Schrade.Blog

You can tell it's getting close to the end of year, as the tech ideas that normally seem to come fast and furious seem to have tapered off a bit, and my day is a little more boring because of it. This week so far we've got "High Speed" Cingular cell phone access, NBC shows on iTunes, and Rhapsody for the Mac. Not exactly groundbreaking stuff.

Ah well, I suppose we've got January to look forward to, although hopefully someone will surprise me before then.

Alarm:Clock has an article on a new tech company that has Yet Another Biometric ID Mechanism (YABIDM), but the interesting part of the post to me was:

We once worked in an office where lessons were made of employees who left their computers unlocked while having lunch. Fellow employees would send embarrassing company-wide emails with the offender's signature.

You mean that there are companies where this doesn't happen? At Thoughtworks we call this hotdogging (named after the wonderful "Hot Dog Stand" theme in Windows 3.1 that people would often find their machine set to if left alone and unlocked) and all sorts of creative techniques have been devised to mess with someone's head. The sending of company wide e-mails has been banned for a few years now, but here are some other great ideas:

• Adjust the mouse sensitivity and orientation. Nothing like moving the mouse up a bit and having the cursor fling diagonally downwards.
• Change their homepage to something totally inappropriate. Use your imagination here.
• Change the MS Word autocorrect so that the word "and" autocorrects to the word "shit" or something along those lines. This is always a good one, because they're not likely to discover it for awhile and it's really confusing when they do.
• Take a screenshot of their screen, make it their background, lock the machine, and then drag the unlock box off of the side. When they come back everything looks just like they left it, but nothing can be clicked on.

and the ultimate pain:

• Retheme their machine so that everything (mouse pointer, dialog boxes, text, background, etc) are all the same color. Not only can you not differentiate anything to get anything done, you can't even figure out how to pull up the dialog box to change things back.

If you've got anymore let me know in the comments.

Hopefully I never end up working for a company where people are irritated enough with the way management is doing things to inspire something like the Mini Microsoft blog. When your own employees aren't just telling people to not come work for your company, they're broadcasting it loudly on the Internet, then it's probably time for some big systemic changes.

Meanwhile, Google is now:

a "retirement cruise for Artificial Intelligence legends of the 80s and 90s."

Doesn't sound like a very exciting place either, and from what I hear from friends there who are just kicking back and waiting for their options to vest, it's probably a pretty apt description.

Mark Cuban has posted a bunch of links to blog entries of his about how he succeeded in business and they're all good reads.

The best link by far though is The Sport of Business. It hits it spot on about the games that have to be played to win at business.

The sport of business is the ultimate competition. It's 7x24x365xforever.

I'm realizing that I'm reaching the point in my life where the thing that gets me going more than anything else is those games. It's far more fun to be in the mix of things then to be an onlooker. Winning at this competition promises to be more rewarding than anything else I've ever done. Once you make that realization and decide to turn that corner I don't think that there's any going back.

Evan Williams posts his list of rules for web startups here. These rules aren't just for startups though, they should be taken as general guidelines for building any sort of software.

Almost every software project, from a small feature addition to an existing product, to an entirely new idea, should be run with these same basic ideas. I can't understand people who still want to drop a big bang on the world with their projects. Rule #9, unless you're building pacemaker software, should be applied to all attempts at software creation. I've yet to come across a software project where anyone involved really know what they want at the start.

So don't spend time trying to cram everything in the world in to your software, just get it out the door, get some users on it, watch how they use it, and start refining. No one knows for sure how users will use their software until we actually put it in front of them. The rest of the rules will make sure that it gets where it needs to go from there.

As I've been looking at how to write a business plan lately, I've been reading everything I can about the matter and the only consensus I can find is that there is no consensus. Today we've got another post about the matter from David Cowan over at Bessemer that, while helpful, is completely different from what I've heard and read from other people.

Going through this exercise, I've realized that, for me at least, the best thing to do is write a short business plan, pull a couple of pitch decks (long and short) out of it and then get back to work on the technology. I just get the feeling that it's better to blow away a VC (or a VC's friend, or family member, etc) with a nice tech demo and then back it up with whatever form of the business plan they ask for, than to just drop a 20 page document or Powerpoint deck onto their desk. I would much rather have someone put their time and money into me and my idea who's seen at least a rough draft of my vision. Am I way off base here or does this make sense?