2015 May 5

The Hidden Dangers of Interim Solutions

One of the hardest challenges in business is knowing when to use an interim solution and when to start over from scratch. From a pure financial perspective, interim solutions almost always win out. I see this regularly in the software industry. The progress looks something like this: You (i.e. your company) write a piece of software. It is successful and useful and sells and grows. Over time, you add more and more features and capabilities, leading to a more useful but more complex product.

2015 Apr 27

For the Love of Brilliant Advertising

Great technology companies have been built on advertising: Google, Facebook, Yahoo (in the old days), not to mention many a magazine, newspaper and television network. I have always loved the operational side of ad networks. They require building and managing a systems whose data throughput and reliability requirements rival a financial pricing and trading system. I have managed several of those, and the parallels are quite strong. What truly interests me in advertising, though, is the brilliance of great creativity.

2015 Apr 22

When to Outsource

Knowing how to outsource a process is challenging enough, and requires serious operational management and help, but does not involve making strategic decisions. Conversely, knowing when to outsource is far more challenging, as it involves making decisions with imperfect information about the future. Caveat: Use this as a starting point, a framework, but do not use it as your sole decision-making process. Get serious help; we are here. The Why There are only two reasons why you should outsource something.

2015 Apr 17

Pay Yourself First

One of the most important rules of successful longtime business owners, right after "Cash is King", is "Pay Yourself First." After all, you do not know what the business will be like in a year or two or ten, so don't shortchange yourself. Of course, you need to invest in your business's growth as well, but don't live in poverty because every penny of profit is plowed back into the business.

2015 Apr 16

Reports of the Death of the Keyboard Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

For almost all of computing history, we have interacted with computing devices via keyboard for input and printer, then screen, for output. Computers are logical devices, and require clean, defined logical statements to interact. Thus, we use precise text. Human interactions, on the other hand, are less precise but much richer. We interact via touch, sound and sight - both the precise written word and visual pictures. For most of human history, the overwhelming majority of people, upwards of 99%, were illiterate.

2015 Apr 15

How to Outsource

Over the last week, I have had several discussions about the challenges to successful outsourcing. One person was dealing with manufacturing products in China; another was managing outsourced server maintenance and operations; yet a third had a financial technology management service provider. In all the cases, the question was the same: how do you know when it is good to outsource, and how do you make it succeed? Successfully outsourcing anything is far beyond the scope of a single article.

2015 Apr 14

Mission Soundbite

Normally, I dislike the phrase "soundbite". It implies a shallow, bite-sized saying that misses all of the depth, nuance and complexity that exists in the real world. Nonetheless, soundbites are successful precisely because they can convey - for better or for worse - a key idea in a short, memorable and often inspiring phrase. Earlier this week, Josh Bernoff, in his bluntly named blog, gave the "Parable of Ray's Helicopter Company"

2015 Apr 13

Nimbleness of Scale

In business, there are two benefits that accumulate to large or diversified companies: Economies of Scale Economies of Scope Economies of Scale are the benefits of from doing more of the same. If you make 10MM laptops a year, your cost per computer will be cheaper than if you make 100,000 laptops per year. These benefits come from a number of sources: Purchasing Power: Since you are buying components for 100x as many LCD screens, you can negotiate better prices.

2015 Apr 9

TrueCrypt: True Security, True Licensing

TrueCrypt was a great open-source encryption program. It created files that, when opened by the program, looked to your computer like an additional drive. Any files placed in that drive would be encrypted and protected from prying eyes. Why would you do it? To keep files protected on your computer. To send files securely from one person to another. To protect files that you might store in the cloud, for example, on Dropbox.

2015 Apr 6

Developers or Engineers?

Which do you hire, developers or engineers? Nowadays, the most popular programming language is JavaScript, or, by its correct name, ECMAScript. Since "Eck-Ma-Script" is not a great marketing name except, perhaps, for a language for Ghostbusters EctoPlasm, it is not surprising that everyone still calls it JavaScript or just "JS". Whether this is a good thing or not, and whether JavaScript is the worst or best language invented, is not a topic I am too interested in.