As already mentionned there, Mathieu is one of the TeachHeadBrothers (French .NET technology portal and community), a Microsoft C# MVP, and as far as I know, he just turned 30 last week ;-) Mathieu is in Australia since February 2005 and has a great blog (in French) about his different trips around Australia. Very nice pictures, good stuff for the week-end ;-)
Mathieu has some holidays in New-Zealand and published some incredible pictures. Have a look!
[via Bernard Golden]
An absolute must-read. Lot of very interesting inputs, totally aligned with what we would like to do in ecenter solutions.
Ray Lane outlined the miserable state of the software industry: 5,000 private and public companies, of which the top 15 account for 85% of industry revenues; of that 15, three represent 75% of all profitability, and one (Microsoft) is responsible for 50% of total industry profitability.
Even worse is the fact that each year venture capital firms plow another $5 billion into software startups, further increasing the pile of zombie companies all desperately scrambling to get the attention of an increasingly inattentive end user population.
Underlying all of this activity is a blood lust for the single most thrilling aspect of the software industry: enormous margins. Margins higher than any other industry ever invented. Margins so high that successful software companies can spend – literally – billions of dollars on pointless initiatives with scant regard for normal returns on capital (can anyone say MSN?).
For software, that perfect meeting was the substitution of automated processing for increasingly expensive manual labor.
Less recognized is the software scarcity present in the user base. Here, in a mirror image of the vendor side, is a skill shortage. Not only in the easily-understood capabilities of programmers, system administrators, and capacity planners needed to install, configure, and manage the software, but in more fundamental capabilities like understanding what the most appropriate applications for a new technology are; high ROI scenarios for the technology; how to integrate the new technology into existing business processes. In other words, the scarcity on the user side isn’t just about specific technical skills; it’s much broader, implying a shortage of general knowledge about how the new technology can be used at all.
There’s only one problem with this scenario: we’re no longer in a time of software scarcity.
On the user side, software is now a regularized process. With over twenty years of experience in creating and implementing systems, users are very familiar with software and need much less hand-holding in terms of education and selection. Most companies (certainly those of a size to represent quota-busting deals) have large IT staffs skilled in architecture and design. So now, instead of seeking guidance from vendors, they are much more likely to be focused on the lowest price to meet their self-defined needs. In any case, they’re sick of the vendor-knows-best, sign-here, best-of-luck-with-the-implementation software business model.
It’s on the vendor side, however, that the biggest changes have happened. The capital costs for software development have dropped through the floor.
Which means the business proposition for software has to change. In a time of scarcity, customers are willing to pay nearly anything – up front – in the hope of solving their problem. In a time of glut, customers will pay nothing until it’s clear that the software will actually solve their problem.
In other words, customers will only part with money once the system is in production. Put another way, since they have so many choices, until they’ve actually got one in and running – and they’re dependent upon it reliably working — they don’t need to pay anything.
Which means the primary task for any open source company seeking to make money from software is to make it as easy as possible for customers to adopt their software. Reduce the barrier to adoption. Anything that doesn’t contribute to that is, at best, a distraction, and, at worst, counterproductive.
The rules have changed in the software business. The only way to make money is to solve real customer problems. And you don’t get paid until you accomplish that task.
So what’s an open source company to do? It’s clear that business only comes from people committed to using the product – and only from a minority of them (estimates of the percentage of customers using an open source product in production that actually make some sort of purchase range from one in 10,000 to one in 100). So focusing on those users who download the product and go on to put it into production is vital.
First, make the product as easy to install and configure as humanly possible. Because we live in a time of software glut, if a user can’t get the product up and running quickly, they’ll move on and download another product. Poor usability is like throwing marketing leads away.
Second, make all your interactions with the user meaningful. If you offer webinars, have them deliver actionable information. This typically means technical information targeted at extracting maximum value from product use. MySQL does a good job at this; every week I get an offer to learn things like how to set up a clustered architecture – key teachings to help me get more value from their product.
Third, and most important, help people use the product. This means participating in the support mailing lists and forums and assisting people struggling with the product.
I have solved two issues on my blog:
Sorry for the inconvenience!
[via Seth Godin & workhappy.net]
Again, a great one from Seth :-) Very quickly, applied to myself:
The top five mistakes entrepreneurs make when they market
- Expecting gratitude in exchange for having done something that was hard. Yes, you built a company, you might even have bootstrapped it. Yes, you’ve got the machinery and the packaging and the retail space. Yes, you’ve navigated hiring people and yes, you finally shipped. I couldn’t care less. I’m not going to buy your brownie/consulting/services just because you worked hard on it.
- Spending money as a substitute for doing something great. Spending on marketing an average product isn’t working anymore. You’re far better off spending money on making your product better. A lot better.
- Not realizing that it’s your company, and your marketing better be as good as everything else. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like marketing or don’t think you’re good at it. Figure it out or go home. Sooner or later, you succeed because you were able to spread your ideas. So go to school and figure out how it works.
- Listening to other people. If they’re so smart, why aren’t they running your company? Don’t take a poll. Don’t ask your mother-in-law, that’s for sure. Cover your downsides, double your desire to take a risk and then just do it.
- Failure to measure. All this is worthless if you don’t test and measure relentlessly. Do what works. Kill what doesn’t. Repeat.
We were today in a very nice village called Gueberschwihr near where we are living. This village is very typical of Alsace and on the Alsatian Wineroad (“Route des Vins d’Alsace”). If you are visiting Alsace one, I really advise to have a look at this Wine road and to stay a while in Gueberschwihr.
About the Wine road, also called “Alsace Wine Route“:
The Alsace Wine Route is a winding path that meanders the length of the Vosges Mountains. You can stroll along the route with complete peace of mind, either on the hillsides or in the depths of the valleys.
At a length of 170km, the Alsace Wine Route offers a real picture postcard image :
Impeccable vineyards, forests, ruins of castles dating from the Middle Ages, towns surrounded by old city walls, blossoming alleyways, friendly wine bars, baroque signs, ancient homes, Roman churches and wells from the Renaissance period. To see all these and more, it’s worthwhile taking a stroll along the Wine Route.From Thann to Marlenheim, winegrowers open their cellars to give tourists a chance to taste some of the region’s wines. This has made Alsace one of the most gourmet regions in France.
Since some days, it is finally a bit easier to find us in Zurich, specially in the building where we have our office ;-)
[via CICLOPS]
This raw Cassini wide angle image has been stretched to show a ghostly white spoke in Saturn’s B ring. This is the first sighting of a spoke during Cassini’s climb to higher inclined orbits and the first spoke seen by Cassini on the sunlit side of the rings.
It is also the first spoke seen at high phase angle – that is, the angle formed between the Sun, the rings and Cassini. In this geometry, the feature appears white (instead of black) against the rings because the very small particles comprising the spoke preferentially scatter light in the forward direction (i.e., toward Cassini), making the spoke brighter than the background rings.
The clear filter image was taken on July 23, 2006 at a distance of approximately 692,000 kilometers (430,000 miles) from Saturn and at a phase of 115 degrees. Image scale on the sky at the distance of Saturn is 38 kilometers (23 miles) per pixel.
[via BetaNews]
New features in Firefox 2.0 include enhancements in security, tabbed browsing, performance, and extensions. The browser update also includes a built-in spell checking and an anti-phishing feature, much like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7. JavaScript 1.7 and improved subscribing of RSS feeds are also among the additions. […]
Mozilla expects to issue three release candidates of Firefox 2.0 before it goes gold in October. Visual tweaks and new graphics will be introduced during that timeframe. In the meantime, Mozilla plans to release Firefox 1.5.0.7 around September 5.
Despite the delays, Firefox is making considerable strides competing against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Firefox has passed 15 percent usage in the United States, and recently topped 200 million total downloads since the browser’s 1.0 launch in November 2004.
I was for the first time in Copenhagen – Denmark in December 2005. And again beginning of June 2006. Three landscape pictures from this stay, we stayed at the Hotel Radisson SAS.
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[click – 1.4MB – 4’222×991]