Oh Dear, the Green Pundits Don’t Understand the Cloud or Multitenancy
Recently I was drawn into a discussion of how Green the Cloud is where I responded as follows: SaaS is going to come out ahead of any reasonably calculation of carbon emissions versus on-prem. Multi-tenancy is just a lot more efficient. Look at the data centers of companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Most corporates wish they […]
What Can a Poor Dumb Engineer Do That Most Marketers Can’t?
This is a tale of bootstrapping and bucking the conventional wisdom. This is a tale of applying an Engineer’s overly top down facts sifted through logic lens to what is traditionally a touchy feely shoot from the gut discipline. This is the story of how my little one man bootstrapped SaaS company competes with giants […]
Yes, In It’s Pursuit of Being a High-Margin Luxury Brand, Apple Must Eventually Be Less Functional
Even Seth Godin flushes out the Apple Fan Boys sometimes. David Terrar has an, “I disagree with Seth Godin,” post going. Seth’s premise, as set forth in, “Decoding Apple as a luxury tools company,” is that eventually, as a company builds a luxury brand, they must choose between luxury and utility or be trumped by […]
Secrets of When and How to Talk to Customers at a Startup
Jason Lemkin says forget building wireframe UI’s and start out interviewing 20 customers, because you just won’t understand your customers until you do. Here’s the gist of why you need 20 interviews before you do anything else: And you have to do 20. I know it’s hard to get to 20. But it’s the right […]
Microsoft’s 4 Real Problems that Gates, Nadella, and Ballmer Can’t Fix
I just finished the Vanity Fair piece on Gates, Ballmer, Nadella, and whether Microsoft can be rebooted to its former glory. It’s a good article, but it’s all about the past mistakes and there’s little about the future there. Mostly, it is the account of how two best friends (Gates and Ballmer) broke up over […]
How I Helped Start the Agile/Scrum Movement 20 Years Ago
I’m a day late, it was 20 years ago yesterday that Dr Dobbs published James Coplien’s article on how my Quattro Pro team was building software at Borland. Jim sent me a very nice note of reminder on it: 20 years ago today, the famous Dr. Dobb’s article on Borland QPW was published: foreshadowing agile and […]
23 Great Websites for Entrepreneurs: Plus Some Radical Advice from an Entrepreneur-Bootstrapper
I recently came across two giant lists of websites for entrepreneurs, courtesy of Jason Lemkin (whose blog is listed in both): Inc.com 50 Forbes 100 Now for some radical advice: the vast majority of the sites listed in those publications won’t help the vast majority of entrepreneurs at all. In fact, many of them will […]
Most Marketing Advice Tells Us How to Market to Marketers
Think about it–the experts out there writing marketing advice as part of their content marketing strategies are all selling something. They’re either selling software, consulting, or some other product. And the audience they’re selling to are marketers. Sure, many of them have practices or history that involved marketing to non-marketers, but right now what they’re […]
Best Way to Succeed as a Solopreneur: Go For Fewer Customers
I’m reading with interest some posts that are hot on Techmeme at the moment from Jared Sinclair and Marco Arment about succeeding with iOS apps and as a Solopreneur. Jared’s blog post is a cautionary tale for those who would like to bootstrap a small venture well enough to quit their day jobs. Many weigh in […]
Microsoft: World’s Worst Customer Service? (Walmart, Amazon, GE, BestBuy, MacMall, and Paypal Not Far Behind)
I recently tried and failed for the fifth time to buy a Microsoft Surface Pro 3. It’s been a real comedy of errors, but the latest attempt has been by far the most spectacular failure. Let me start out by saying I really like the Microsoft Surface Pro 3. I am a perfect candidate for […]
