Every week, I have to use six different Office Software Suites:
As an expert computer user (former SysAdmin), I’m often asked for help by people with non-computing backgrounds. When they see how many different suites I’m using, they’re … surprised, to say the least. Here’s a quick snapshot of what and why.
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TL;DR: experienced CEO/CTO/TechDirector with long background in programming, sales, and business management (Corporate, iPhone/Android, Games, Education) looking for strategic roles in USA, UK, and Asia.
After a year-out to do a post-graduate degree in Education, I’m looking for something new and exciting to do next. My primary goal is to boost a company or team rapidly and show significant outcomes – increased revenue or other KPI’s – either through Consulting or full/part-time senior leadership.
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This week I’m paralysed on some of my simplest decisions while happily making complex decisions quickly, and being incisive and highly effective on others. This problem occasionally crops up in my work and personal life, and it frustrates the hell out of me; I’m going to write about it here, see if it helps me find a new way forwards. Hopefully this may also help others who’ve experienced a similar problem in their own lives.
Many businesses underestimate the power of a clever Pricing Model. I’m selling a new product at the moment (we’re helping schools teach children to program), so pricing models occupy a lot of my head right now.
Startups are so unsure of what model to use that they often say “anything, so long as we get sales”. They usually focus on simplicity (with a “new” product, a complex pricing model can tip people over the edge and make them “give up” on buying).
Which is fine, but a cunning pricing model can work wonders.
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This:
(blocking me from doing any work – I need that spreadsheet, and thanks to Cloud, it’s impossible. Any other system – source / revision control, local files, file servers, etc – would have a quick, easy way for me to get at it. It’s only Cloud that fails … opaquely :( )
In the past, I’ve found Thomas’s Kickstarter analysis for game-projects very useful. Today I found something that complements them: an excellent visualization of Kickstarter projects.
It takes a little thought to understand how to use it, so here’s some ultra-quick example analysis…
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My blog posts are info-rich and spam-poor. Most of the “enter your email address” plugins are designed for spam – covered in bling, in-your-face animations, background music, all sorts of crap.
There’s nothing out there, so I made one, using a GPL’d existing project. Feel free to use this yourself.
note: this is an image, not a form!
Some good observations on tech business strategy here
Low-margin can still mean high-value-business:
“Most people just look at a company’s margins and judge the quality of the business model based on that, but the cash flow characteristics of the business can make one company a far more valuable company than another with the exact same operating margin. Amazon could have had a margin of zero and still made money.”
Preventing the number-1 biggest threat to a mainstream company (disruption):
“Study disruption in most businesses and it almost always comes from the low end. Some competitor grabs a foothold on the bottom rung of the ladder and pulls itself upstream. But if you’re already sitting on that lowest rung as the incumbent, it’s tough for a disruptor to cling to anything to gain traction.”
And … an idea I’d considered more seriously back when I started in iOS development. This was the perfect way to disrupt agencies (tough and unpleasant though it was):
“Not having to sweat a constant onslaught of new competitors is really underrated. You can allocate your best employees to explore new lines of business, you can count on a consistent flow of cash from your more mature product or service lines, and you can focus your management team on offense. I”
While upgrading Unity, I noticed the current download page is a great example of how it SHOULD be done:
Unity 4 has some … issues … with backwards compatibility – but at least they made the “need an older version?” link prominent. And how many old versions can you download?
Many!
(it goes on right back to unity 3.0)
Well, that backwards compatibility thing is a *****. If you work on a project with other people, and they’re using Unity 3.5 … you SHOULD NOT (must not?) use Unity 4 (there be Dragons).
But it’s fine; Unity makes it trivial for anyone joining such a project to get exactly the version they need.
Some games middleware *cough*Hansoft*cough* companies declare that everyone must use the latest version, even if it is buggy and breaks existing projects. Or if it requires staff retraining. You must retrain EVERYONE! NOW!
(Hansoft has probably changed by now – maybe unfair to single them out. But for a long time they only allowed you to download the “latest” version, and actively deleted everything else. As soon as a new version existed, BOOM! Everything else got wiped. A happy customer I was not)
So, here we have a piece of middleware, with a download page:
Designing a website to look simple is certainly a difficult and non-trivial task.
But in the case of a download page – where almost everyone has the same needs, and there are many examples to copy (plagiarise) from – it doesn’t take much. More projects (and companies) should at least try to do this.
“Based on a analysis of 10,000 programming sessions recorded from 86 programmers using Eclipse and Visual Studio and a survey of 414 programmers (Parnin:10), we found:
- A programmer takes between 10-15 minutes to start editing code after resuming work from an interruption.
- When interrupted during an edit of a method, only 10% of times did a programmer resume work in less than a minute.
- A programmer is likely to get just one uninterrupted 2-hour session in a day
We also looked at some of the ways programmers coped with interruption:
- Most sessions programmers navigated to several locations to rebuild context before resuming an edit.
- Programmers insert intentional compile errors to force a “roadblock” reminder.
- A source diff is seen as a last resort way to recover state but can be cumbersome to review
”
The full article – http://blog.ninlabs.com/2013/01/programmer-interrupted/ – includes graphs, analysis techniques, suggested tools / features that help to fix the problems, etc. Good reading.
Also some good comments, for instance:
“I was surprised to discover whenI first started pair programming 13 years ago, how one person ia a pair can hold the context while the other person in the pair gets interrupted. We could get back to work in seconds.”
“I was also surprised by test-driven development, how it helps keep track of where you are. Here are some of the factors I’ve noticed:
* The test tell you how far you have gone.
* Your test list serves as a reminder of where you need to still get to.
* The focus on small steps meas at any instance there are fewer balls in the air.”
Building and Dismantling the Windows Advantage – a great article, telling the story in a mix of words and graphs.
“The consequences are dire for Microsoft. The wiping out of any platform advantage around Windows will render it vulnerable to direct competition. This is not something it had to worry about before. Windows will have to compete not only for users, but for developer talent, investment by enterprises and the implicit goodwill it has had for more than a decade.”
In the past, I’ve had terrible advice from brilliant people. The best way to avoid that is to be careful to research the brilliant person and tailor your questions to avoid their weaknesses.
Tomorrow I’ll be meeting a bunch of people at Google London’s open day. I started by writing down a list of known strengths/weaknesses based on my knowledge and experience of the company and the people. Earlier this year I had some in depth meetings with Facebook, which gave me a fresh perspective on the similarities and differences. I think the list itself is interesting – modulo: it’s only my personal impressions:
[comments in brackets to clarify some non-obvious points for anyone reading this]
http://gigaom.com/europe/makie-future-doll-toy-funding/
“We’re making toys using game data and 3D printing,” explains Alice Taylor, Makielab co-founder and CEO. “We call ourselves a smart toy company, and for us that means there’s a digital side to it by default.”
The company slogan is “the action doll you design”, and here’s the concept in a nutshell: you hit the Makie website and create your own avatar, choosing from a range of shapes, sizes, features and outfits — the kind of thing that’s recognizable from all kinds of MMOs, virtual worlds and kids’ games. But then comes the magic: press a button and you get your digital figure turned into the real thing, produced as a one-off in bone-white plastic using cutting edge manufacturing techniques.
Congrats!
“Disruption” used to be mentioned frequently as the thing that every company wanted to be (urged on by investors).
But what is it, really? I’ve met lots of people who believe it’s “a fancy word for ‘innovation'” – but if that’s all, it would be pretty pointless and vapid.
This post from 2011 gives a great explanation based on simple concrete ideas. It explains why disruption is interesting to companies and managers.
It’s a great explanation, although it’s mostly from the perspective of business owners / management. Why do investors – especially startup / VC investors – care about disruption?
The key here is Des’s paragraph about share price:
“Microsoft’s share price hasn’t moved. This is because they are precisely predictable. Their shareholders have gotten exactly what they paid for, and not a penny more.”
A share price that doesn’t move *still provides profit to shareholders* (in the form of annual dividend). In fact, it often provides rather a nice sum of money – just like the rental income from owning property).
…but: Angel/VC investors make the bulk of their profit from changes in the share-price, not from dividends. Two reasons:
If you run your startup perfectly …
If you do everything you said you would do …
If nothing goes wrong …
… your investors may class you a failure. And they’d be right to do so. They didn’t invest for the dividends, they invested for the “surprise me” factor.
(which should, perhaps, give you pause for thought: if they’re “right” to pan you for achieving your aims … are/were you “right” to take their investment?)
Please email me (adam at red-glasses.com) if you have skills / interest in the following:
NB: we have no funding yet, just an idea. This is a scatter-gun first approach – if things go well, there will be another call for people in 2-4 months time.
Someone just wrote this comment on one of my StackOverflow answers:
Fundamentally, this question/answer pair is saying:
“Apple: one of your non-programming managers made a stupid mistake in one of your core tools, one used every day by hundreds of thousands of people; since you won’t fix it, here’s a (tricky) workaround that anyone can use”
Apple “doesn’t do” anything open, doesn’t do community support, or community development – you’re not even allowed to know if you’re the first person to report a bug, or the millionth.
But if they did, just imagine how much better their tools would be, and how much more productive the iOS developer community would be…
Steve Yegge’s Google Platforms Rant is not so much a rant as a sign of someone fighting an inappropriate culture. We saw stuff like this a lot at NCsoft when people were trying to turn around the $100 million clusterf*ck that created hundreds of redundancies all the way to director level.
It’s a great article, but a couple of the key points resonated with my own experience of Google UK’s hiring practices a couple of years ago. There was clearly a lot wrong with the internal culture, but as an outsider I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Here’s the crux of Steve’s post (but seriously – read the whole thing, it’s rich and meaty):
That one last thing that Google doesn’t do well is Platforms. We don’t understand platforms. We don’t “get” platforms. Some of you do, but you are the minority. This has become painfully clear to me over the past six years. I was kind of hoping that competitive pressure from Microsoft and Amazon and more recently Facebook would make us wake up collectively and start doing universal services. Not in some sort of ad-hoc, half-assed way, but in more or less the same way Amazon did it: all at once, for real, no cheating, and treating it as our top priority from now on.
But no. No, it’s like our tenth or eleventh priority. Or fifteenth, I don’t know. It’s pretty low. There are a few teams who treat the idea very seriously, but most teams either don’t think about it all, ever, or only a small percentage of them think about it in a very small way.
It’s a big stretch even to get most teams to offer a stubby service to get programmatic access to their data and computations. Most of them think they’re building products. And a stubby service is a pretty pathetic service. Go back and look at that partial list of learnings from Amazon, and tell me which ones Stubby gives you out of the box. As far as I’m concerned, it’s none of them. Stubby’s great, but it’s like parts when you need a car.
…and finally, reading that, it clicked for me what I saw that was so wrong:
“It’s a big stretch even to get most teams to offer a stubby service to get programmatic access to their data and computations. Most of them think they’re building products.”
That pair of sentences, back to back, is the problem: people outside Google would put the word “except” in between. Googlers put the word “because” in between. Google’s cultural definition of Product has got lost and perverted somewhere along the way, and now looks and smells like the real thing but is – to the rest of the world – a fake. Except Google – internally – can’t see this.
Every Googler I talked to worshipped at the altar of Product-as-King; three quarters of them would then – even in the same sentence – admit that they hated Product, didn’t believe in it, and felt it was a waste of time — “get out of my face with your product BS, and let me write beautiful code in my Ivory Towers, and leave me alone”.
They were smart people; they never said this explicitly (although one came very close – and you could see the moment when he had the thought: “oh crap; if anyone else hears I said that…”, then backtracked very hastily) – instead they frequently said mutually conflicting things, and dressed them up in enough abstractions that you could pretend that they weren’t conflicting. They were very good at it – I could tell there was a crack, but I couldn’t work out where the fault-line lay.
As Steve puts it later on:
Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo). We all don’t get it. The Golden Rule of platforms is that you Eat Your Own Dogfood. The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought. We had no API at all at launch, and last I checked, we had one measly API call. One of the team members marched in and told me about it when they launched, and I asked: “So is it the Stalker API?” She got all glum and said “Yeah.” I mean, I was joking, but no… the only API call we offer is to get someone’s stream. So I guess the joke was on me.
Product. Platform. Since when have those been mutually exclusive? Not in this Millennium, I believe…
And even when Google gets over their hatred of Platform, even with something as simple as the pixels that their apps put on screen, they’ve jumped the shark:
You know how people are always saying Google is arrogant? I’m a Googler, so I get as irritated as you do when people say that. We’re not arrogant, by and large.
But when we take the stance that we know how to design the perfect product for everyone, and believe you me, I hear that a lot, then we’re being fools. You can attribute it to arrogance, or naivete, or whatever — it doesn’t matter in the end, because it’s foolishness. There IS no perfect product for everyone.
And so we wind up with a browser that doesn’t let you set the default font size. Talk about an affront to Accessibility. I mean, as I get older I’m actually going blind. For real. I’ve been nearsighted all my life, and once you hit 40 years old you stop being able to see things up close. So font selection becomes this life-or-death thing: it can lock you out of the product completely. But the Chrome team is flat-out arrogant here: they want to build a zero-configuration product, and they’re quite brazen about it, and Fuck You if you’re blind or deaf or whatever. Hit Ctrl-+ on every single page visit for the rest of your life.
It’s not just them. It’s everyone.
Any genuine Product person would run screaming from that situation – there’s nothing salvageable. It’s like someone coming to you with their design for a chocolate teapot: “Once you’ve had your tea, you can have a tasty chocolate treat too!”, leaving you wondering: where do I even start with trying to explain to this person what they’re missing?
Here’s a new term: The FAILtrepreneur
FAILtrepreneurdef: someone who tries to be an Entrepreneur, and takes advantage of lots of things intended to “help” them be a success, but somehow finds each “help” pushes them further and further into mediocrity and the failure of their business. Then they go work for a management consultancy; they have great stories to tell about their jolly jaunty time playing at being an Entrepreneur
Time and again, these people think they’re “helping”. They never stop to think about what their assumptions say about themselves – and how little they say about Entrepreneurs.
Typically, they believe that startup-founders-to-be need:
The last thing that Entrepreneurs need – the very last thing – is to be given handouts or to be patronized.
Being an Entrepreneur is *all about* starting from an inferior position and not just out-doing everyone else, but positively eclipsing them.
The idea that they need “a leg up” or “handouts” is laughable – all it does is re-enforce the qualities and expectations that the Entrepreneur needs to avoid.
Resource; specifically: whatever resource they cannot manufacture for themselves, out of thin air.
Ultimately, a great Entrepreneur is someone who sees opportunities, leaps on them, knocks them to the ground, and exploits the heck out of them.
If they can do that, normally they can magic-up whatever else they need. But there’s often a couple of needs that prove slightly too overwhelming:
Everything else is fluff:
(this would need a series of posts just to summarise the successes and failures to date – and I believe the professional investors of this world are doing a pretty good job already via the VC blogs, the Angel blogs, VentureHacks, etc)
Professional investors won’t touch a small failed business with a bargepole (usually).
Not because there’s no profit there – there manifestly IS profit there – but because the potential upside has been given a glass ceiling, and they’re not interested in “small but steady profit”.
Fair enough; but that leaves a gulf where someone else could step in. If the businesses that failed are big enough, then professional investors are happy to be involved – the money becomes enough to excite them. It’s when they’re small that there’s a black hole.
Tips to Help you Think About Sales at Your Startup
We covered much ground. The video link is here and quick time-coded show notes at the end of the post in case you want to jump ahead to just one section. But the ground we covered was awesome for anybody wanting to know more about sales.
1. When & Whom should you hire?
2. How much to compensate them?
3. How do you get access to customers?
4. What is your sales process?
5. Telesales versus field sales?
6. What tools do you use?
“Starting work without a contract is like a putting a condom on after finding out you got someone pregnant”
For this and other great pieces of advice on life as a services company, trying to get paid, watch this great talk from Mike Monteiro:
