“If you give someone a program, you will frustrate them for a day; if you teach them how to program, you will frustrate them for a lifetime.”
Simple is better than complex.
Cheap is better than expensive.
Explicit is better than opaque.
Purpose is more important than process.
Insight is more important than precision.
Understanding is more important than technique.
Think more, work less.
I have a bone to pick with Apple’s App store. Why do all the app developers need to pay a 30% fee to the device and OS developer? PC software makers never had to send 30% of their price to Microsoft or Dell? How did Apple get that kind of walled garden? As an outgrowth of the iTunes model, they’ve become the ditributor … but there is another lower-cost distributor out there: It’s called the internet.
Windows 8: The Wounded Bear From Redmond Awakens makes the case for Windows8 embracing the webapp model:
Windows 8 also allows browser-based apps to set up icons (tiles in Windows 8 parlance) on the Metro interface. Consider these tiles a shortcut to your favorite app/Web destination, displayed inside a fully-functional browser. The other model for Web apps consist of single-function apps that reside solely on the Metro interface. When opened, they display like a desktop app, without any browser infrastructure.
There is one thing webapps do. They turn downloaded software into a service. The WebApp SaaS model disintermediates ALL distributors, whether it be BestBuy, Amazon … or Apple. Moreover, WebApps make the OS once again largely irrelevent – users wont care between iOS, windows8 or Android, so long as they can run their tools.
What does this mean? WebApps will disrupt Apple’s App dominance. We will have a rich set of choices as consumers in a RichWebApp world.
Cloud is getting cheap and boring: It’s about time says Nodeable blog, citing new Windows Azure price points: “Windows Azure Extra Small Compute has been reduced by 50% ($.04 to .$02)” This compares with Amazon small ECU spot price of 2.7 cents.
… but we are not there yet.
Greg Arnette review AWS price history and finds:
Per-unit hourly rates for each ECU type have gone down over the previous 5 years (by 15% per unit cost). But in addition to this, there are two other significant factors that have lowered costs even more than the 15% unit cost reduction. These are SPOT pricing and Reserved Instances. For cloud orientated architectures that can take advantage of SPOT and Reserved, costs can be decreased by more than 60%.
This is a smaller reduction than might be expected, given Moore’s Law. And here’s a further problem – Is EC2 spot instance a real spot market?. Maybe not (see also “Debunking Real-Time Pricing in Cloud Computing”. Large instances So, the cloud is getting cheaper, but it really needs to get on a faster Moore’s law price descent to become the ‘boring’ utility that fulfils the promise of cloud computing.
I haven’t yet read Reid Hoffman’s The Start-Up of You, but I already agree with his premise. He sees similarities between careers and startups in terms of what it takes to succeed, and advises: Treat yourself as a ‘permanent beta’; invest in yourself and always improve; grow your economic capability and create value from your assets; take intelligent risks; leverage your network, etc.
The acceleration of the internet and our information age means that mind-work is shifting at an ever-faster pace, requiring ever more nimble workers who must adapt or suffer the consequences of obsolescence. Thinking like a stratup appears to be good advice to deal with this “Career Future Shock”.
The “moneyball” meme is getting a lot of mileage, as well it should in the age of Big Data. StartupStats is Using AngelList Data and Twitter Noise To See Which Startups Are Worth Talking About, using detailed data. What used to be “experience” and “instinct” is starting to get replaced by “lots and lots of detailed data”.
Another example of Moneyball-type big-data analytics for sports – Bike Racing. This blog is from a company that is using big data to improve B2B sales performance.
Candidates in Orbit by PJ O’Rourke laments the lack of vision when it comes to space policy from either side of the aisle. After an engineer states that Obama will “kill the manned space program”, he asks:
Then the engineer asked me a question.. “What message will it send in 2023 or so when China can put a man on the moon and we can’t put one in low Earth orbit?”
NASA is withering because it doesn’t have the funding to do anoher Apollo program and doesn’t have the vision to do something remarkable that it can afford. But something is amiss: Technology has advanced so much in so many areas that many hugely expensive things are now dirt cheap. Can we leverage that?
One good idea mentioned: Turing NASA more into an R&D rather than an operations agency. There is a better way than trying to put men in space the same way it was done in the 1960s, and perhaps NASA R&D can find it. We can revamp the concept of space exploration with a large focus on unmanned robotic exploration, just as we control UAVs today, remotely. It’s time to think about a permanent Moon base staffed by … robots.
Educational reform as we know it will die says Steve Peha. He makes the case that the reforms of the past few decades – testing, curriculum standards, etc. – have not make a difference, and that technology products themselves haven’t worked. Rather, he suggests Agile processes and concepts (scrum, XP, Kanban, Lean) could be used to run schools more effectively.
Learning is iterative, learning about learning is iterative. And yet, we attempt waterfall-model-type reforms that are hugely expensive and take years before we find out, they didnt really make a difference. The better way, of making incremental improvements, measuring and iterating, via agile methods, makes a lot of sense. Since Government-driven processes are inherently over-controlled and, due to risk-aversion and politics, rarely adaptive, one wonders if this approach would bog down as much as other reforms. Merit pay was to incentivize innovation; charter schools was to break the bonds that prevented innovation; testing was to measure performance (a key element in agile is measurement and iteration). So rather than think of prior reforms as dead ends, perhaps we should consider them as incomplete and missing the key ingredient – an operational model for improvement. Agile processes provide that.
Why you need your own company by Derek Sivers explains:
Then I realized why I need to start a new company. Not for the money. Not because I’m “bored”. But because a company is a laboratory to try your ideas. (The word “laboratory” is defined as a room for research, experimentation or analysis. I think of it as a sandbox or playpen.)
In the end, Derek knew what he needed to do, not for money or fame but for himself, was to create a vessel to pursue his ideas:
And this made me happier than doing nothing. This isn’t work, it’s play. It’s my place to try my ideas.
It hit me: This is why I created my own company recently. As an aspiring entrepreneur, I’ve had several projects, ideas, (and now in the post-business plan era) Lean Canvases, and implementations, needing other pieces to ‘launch’. I was hit with a challenge: At what point does hobby become project become launchable idea become a startup seedling? How do I think and work on these? I created a company as a vessel to capture and pursue ideas, to nurture them to the point of launch.
In doing so I realized it wasn’t just my ideas alone I could help, but those of others as well. I’ve had the privilege of learning about a lot of other great things going on in startups in Austin and elsewhere, including watching literally dozens of startup pitches this month at SXSW interactive, RISE Austin this week, in my Venture Forth class at TechRanch, etc. I saw both the promise and the needs of startups and entrepreneurs, the common theme being the need to discover and validate what the ideas mean for customers.
So Freestar Tech is in the business of supporting early-stage startups turns ideas into successful companies. I’m bring my experience and skills in software, technology Lean Startup, business development, etc. to bear on making it happen. Who’s ideas? My own … and maybe yours. That’s why I created Freestar Technologies.
“It’s [SXSW interactive] become the world capital of the web. Temporary capital but real …” – Bruce Sterling
