2015 Apr 3

Once Again, Great Product Management Wins

I often notice the incredible value of great product management. Unfortunately, it is something many experienced people do not get, simply because it is the one area of a business, and especially a startup, that cuts across the company. Every other group has a clear line of responsibility: Engineering builds the product. Marketing defines who will buy it and drives awareness. Sales sells it. Customer support supports it. Finance manages the cash, P&L and balance sheet.

2015 Apr 2

Planning People and Laughing Markets

Sometimes, you build marketing collateral for a market that is completely unexpected. And while on the way, it teaches you, once again, why Steve Blank, Eric Ries and Co. are right: everything you rationalize and think about is only an opinion about the way the market will react to it; facts exist only in the real world. I have a friend who is a very experienced technology consultant, Reuven Lerner.

2015 Mar 30

Should Your Mobile App Shutter Your Web Site?

Last week, Flipkart, India's largest e-commerce firm, and its fashion subsidiary Myntra, announced that they shuttered their mobile Web sites. According to the article, which has a good analysis on zdnet, their desktop Web site is still active, but they are considering shutting that down as well. Indeed, if you go to flipkart.com or myntra.com from a desktop browser, the site works just fine. Change your User-Agent to iOS or Android, and you get a link to their platform-specific mobile app.

2015 Mar 26

Should Apple and Microsoft Buy an Online Backup Company?

Yesterday, I read an article which claimed that 30% of people have never backed up, while the overwhelming majority are way behind on backups. In the early 1990s, about a year into my very first job out of college at a large global financial, I ran the server backups. Yes, in retrospect, I wonder what they were thinking giving that level of responsibility to the inexperienced kid I was. Either way, it was a great learning experience.

2015 Mar 25

Engineer Your Core, But Only Your Core

When do you buy? When do you build? This question of "buy vs. build" is at the heart of many a debate in companies, not only inside engineering teams, but between engineering, product management and executives. Fact #1: Engineering is Hard Engineering is very hard. Despite the enormous advances over the years, and the number of system tools and development frameworks and languages, every one of which is touted as a "

2015 Mar 20

Software Engineering and Human Nature

This morning, Adrian Colyer posted his morning paper on a "functional programming." Most readers of this blog are not deep into different programming paradigms, so I will give a very short layman's overview here. For those who are comfortable, jump ahead a few paragraphs. (For the real experts, please do not nitpick on the details; the point is only to give an overview, not to debate the fine points.)

2015 Mar 19

The Power of Visualization

Once in a while, we come across a perfect example of how everyday technology can improve our understanding. It is not radical new technology, like nanoparticles fighting cancer, but great usage of tools that are widely available. Understanding Math I earned my Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering many years ago. While I did well at my alma mater, like most people, I struggled with visualizing complex mathematical principles. Sine waves are easy to draw and see, but start doing more complex forms, then head into Fourier Transforms, and even the smartest get lost.

2015 Mar 17

Experience Matters... Especially In a Startup

There is a belief in startup-land that you have to be younger than ___ to successfully innovate. To some extent, that is driven by the youth of the founders of a few highly successful companies like Facebook and Twitter, magnified by the adoring media coverage they get. And yet, even when I was back in my 20s and 30s, there was a nagging presence in my head that said, "

2015 Mar 16

Yahoo's On-Demand (In)Security

Passwords are insecure and annoying. I get that, I have written about it, and I experience it. So lots of companies and organizations are working on replacing passwords with something that is both more secure and more convenient. For example, Twitter's Digits service. Other approaches, like 1Password's password manager, make passwords easier to manage and auto-generate, so they simultaneously can be more secure and more convenient. Then there are "

2015 Mar 13

HP Printing Is An Ink Company, Not a Printer Company

Late last night, Hunter Walk, of HomeBrew Seed Stage VC, tweeted out the following: This shouldn't be too surprising; people and businesses buy the machine once, but the K-Cup refills are bought over and over again. This is why Keurig has been so intent on keeping machine users buying their coffee, by any means necessary. A year ago, I wrote how I found a mention in their annual report about digital rights management (DRM) to force Keurig machines to accept only "