[via Jeff Bussgang]

Great post from Jeff: Why Being A VC-backed Founder Can (Sometimes) Suck

[…] The primary issue is that you’re always afraid your VC is going to fire you. It’s the unspoken thing that founders live in fear of. They work like hell to create something from nothing, take this great VC’s money, get invited to all their great parties, get told how much everyone loves them, but live in fear that after each board meeting, they’re going to get the call. “Hi Joe – it’s your VC. Listen, we need to get together for breakfast.” Uh oh.

Let’s put it right out on the table – VC board members are always evaluating the performance of the CEO. That’s the fundamental job of the board of directors: hire, fire and compensate the CEO. When you’re a “hired gun”, professional manager, you know the drill. You’re only as good as your last quarter, goes the old board room yarn. But founders are typically less glib about it all, because a founder can’t just bounce from one CEO gig to another – they’ve put their blood, sweat and tears into this start-up and it may be their only ticket to the big time. And they’re damned if they let some pencil-pushing VC who simply doesn’t “get it” ruin it for them.

On the VC side of the table, watching a founder run out of steam and lose their ability to manage and build the company is incredibly frustrating. Great company, great technology, great market position and a huge opportunity, but the founder just won’t let go and let the best people in the world come in and take the company forward. It’s like watching a train wreck – you know exactly how it will end and it’s impossible to stop. Founders love to cite Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Michael Dell as young, founding CEOs who run their companies from the garage through multi-billion dollars in revenue. Why can’t they do the same? If it were that easy, there would be far more than a mere handful of Fortune 1000 companies still run by their founders. A friend of mine used to talk about the three stages of a company’s life: the jungle, the dirt road and the highway. The right CEO and executive team in the jungle tends to be very different from who you need when you’re on the highway. Founders very rarely can be effective leaders during through all these complex transitions.[…]

[via Microsoft]

Again, quite impressive results of Microsoft for the Fiscal Year 2005 (closed end of June).

Income FY 2005

More than $12 bn net income. Wow. What an incredible margin. And $6.2 bn invested in R&D.;

Segment revenues FY 2005

Segmentation:

• server&business;

• business solutions (eg: Navision, CRM, Solomon)
• server&tools; (eg: Windows Server, SQLServer, developer tools)

• client (eg: WindowsXP, MediaCenter, TabletPC)
• information worker (eg: Office, Project, Visio, OneNote)

• mobile&embedded; devices (eg: Mobile SW, MapPoint)
• home&entertainment; (eg: Xbox, PC and online games)
• MSN (eg: MSN Search)

WinXP and Office generate, as usual, a *lot* of cash for MS, definitely their cash-cows. A great positive development concerning the Server and Tool segment. The other segments are still losing money, excepted MSN.

Revenues 1985 – 2005

Net income 1985 – 2005

Marketing launch of Microsoft Windows Vista, formerly known as “Longhorn”.

I have played a little bit with GoogleMaps. I am quite lucky (in a way) because the region where I am living is available in a full-zoom mode. Really great, completely useless, and consequently, a MUST :-)

Where I am living ;-)

Where we lived 5 years ago

Ecomusee d’Alsace

Where my wife has her doctor’s office

Where I went to school when I was 8

Where I passed my Master of Science

Again, a new version of Firefox, the 1.0.6.

What’s new in 1.0.6?

Firefox 1.0.6 is a stability update. We recommend that users upgrade to this latest version.

Here’s what’s new in Firefox 1.0.6:
Restore API compatibility for extensions and web applications that did not work in Firefox 1.0.5.

[via BetaNews]

A source close to Hewelett-Packard indicated over the weekend that the company plans to cut at least 15,000 jobs from its workforce, with the biggest cuts coming to the IT, sales and service divisions. The news comes as HP said in a filing that it planned to offer new CIO Randall Mott a $15.3 million pay package.

Sources said that the job cuts would save the company an estimated $1 billion per year and were being done to improve cost efficiency compared with HP’s competitors. The official word on the layoffs could come as early as this week; company representatives said they would not comment on the speculation.

As the biggest user of Open Source Software within the Group, we had to prepare a presentation for our Executives about the Open Source trends (definitions, legal aspects, trends, scope, where are we already using OSS, potentials, etc.). During our online research, we found an interesting and extensive (120 pages as a PDF document!) presentation about this subject from David A. Wheeler. A great aggregation of information!

Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS, FLOSS, or FOSS)? Look at the Numbers!

Goal of the paper

The goal of this paper is to convince you to consider using OSS/FS when you’re looking for software, using quantitive measures. Some sites provide a few anecdotes on why you should use OSS/FS, but for many that’s not enough information to justify using OSS/FS. Instead, this paper emphasizes quantitative measures (such as experiments and market studies) to justify why using OSS/FS products is in many circumstances a reasonable or even superior approach. I should note that while I find much to like about OSS/FS, I’m not a rabid advocate; I use both proprietary and OSS/FS products myself. Vendors of proprietary products often work hard to find numbers to support their claims; this page provides a useful antidote of hard figures to aid in comparing proprietary products to OSS/FS.

Organisation of the paper

Below is data discussing market share, reliability, performance, scalability, security, and total cost of ownership. I close with a brief discussion of non-quantitative issues, unnecessary fears, OSS/FS on the desktop, usage reports, other sites providing related information, and conclusions. A closing appendix gives more background information about OSS/FS. Each section has many subsections or points. The non-quantitative issues section includes discussions about freedom from control by another (especially a single source), protection from licensing litigation, flexibility, social / moral / ethical issues, and innovation. The unnecessary fears section discusses issues such as support, legal rights, copyright infringement, abandonment, license unenforceability, GPL “infection”, economic non-viability, starving programmers (i.e., the rising commercialization of OSS/FS), compatibility with capitalism, elimination of competition, elimination of “intellectual property”, unavailability of software, importance of source code access, an anti-Microsoft campaign, and what’s the catch. And the appendix discusses definitions of OSS/FS, motivations of developers and developing companies, history, licenses, OSS/FS project management approaches, and forking.

An example of the shot you can realize with a Canon EOS 20D (with the Canon lens EF 17-40 mm). Really a cool digital SLR.

[click for the original, 3’504×2’336, 1.4 MB]

[via vowe]

Flags are – sometimes – better than 1’000 words. Excellent summary. In which word are we living??

Update: these flags are coming from a Brazilian artist – Icaro Doria.

I have aggregated and published all my posts about our travel to St.Barths (French West Indies) in February 2005.

Have a look at my website!