it was the outsourcing of people which caused the problem. People are crazy, emotional, irrational. Of course it’s not going to be simple.
But should a mortgage advice/brokerage company run a mail server onsite? Should a design firm have any more technology onsite than the need to store their image libraries for swift access? Why does a company where everyone has a laptop feel the need to run essential services on their business broadband lines which, by the way, have ZERO assurance on uptime or bandwidth. (Yes, we’re getting dangerously into Bedouin territory here).
Outsourcing these functions in a small business where it’s not someone’s entire job makes a lot of sense. This is why, despite being a “technology” company, Infurious does not have their own dedicated mail server (sitting on a fluffy carpet in a warm dusty office). It’s why Mac-Sys, despite being a technology company, advises their customers to using hosting plans for their mail and web servers. Email is so important that you want it to be on 24×7, sitting in a cooled rack of other servers with multiply-redundant network pipes and avoid outages caused by someone kicking the cable while slouching in their chair.
There’s a lot of work involved in freeing the Fortune 5 000 000, the hosts of small businesses out there, from the legacy of blunders caused by centralising their infrastructure around legacy Exchange installations. Just my £0.02
David on the
Ouch, this means it’s not just me that thinks Microsoft is making some major blunders.
But this is the problem when you’ve got higher-ups who just don’t understand cool. Microsoft never did. They were never hip and happening any further than the celebs they’d invite to their product launches, most of whom were very public Mac users. Further pinning their hopes for the future on Ray Ozzie (whose very name should inspire fear and doubt due to inflicting Lotus Notes on the world), Microsoft is definitely entering the Autumn of their time. Sure, they’re still pulling in billions in revenue, but for how long. It took them 30 years to get where they are now, it’ll probably take another 20 of them to fall.
BBC News LinkMore than 900 workers losing their jobs at a County Londonderry computer company are to receive details of the redundancy terms being offered to them. Staff at Seagate in Limavady were told on Monday they were losing their jobs. Seagate, which has received £12m from Invest Northern Ireland and its predecessor IDB since … Continue reading “Seagate dumps Limavady Plant: opportunity?”
BBC News LinkMore than 900 workers losing their jobs at a County Londonderry computer company are to receive details of the redundancy terms being offered to them. Staff at Seagate in Limavady were told on Monday they were losing their jobs. Seagate, which has received £12m from Invest Northern Ireland and its predecessor IDB since 2001, will close in the second half of next year.
…
However, it has a plant in Malaysia which is due to start operations in the new year.
It will make the computer components currently being made in Limavady.
Ouch.
The hard drive manufacture market is going to take more of a beating in the future as more and more devices move to solid state memory. Seagate don’t really have a rep for reliability anyway but reduced margins and reduced costs are not going to improve that.
End of the day, that’s probably 900 Christmases ruined. I love it when companies wait til this time of the year to dump their staff. Scrooge ain’t in it. Nortel was an expert at it (note: it’s now 5 years since I left Nortel) with multiple years of “Christmas is coming, better go down the job market”. Bless them.
This, alongside the Nortel/Flextronics fallout, is going to flood the Northern Ireland marketplace with ex-technology workers. I think, however, the market will have to realise that these things come in cycles. Technology firms like Seagate will come in, stay for a decade and realise good savings from Northern Irelands low-cost economy (and a £12 000 000 sweetener ain’t bad) and then will move off again to a lower cost economy. This means, in the grand scheme of things, that Northern Ireland is just a middle man, a safe harbour for US companies to attempt their offshoring. Once they’re confident with it, they can go further afield.
Is Northern Ireland doomed to an ephemeral manufacturing economy? Yes, I think so.
Are there other areas where Northern Ireland could excel? Possibly.
We’ve already seen how popular Northern Ireland is as a call centre location: all of the call centres in the province are growing, especially as companies attempt to bring them back from their first rounds of offshoring. The Irish just seem to be cheap good at it.
InvestNI should be focussing on the Seagate fallout and acting as a dating service. There are going to be a lot of potential startup companies coming out of Limavady in the near future with specific (and potentially high margin) expertise in data storage and retention.
There’s a frighteningly large number of empty and derelict warehouse and manufacturing premises in Northern Ireland that could really do with being repurposed. All of them “InvestNI properties”. Empty they’re a drain, filled, even with only a small number of tenant companies, they’re a boon.
Yeah, there’s a certain “Duh!” about the headline… The UK computer agency Becta is advising schools not to sign licensing agreements with Microsoft because of alleged anti-competitive practices. The government agency has complained to the Office of Fair Trading. The article is on the BBC News site. The reasons being: a spokesman for Becta said … Continue reading “BECTA says “Microsoft is anti-competitive””
Yeah, there’s a certain “Duh!” about the headline…
The UK computer agency Becta is advising schools not to sign licensing agreements with Microsoft because of alleged anti-competitive practices.
The government agency has complained to the Office of Fair Trading.
The article is on the BBC News site. The reasons being:
a spokesman for Becta said the problem was that Microsoft required schools to have licences for every PC in a school that might use its software, whether they were actually doing so or running something else.
Finally BECTA get off their ass and do something about it. This was news back in 2002 before I had even started up Mac-Sys. One school I had dealings with (as a free consultant) was that they were being forced to go for a 3-5 year deal where they needed to pay for every PC in the building despite NONE of them being able to run Windows XP (most of them struggled with Windows 95) and the remainder being Macs. Yet the advisor from the board said they would have to pay for Office and XP for every computer whether it was capable of running the software or not. This would include whether the machine was running older versions of Windows, Mac OS or Linux.
Never mind the absolute hash that Classroom 2000 became where teachers found that their laptops were suddenly not covered under labour costs and so many lost their laptops altogether. And installations were often left half-completed (the school I was dealing with had their school rooms HALF-CABLED and I went in and did a patch job so they could actually use the network). Schools may also be better off buying their own ADSL connection and a NetNanny style proxy due to the costs and draconian firewalls involved in the C2K network. Plus C2K’s partners in this, SX3 (now Northgate) were charging hundreds of pounds for callout to look at the problem. It’s one thing being expensive when you’re offering a boutique service but C2K are administering a network of PCs which are locked down tighter than a wallet from Ballymena. How can they be more expensive????
C2K’s policies in this regard, as well as the fear, uncertainty and doubt that they espoused was one of the reasons that my company stopped working with Education markets. We’d respond if called but the amount of time and effort spent in building a relationship, hammering down a set of requirements only to have it cancelled at the last minute and given out to a box shifter just killed our enthusiasm for it. I really used to care about the state of education technology in Northern Ireland as a whole. Now I’m concentrating on making sure my kids are okay.