Public Comments | F. Andy Seidl

Very well said, Clinton!

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 09:45:45 -0400

A blindsided neglect to one of these important areas will cause a business to fail

I wish I would have had that type of clarity 25 years ago. I'm sure it would have save me (and my businesses) some time in school of hard knocks. I spent many years building great technology and expecting that it would just fly off the shelves because everybody would understand how great it was. It didn't happen that way.

After a few years of frustration, I hired a business consultant--a retired BIG COMPANY employee--and the first thing he said was, "You need to write a real business plan." Much to my chagrin, my wife (who was the company president) and I spend several months studying what that was really all about, and with the help of our consultant and a bunch of folks from a local entrepreneurial group, we wrote a real business plan.

Within a span of one year after that, we successfully raised a little money, became way more visible in the industry, negotiated a significant OEM agreement with Unisys, and sold our company to a Fortune 500 software company.

Blindsided neglect of the business side of our technology business had clearly been holding us back.

Most of us are blindsided to whats behind a business

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 23:31:47 -0400

I finally understand.Just because Chrome was a failure(or at least to a lot of people it was) doesn't mean it didn't broaden Google's "reach". It seems to all come down to the principle, doing something is better then nothing, or
"you don't have to be great to start, you have to start to be great". Google doesn't come out with perfect services but their doing OK business wise. Every company has a strong point and with Google it's always been content and search, with Microsoft it's(or seems to be) the Operating System.

Microsoft is a good example of this. Their not about doing better than other companies or innovation, their about making money. Bill Gate's sold in quantity, not quality. He even admitted that Mac was a better OS.

It also depends on HOW you want to extend a business and what the goals are. For example, Linux focuses more on the people and letting the public decide what they want on their machine. Their focus is more on catering to the people.

This is inspiring. I want to run my own technology/software company. I understand that focusing on both business strategy and tech innovation is really important. A blindsided neglect to one of these important areas will cause a business to fail(because of poor quality products or lack of growth).

Tell me if I'm not catching on.

Great Post!

- Clinton

Techie buying technology vs. Techie selling technology

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:20:38 -0400

Great observation Martin!Martin, thanks for the very insightful comment. I've never thought of it quite that way... but I will remember that perspective from now on.

Keep on telling us, Andy!

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 18:22:32 -0400

Techies -- like everyone -- have values, and hierarchies of values.

Techies -- like almost everyone -- think their value hierarchy is more correct and more universal than it really is. And they have a really arrogant attitude when "the masses" don't agree.

I tell people that Quality is an N-dimensional space, where N is roughly the number of users. No given user is likely to share your exact value hierarchy, and so no given user will precisely agree how brilliant your favorite tech it.

But does that mean we're lost, and there's no way to measure value? Of course not. We can't predict it in the individual, but we can measure it in the aggregate, through the choices of large numbers of users. In other words, the market.

Some techies refuse to concede that. If the market disagrees with them, then the market is wrong. And if you're a techie buying tech, fine: buy the tech you know is superior. But if you're a techie selling tech... Well, telling people how stupid they are and how smart you are has never been a winning sales strategy.

Great Post!

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 19:45:00 -0400

I agree. The bad guys are always one step ahead so security should always be a concern. In my article, I detailed how to write your robots.txt, and I agree that this is should not really be used for security purposes.

How to write robots.txt:
http://sin8.com/tip-3-its-important-to-hide-parts-of-your-site-from-search-engines
Carl

A given blog can only be a member of a single Widgetbox Network blog ring.

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 16:30:31 -0400

The idea is to keep the the quality of the blog ring high.Patti, as you suggest, there would be folks that would join every blog ring just to increase chances of traffic. However, at least with the Widgetbox Network implementation, it is not possible for a given blog to be part of more than one blog ring (which is probably a good thing.)

Well....

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:40:00 -0400

I can certainly see someone signing up for every single web ring, just to get their blog out there. Unless the rings somehow screen for similarities (i.e. in the food ring, does your blog at least have recipes).

Kind of OT, but I'd love to see a regional webring. I love reading blogs from folks in A2...90% of what I read is from right here!

The real value of Twitter is an emergent "epiphenomenon"

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 21:22:56 -0400

There is very little value in any single neuron, but the collective value of all the neurons in a brain is enormous (even if we can't explain exactly how that happens.)

@TeacherPatti, my first impression of Twitter was exactly the same. And while I'm not sure exactly how or where a greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts value will emerge, I am pretty confident that it will emerge.

Twitter is really a general purpose, publish/subscribe, multicast messaging infrastructure. There is no doubt that such infrastructures can be valuable... almost a decade ago I worked with companies spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to license such platforms just to solve specific business problems.

Now, several software generations later, here's Twitter, a nearly ubiquitously available, free platform with a relatively complete (and also free) programming API. As Tim Berners Lee once said of the Internet itself, this technology is emergent; emergent phenomena are often unexpected, nontrivial results of relatively simple interactions of relatively simple components.

Something is bound to happen.

Twitter

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 19:23:18 -0400

I have a love/hate relationship with Twitter. On one hand, I don't think I'm important enough to report what I'm doing. OTOH, I love seeing what my friends are doing! Thanks for following me :)

Hegel, quoting Kant

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 13:29:43 -0400

But I'm not sure they were talking about disruptive technology.

I'm not a professional philosopher, but (with the help of Google and Wikipedia) I can play one on the web.

Hegel, Kant, and others, by "thesis, antithesis, synthesis", where talking more about finding harmony between opposing points of view. Disruptive technology is something altogether different. It describes a very specific technology life-cycle pattern in which one technology replaces another.

Neitzche? Hegel?

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 12:55:03 -0400

I do not remember who said it:
Thesis/Antithesis/Synthesis.

There is always disruption.

Chrome on the Mac

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 12:09:31 -0400

I was surprised that Google did not launch Chrome with a Mac version... at first.As I pondered the missing Mac version a little, it occurred to me that going Windows only may have been a good tactical move. For starters, it is inline with the "go ugly early" philosophy. But even more importantly, it creates an opportunity for a second buzz tsunami to roll through the media: Google Announces Availability of Google Chrome Beta for the Mac.

Yes

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 11:39:33 -0400

I agree, but it will take time

I agree with this, and you might add the buggy codebase of FF in there too.

It's instructive to remember that firefox started out as a paring down of bloated Mozilla code. Ultimately, Mozilla dropped navigator and made FF its default browser.

Dave Hyatt, one of the FF initiators, ultimately left and went to work on webkit, a totally new rendering project that started out as khtml.

Google has picked up on this last as the basis for its rendering engine and thrown in a completely new javascript engine. Further, it has rearchitected the whole browser platform for more robust performance.

Who will this work for? Well, I think anybody depending on a web service like Salesforce or 37Signals or Google. Early adopter technogeeks (like you) will also go for it. People in enterprise silos (zdnet's main audience) will not because they don't like disruption.

All in all, chrome adoption will take a while.

I'm surprised they did not debut with a mac option. Generally a younger crowd that adopts macs.

An iPhone makes great Twitter client

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 17:46:43 -0400

There are several pretty nice apps that make it easy to use Twitter on the iPhone.

Patti: Consider getting an iPhone so you can follow Twitter anytime, anywhere. I use the Twittelator app, but there are others too.

Me too!

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 16:27:55 -0400

I'm somebody, too, dammit!

Twitter is addicting, to say the least. Our district blocks it, so I find myself gritting my teeth through the day :)