Business

Some thing to chew on.

Startup Hiring

In war the need for innovation can be very clear, for example a Knife can still do a very effective job. Once the gun came about, knifes become only useful in the niche cases.

Watch out that your tools do not go the way of the knife. Still being able to do the old job just fine confuses the issue, tell you see how much better the new tool can do its task.

When a customer calls your company with a difficult problem does your company have a way to solve it ?

Having a escalation support procedure in place is often needed for web sites which can be difficult to use. Forwarding the most difficult problems to more trained staff often points out problems with the site.

The problems have to be solved as well, other wise things can turn sour fast. For example
Mark Evans writes about a customer service problem with HP.
Mark Evans

How much is this costing HP for having a poor procedure ?

All of the developers I have hired have different skill sets and abilities to produce softwave. Some developers on specific tasks would take half the time of others. Some could handle clients directly well and some not.

Just as I avoid taking on projects which will fail, good developers will avoid working on projects which have poor infrastructure or choices of tools.

Paul Graham writes up on how choices of infrastructure and languages affect who you can recruit.

Great Hackers

Bill Burnham post on Walled Gardens brings up some issues which are taking place in the market. Currently users are moving away from Walled Gardens towards free alternatives or to publishing packages suited more for their needs.

The way things are going now is that ebay and similar sites will go threw some hurting times as the people who prefer free listings or cheaper ones. That does not mean ebay will simply die out as there will aways be a demand for paid services where there are free ones. Has
The Village Voice brought the end to New York Times

There is a free bus in Halifax, Nova Scotia called Fred, though it may cut into taxi cabs business it does not stop those who want or need a cab. Just like a free bus will not destroy the cab business a free listing site will not destory ebay. Ebay has all ready made its direction clear by cutting out the lower paying customers and will most likely improve services to suit the ones who stay.

Human nature does not change much over the course of time and what we are seeing on the Internet is the market re-balancing its self tell the pendulum swings the other way again.

Bill Burnham on rss and google

The Walled Garden “Hit List”

Currently many business being created on the Internet today are simple combinations of existing ideas.

1. Subtraction: Removal of components (Simpler content management system tuned for a specific niche.)
   


2. 
   Multiplication: Add modified copies of existing components (More hosting space)
   


3. 
   Division: Separate product into individual components (Google maps api allows for the creation of sites which only need parts of the whole)
   


4. 
   Unification: Extend the use of an existing component so that it provides additional value (Otherwise known as Mashups - Google maps and a crime database to display crimes on a map)
   


5. 
   Dependence: Change the relationship between the product and its environment (Load balanced web sites, backup and fail over systems)
   

This is known as “Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT)".
Paul Eisenberg has a post with some classic examples