Software Destinations

At the end of 2003, I had enough of trying to rely solely on a PalmPilot to take care of all of my computing needs while traveling. With a few exceptions, the Pilot did almost everything I wanted for light communications and note taking during meetings, but left me without recourse for creating sophisticated documents or showing product demos. My old ThinkPad was gathering dust. Proactive International was deeply involved in the prosumer 3D industry, and there was no way my old ThinkPad could manage a good 3D product demo. I needed a modern laptop, so I took at look at Dell. (more…)

Nat over at O’Reilly is having a hard time figuring out why there are so few european start ups in the open source world. There certainly is a huge amount of interest in implementation of open source systems among European Union members, so you would think there is a golden opportunity for start ups to provide services. Why arent there more start ups? (more…)

John J. Sviokla’s Fast Company article “In Praise of Ecosystems” states “The iPod is doomed. Not this month, not this year, and maybe not the next. But soon enough, Apple will lose its hold on the marketplace for both digital-audio players and digital songs. It’s inevitable” with a comparision to the failure of the Mac. However it seems to me that the iPod is the first business ecosystem that Apple has ever had. This brings me back to the Steve Jobs quote on the first edition of Geoffrey Moore’s Inside the Tornado: “The Chasm is where many high-tech fortunes have been lost…the Tornado is where many have been made.” — Steve Jobs. (more…)

Which came first, the feature list or the marketing plan? A lot of great software begins without a thought to marketing. That is, a software developer spends his wee hours creating a great utility without a thought beyond solving a simple problem in an elegant way. But its also the way bad habits start. (more…)