The vibe most people I know picked out from the recent Wired article on 37signals is that of arrogance. Personally I love their approach of not making too much revenue from any one client. It protects you from having to pander to a few rich clients which inevitably happens, especially when you enter the so-called ‘enterprise’ space.

What I think is insane, and what came across in that article, is to be a dick about it. Sure, you have a core set of clients and you take a strong stance in building your products for them. Clients on the fringe who demand features that don’t serve those core clients lose out. Having low license fees allows you to survive when they walk away.

Maybe it’s just spin but instead of saying “we don’t do that, you’re only paying us $150 a month, tough luck, we aren’t adding those features you need”, could you not speak to migration? No we aren’t planning to add those features as they don’t serve our core clients, it sounds like you’re ready to move onto another product such as product x, y or z. You then provide a migration path or tools to make it smooth for those clients to migrate off your product onto the one they choose.

If you did that, and clearly showed me this isn’t about lock-in, then I’d feel comfortable using your products. I won’t, however, put my data into a product who’s owners proudly claim that they ignore their clients.

I love working in an open source programming language. That’s a serious perq python has. You just see cooler stuff in open source software, it has more character. It’s the kind of software you’d talk to at a party.

It also sucks, crashes, includes applications with hideous design and usability but so what? So does every other piece of software. With a language, it’s direction is governed by volunteer nerds who use it everyday. That results in an experience far different that what’s produced in a corporate piece of software.

I have no idea how FOSS will fair long term and it’s certainly not for everyone but when it comes to programming languages it seems to make some sense. What other industry designs and builds their own tools? I’m not talking about having a say, like a mechanic informing wrench design, I mean software developers developing software they use to develop software. Wow, too much dr seuss with the kids.

Car designers design cars to design cars?…no
Home builders build homes to build homes?…no
Robot builders build robots to build robots?…hmmm…maybe..

Mark Roseman turned me onto a great article titled “Getting to We“. Mark also does a great job of summarizing it in his post.

“Roberts notes that the students eventually got to collaboration, but not before they had exhausted the alternatives of authoritarianism and competition.”

They go on to talk about the idea that “people fail into collaboration“. As a result, it’s only the “wicked problems” that ever reach the collaboration stage. I love that quote, “fail into collaboration”. It’s just so true of human nature. We always start on our own and fail our way through several stages on our way to collaboration.

The concept of ‘wicked problems’ reminded me a lot of a great book Mark recommended to me a few years back titled ‘Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities‘.

“Scaling up the known collaboration processes to country or world sizes will require significant advances in collaboration tools and networking”. While we’re starting with company not world sizes, this is part of our mission at brainpark. All of it hopefully leading to the “hallmark of successful collaboration is the experience of solidarity and new energy: a ‘we’”.

The article also gets me thinking about the entire *Camp movement. Whether we’re freelancers, early startups, or people working in traditional companies, if we want to move up and start tackling the wicked problems then we have to move beyond information sharing, coordination, and cooperation and on to true collaboration.

DemoCampGuelph6 is booked for Wednesday July 9th. Please talk the event up and sign up to attend here. As always, we need interesting demo’s, if you know anyone interested please have them contact me here asap.

With this being #6 I’m seriously concerned about my health. I hope NOT to follow in David’s footsteps. Health-wise that is, fashion wise I’m always scampering along after David.

Wow, I can’t say I disagree with much here but for a former employee Joel really goes after MS. Who cares if you agree, the writing is enough to make it worth the read. He takes a bit of a glancing pass at google as well. Make sure you stick around for the last paragraph. I will add that I agree for the most part, however, the problem they’re solving’s already been solved, the astronauts just want to compete for the over complicated version of the solution.

When I read David’s post on livemesh, I really did try to stay interested but it quickly sounded like, well exactly what Joel’s describing, something built by architecture astronauts that I would never contemplate using.

Bottom line, I know nothing about livemesh beyond what David’s written about but in any case ‘controversial Joel’ is good reading.

“Windows Live Mesh is not just a way to synchronize files. That’s just the sample app. It’s a whole goddamned architecture, with an API and developer tools and in insane diagram showing all the nifty layers of acronyms, and it seems like the chief astronauts at Microsoft literally expect this to be their gigantic platform in the sky which will take over when Windows becomes irrelevant on the desktop.”

“It’s Groove, rewritten from scratch, one more time. Ray Ozzie just can’t stop rewriting this damn app, again and again and again, and taking 5-7 years each time.

And the fact that customers never asked for this feature and none of the earlier versions really took off as huge platforms doesn’t stop him.”

“It sort of bothers me, intellectually, that there are these people running around acting like they’re building the next great thing who keep serving us the same exact TV dinner that I didn’t want on Sunday night, and I didn’t want it when you tried to serve it again Monday night, and you crunched it up and mixed in some cheese and I didn’t eat that Tuesday night, and here it is Wednesday and you’ve rebuilt the whole goddamn TV dinner industry from the ground up and you’re giving me 1955 salisbury steak that I just DON’T WANT.”

Well look who’s competing on price now. First there’s rumours of actually making coffee again, now reasonable prices?

While it’s fun to poke fun at the giant I have to say, this can’t be a good sign. I don’t know much about business but I do know that the buck’s have done a great job of making a cup of coffee a non-commodity. People rarely thought of the cost when they hit up a starbucks, it was about the beans, the cushy chairs, the whole experience man… It seems a business such as starbucks would be difficult to keep up if they compete as a commodity.

Chris, Ali, Jevon and Jonas launched StartupIndex this evening. I believe the launch was meant to coincide with StartupCampToronto2. Have a look around when you have time and check out what’s going on with Canadian startups.

A new ubuntu release, hardy heron, is out, lifehacker review.

I know I’ve said this before but synaptic, and apt-get, is the coolest piece of software I’ve come across in years. Finding, installing and maintaining software is a magnitude simpler on ubuntu than any other os. An example is this recent release. I’m about to download, install etc with one click of a button while on a wireless network. A dream.

I like this quote from Jeff Bezos, found link from Mark:

“Communication is terrible.
When Jeff Bezos’s people said they needed to communicate more within the company, he shocked them by shooting back: ‘No, communication is terrible.’ To promote his decentralized vision of the company, he created ‘two-pizza teams’: highly autonomous task forces with five to seven people — no more than can be fed with two pizzas — who innovate and test new features.”

The key for me is the “highly autonomous” part and I’ve seen that overlooked a lot when this approach is tried. Almost every company I’ve worked for has tried some form of 2 pizza teams, however, none have stuck with allowing them to be truly been autonomous. I’d hazard to guess that a highly autonomous 6 pizza team is still better than lipservice autonomous 2 pizza teams.

You should really check this out. I’d suggest headphones or loud speakers. From Mark.