Last night, I decided to read a few chapters in ‘Getting Real‘, a book by the good people of 37Signals, to guide people towards building better (software-) products. I was surprised to find this chapter on staffing:

Hire good writers

If you are trying to decide between a few people to fill a position, always hire the better writer. It doesn’t matter if that person is a designer, programmer, marketer, salesperson, or whatever, the writing skills will pay off. Effective, concise writing and editing leads to effective, concise code, design, emails, instant messages, and more.

That’s because being a good writer is about more than words. Good writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand. They can put themselves in someone else’s shoes. They know what to omit. They think clearly. And those are the qualities you need.

Being a good writer is all about practice, so I hope that encourages some people to write more. Btw. we are looking for more bloggers, so drop Jeremy a message via the about page.

Vincent is a co-author on Tech IT Easy, who doesn’t consider himself a wordsmith yet, but he does his best. You can find out more about him on this blog’s initial announcement or on his site.

Like

Unlike

“Abbots Aerodrome is the place to go if you have a head for heights and a taste for adventure. If you’re visiting on a budget, arrive only to beat the crowds and then head to the top of the skydiving tower.”

You probably think that it is an excerpt from a Lonely Planet or another touristic guide… well you’re not wrong, except that it is a touristic guide to Second Life. Across 223 pages, Paul Carr and Graham Pond invite you to spend your holidays in Second Life in “The Unofficial Tourists’ Guide to Second Life”.

For somebody really down to earth like I am, I just don’t get it, even if I have spent some time in SL not to have a biased judgment. First, how can only 40K users at the same time (source: Forrester research) can spend so many time building touristic places in SL? And, even more worrying, how can people think that tourism in Second Life can be as great as in reality?

Anyways, I have been just amazed by the number of “places to visit” in Second Life, and I have made a quick selection of what I find the most surprising:

Svarga: it is a kind of SL paradise where there is an entire ecosystem such as in real life (clouds rain to make flowers grow, which are pollinated by bees… well you get it).

Virtual Hallucinations: it is a place aimed at raising awareness about schizophrenia, where your avatar can experiment the sound of voices, visual hallucinations, illusions of himself in a mirror… Really scary.

Hearts Enchanted: it is a place where you can simply have a really advanced experience of fishing. And you can even keep the fish at the end!

Regina Spektor Audio Kiosk: I am a personal fan of Regina Spektor’s music, and even if she is not so much known in real life, she is apparently a star in SL, as you can visit her virtual loft, listen to her music and even nip up the iron staircase and have a snooze.

Wheelies: it is a nightclub dedicated to disabled but also able-bodied clubbers (or avatars!).

Machinima: it is the burgeoning movie industry in SL, where movies are played by avatars themselves. You can even see kind of a SL teenage drama here on Youtube: definitely a new style!

Bruno Echegaray’s immersive spheres: Your avatar enters a 360° sphere where pieces of art are displayed. I kind of like those initiatives as they are a new way to show art (see my post about art in virtual worlds). I must also mention Kula, the Creative Commons Island, where you can find a lot of free art that you can even remix.

And finally, as it is common knowledge that one of the basis of SL is sex, you can go to Xcite to buy you some… genitals (and lots of other things I don’t even want to mention!).

So if you’re really interested in SL phenomenon, you should definitely buy this book, but you will have to keep in mind that with the number of users decreasing, it won’t really matter how amazing the places to visit are.

And finally, just to make this post a little bit funnier, here is a “real” video which shows all the bugs of SL which are for the moment a major problem for its expansion:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flkgNn50k14]

Fidji is a co-author on Tech IT Easy. You can find out more about him on this blog’s initial announcement or on her site. She enjoys real trips around the world, with real people, real seas and real fishes.

Like

Unlike

What do books like ‘Freakonomics‘ and ‘The Long Tail‘ (which I haven’t read yet) teach us? That statistics is an immensely powerful tool for getting at the underlying behaviour of people. It’s rationalised observation really, for books like ‘Blink‘ teach us the same thing… minus some of the numbers perhaps.

In “real life,” so far I have found out several things through statistical collection and analysis: what percentage of businesses use what type of hardware set-up (in the 90s, so no longer relevant); what percentage of people is interested in luxury leisure services; and what percentage of businesses use what type of financing. I also found out many of the “why’s,” though in statistics, numbers speak louder than words. For example: An entrepreneur can tell me he doesn’t trust banks, business angels, and venture capitalists. But on the aggregate, I also see that his ambition-level is far lower than those that do “trust” and use these institutions. The more data you can collect, the less “talking” needs to be done.

A friend of mine told me about some of the statistical methods he uses on his successful e-commerce site, and I’m sure many others do too. The method is called “A/B split testing” and works as follows. You create several copies of pages, all with different looks (fonts, colours, levels of “noise,” etc.)  and you see which one is more likely to turn the visitor into a buyer. Very simple to do on a web-site, you can profile by region, browser, or just pick every 2nd/3rd/…/50th visitor, and very quickly, after a 100 hits or so, you see what works and what doesn’t. And you don’t need to concern yourself with the “why.” On a more negative note, A/B is also the reason why you also need to clear your cookies when shopping for your flight. More on A/B here.

Another interesting method is that employed by Amazon, Pandora, and Last.fm (I think). That of “collaborative filtering” Essentially, it allows you to quickly check what other products/services a user/listener/buyer of a certain product/service will like, based on the past behaviour of other users, and suggest it in real-time. More on that method here.

The advantage of (internet-)software is that everything is measurable and easily changed to match tastes and behaviour. With what I call “hard” businesses, those that operate with tangible things, it is far less easy to change and adapt, though companies like Dell or Toyota are certainly a forerunner there. The problem can also be observed with software-vendors. If they provide a static piece of software, which does not send back user-behaviour, they will have much more difficulty in adapting future products to users’ needs. That’s where software as a service (SaaS), which Jeremy has been raving so much about, has a real advantage, and will, technology-permitting, eventually replace the (crappy) desktop software we are so used to.

Imagine the kind of statistics Last.fm is collecting on music-usage; Facebook on social trends; Linkedin on business-trends; and Twitter on god-knows-what. And imagine both what revenue-streams can come from it and how these services can be improved based on that data. That is the power of statistics. But also don’t forget that, as these methods become and are already part of hard businesses, improvements happen there too. With it, you will get a better cup of coffee from Starbucks, a better burger from McDonalds (I’m sceptical), more logical product layouts in your local supermarket, and a better car from Mercedes. With the internet we are only scraping the surface—process innovation. The truly radical stuff will happen in the world outside your computer-room.

Vincent is a co-author on Tech IT Easy, and prefers getting shot to working in Excel. While he’s loading his gun, you can find out more about him on this blog’s initial announcement or on his site.

Like

Unlike

After my brief stint into the world of McDonalds (read thoughts here and here), I decided to learn about what I thought was another franchise, but a more modern one: Starbucks. Turns out I was mistaken and it is not a franchise at all. Instead, the company is immensely vertically integrated for one purpose alone, maintaining perfect quality throughout the value-chain. At least that’s what its founder, Howard Schultz, claims in his book ‘Pour Your Heart Into It.’ I agree that when you have a globally orientated company, with both suppliers all around the world and coffee-shops now too, and you are selling a premium product, that this is a good strategy.

How did Starbucks get this way? Its organisational structure is ingrained in the strange history of the company. It originally started as a roaster and retailer of coffee-beans, when Schultz joined the company as a young salesman. He later left it to pursue his real passion, setting up coffee-shops, and a few years later returned to buy Starbucks the company, including the name. Had he not succeeded, his strategy of expansion may well have been very different.

In business, you’ll often come across the concept of transaction costs, or the make-or-buy decision. Transaction cost theory stipulates that you should keep the things in-house that constitute your core-competencies, and outsource those that do not. In other words, make it yourself versus buy it externally. In the case of Starbucks, the core-competencies is quality coffee which sells at premium prices. To them, it is vital to own the components and have the people that create this quality.

Being vertically integrated is both rewarding and risky. One the negative side, you have a lot of dependancies and there is a great risk of stagnancy in a dynamic market-place. The more people you have working for you and the more business-units you have to manage, the higher the complexity level and the more layers are necessary in a command-structure. Therefore everything happens much slower and is also much more expensive.

The best way to circumvent that is to focus on your core-values and the bottom-line. If your core-value is high quality coffee, you can also charge higher prices for it, off-setting some of the costs of vertical integration. But similarly, it pays off to slim down the complexity, make the process of creating your product as (cost-)efficient as possible.

And by controlling the value-chain, you can essentially control the experience, maintain the level of quality much better than if you are dependant on external partners. This is especially an issue in the world of coffee, where you would frequently deal with suppliers in developing nations with varying standards of quality. Starbucks does not grow its own coffee, but it does keep its buyers awfully close to those that do. Similarly, other industries like IT or retail face similar concerns. Do we hire programmers elsewhere or train them ourselves?

So why doesn’t a company like McDonalds integrate vertically? On a virtual level, you could say they do. They have created McDonalds university, which offers training to franchisees, in order to share the same values throughout the company-name. They keep their R&D in-house, but share the results throughout the virtual chain. They advertise on a national and regional level. And they maintain good relationships with suppliers to buy what they call premium-products at far-less-than premium prices.

As the last sentence suggests, that is perhaps where the difference lies. The core-value of McDonalds is not the same as that of Starbucks. The first started with offering hamburgers for $ 0.15, now around $1; the latter offered premium beans and later coffee for $3.50. This is again a superficial observation, but higher prices translate into a higher budget for quality. Just like Apple maintains high margins for it’s hardware, vs. other PC-makers, it can offer a higher quality of design and customer service than most of its competitors. Similarly, Starbucks can focus on training the best people, buying the best equipment, run innovative marketing campaigns and strategies. And it can afford to be vertically integrated.

More thoughts to follow as I finish the book, which, incidentally, is one of the best business-books I’ve ever read.

Vincent is a co-author on Tech IT Easy, who loves coffee far more than milkshakes. You can find out more about him on this blog’s initial announcement or on his blog.

Like

Unlike

I’ve only been on the Facebook for a few weeks, but I’m loving it and am trying to migrate my friends from other networks on there too. Here are X ways (I hate top-10 posts), I dig this social network.

A way to keep track of my closest (and most distant) friends

I used to keep mailing-lists, but this way is much better. The fact that you set your schools, like in Linkedin, also makes it easy to track down long-lost high-school-buddies.

A replacement for Flickr

Flickr is great, and the Facebook interface still needs work. But I love that you can tag people in pictures and set privacy-settings for certain groups of people, e.g. family. For now it is free, but I see it going towards offering a premium version soon.

A personal weblog

I haven’t tried this yet, but it seems like a great place to write about your holidays, etc. and only have your friends read it. An alternative is Vox.

A mail and message-client

I already wrote a little about this on Kari’s recent post on Inbox Zero, but I think Facebook’s closed messaging system is a great way to combat spam and feels very intuitive. I do wish there was an api to get my messages into a mail-client.

An rss-aggregator

Just like in Jaiku or Tumblr, you can add rss-feeds for your blog(s) and twitter-messages to Facebook. Just one warning. I find too many updates of friends annoying and I’m sure they feel the same way. Therefore I only link to twitter.

A marketing-tool

Facebook publishes daily poll-results, like on what demographics use Facebook and how, what people of different ages and sexes think of their appearance and intelligence, etc. Very useful, I think. You can also run your own (paid) polls and Jeremy wrote about a way to check your hotness. Alternative to the latter: hotornot.com

One necessary policy, I think:

Only accept those you know and that know you

I know it’s very easy to grow to a 1000 friends plus, however that is not the purpose of Facebook. Instead, it’s to keep you updated on what your real friends are doing and vice versa. Sticking to those you know also minimises the risk of spam-messages and annoying updates on people that you really have nothing to do with. Note, that I consider myself an extroverted introvert, so this policy may only apply to similar personalities.

Completely disagree with this policy? Check this post on growing your network to crazy proportions.

I’m sure there are many features that I don’t know yet. Discovered a cool one? Let us know in the comments.

Vincent is a sometimes-social co-author on Tech IT Easy. You can find out more about him on this blog’s initial announcement or on his site.

Like

Unlike

A couple of weeks ago, Jeremy wrote that he can’t keep up with his bloated inbox anymore and there were some good ideas in that post’s comments. The ever-increasing Inbox seems to be a problem for more and more people. Some people try to be part of the solution and not the problem. I, for one, like writing “complete” e-mails, so restricting myself into 5 sentences might not be for me – except at work, where I think many of us have this problem and keeping e-mail short and clear is always a good policy.

What I’m afraid of in restricting your e-mails to certain length is that it makes e-mail into IM or SMS (something the guys at sentenc.es see as a good thing).  In these mediums (or media, to be correct) the character-limit, in my opinion, forces you to leave a lot of context out of your message, rendering the message to more akin to a stream of consciousness. I like to think that e-mail as more a self-contained thing.

Anyway, the net’s premier productivity guy, Merlin Mann, recently gave a speech about “Inbox Zero” at Google. If you have an hour to spend in sake of productivity, take a look at his presentation.

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=973149761529535925]

Like

Unlike

In response to Ouriel who claims he found the best jazz piano – voice extract ever, here’s Tuck & Patti (I saw them live in Paris @ Vincennes floral park in 2006, and they’re just amazing) performing a jazzy medley of bluesy Jimmy Hendrix’s Castle Made of Sand and Little Wing. This is probably the best guitar – voice duo I’ve ever heard. While I’m flying away on vacations, with no access to emails for 2 weeks, enjoy!

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=M56QwDjE6PQ]

Bonus on the house for those who like soul music: Feel like making love, by D’Angelo. Nothing to do wih duos.

Like

Unlike

Many Apple fans are salivating over the rumored launch of Apple’s long-awaited mobile device in Europe. These fans (who put ”fan” in ”fanatic”) are reading the American echo-chamber-blogs and are certain that Apple will not only introduce iPhone in Europe this year, but it will be also revolutionary. As a card-carrying Nokialand citizen who, though, has never owned a Nokia, I disagree.

Telecom operators are far more heterogeneous in Europe and prices vary wildly in each country. Recently EU tried to limit the roaming charges, which is positive development. In USA, Apple went with exclusive deal with an operator so it can control the experience. In Europe, this will be so much difficult. Will Apple discard its main core skill, the user experience, so it can sell its device all around Europe? Or does the user experience mean so much to Apple, that they’re willing to concentrate on just the important markets? I’m betting the latter will happen.

I have to admit that my guess is based on the assumption that Apple launches the phone in Europe on a single carrier. This probably means that iPhone will not be available in all European countries at first. My guess is UK, Germany and France. I’ve very limited knowledge of operators in these markets, but my guess is that there are some big players in all of these fighting over the exclusive deal over iPhone. Other markets will see iPhone later, through subscriptions or after Apple starts to sell iPhone without subscription in whole Europe. But for this to happen, Apple needs to find a way to bring down the price, at around 800-900 euros, it is way too expensive. Compare this to iPods and Macs, which have gained lot of adoption when they entered the price ranges of their competitors.

And then there’s 3G. Telecom operators mis-invested in 3G en masse during the dot-com boom and it’s not widely adopted, but the fact remains that the infrastructure is there and the telecom operators are desperately seeking killer apps for it. Yes, 3G eats your handset battery like nothing else. Yes, the data charges are insanely priced pretty much everywhere. Yes, pretty much everyone has broadband at home these days.

But these are just technicalities. The mobile phone culture is different here and differs widely across countries.

The main reason it won’t matter is… we just don’t care about smart phones. Or what goes as a smart phone on the other side of the pond, as according to some statistics, about a quarter of phones in European hands have the multimedia capabilities. That’s a lot. Go to any European store and try to find a model without camera, music player or internet (3G or EDGE or what they now have). I won’t mention other features like calendars, ring tones, games and such, as they’re are even in the cheapest models already. This is 2007, after all.

The European handset manufacturers made a grave mistake couple of years ago in 2004, when they presumed people were into feature-filled bricks and cheap “clam-shell” phones from Motorola and Samsung came and conquered lot of market ground. After a quick shuffle, both SonyEricsson and Nokia quickly reintroduced cheap models to their offerings. Even Nokia was forced to launch their first clam-shell model. Now, Motorola and Samsung are going for “thin” models and at least SonyEricsson is answering that challenge. Nokia’s answer to these “slim” phones is expected during fall, but the company is know for missing deadlines.

Nokia on the other hand is betting on its N-series line. These are, according to Nokia, what computers have become. Nokia N95 is formidable opponent to iPhone in Europe. On a spec sheet, it has pretty much all the features of the iPhone and is better in some fronts. Naturally, the UI isn’t slick and it doesn’t have the future technology iPhone has.

In Europe the people going for other Apple’s forte, style, might not be throwing their Samsung Ultras, Nokia N-series or SE Walkmans out of the window. They are so much cheaper and get the jobs done and look good. On the other front, technical advances, the likes of N95 is dominating the field with its geek appeal (3G and WLAN, GPS, runs on third-party-welcoming Symbian). And for the enterprise, I don’t see anyone challenging Nokia’s Communicator (and now E-series) foothold. In Finland, the Nokia Communicator (which I think totally sucks not only as a device but as an user experience) is as ubiquitous among business people as iPods are among urban people.

Yes, there will be buzz. Yes, in many ways, it will be a success. But, will iPhone matter in Europe? Probably not. It will have its niche and I hope it challenges other players in the market to improve their user interfaces, but that’s about it.

Better question is, I think, does Apple care? I got the impression that Steve Jobs would of course love to sell as many of these things as possible, but he’s not counting on it to penetrate the market, going so far as using one of the common start-up lies, “we only need 1% of the market”. The device seems to have an audience, but the features might not be so revolutionary to us Europeans that we’d invest in it. It would be a lie to say that Apple is not out to capture the markets it enters, as that’s what corporations do by definition, but it has shown that it can survive as a niche player in computer markets. It’s not Microsoft and it’s not Dell. Using their tactics, Apple probably would have larger market-share, but the costs of doing so might be not worth it (goodwill, community, brand). With iPods, they had tremendous luck (and skill) and could dominate the market without sacrificing their values. I’m afraid many Apple fans believe that with iPhone, Apple has been able to combine the the different market advantages it has in Macs and iPods. This is wishful thinking and I don’t believe that. The fact remains that computers, portable music players and phones are all different markets. Both Nokia and Apple would like us to believe in this trio’s convergence. Their devices, after all, are “what computers have become”.

Kari has always depended on the last year’s models of SonyEricsson. Now he has a SE K610i with Opera Mini installed. Even it will kick iPhone’s ass in Europe.

Like

Unlike

After Vince’s book review of the MacDonald’s Franchise system, I thought that I would make a review of « The E-Myth revisited » by Michael E. Gerber, who sees the « Franchise mind » as a key success factor for small businesses. It is quite an old book, but I have been amazed by the simplicity and the truthfulness of how the author describes the mind of a business owner.

The author describes the entrepreneurial myth as 1) the myth that most people who start businesses are entrepreneurs, 2) the fatal assumption that an individual who understands the technical work of a business can successfully run a business that does technical work.

He says that almost every business starts with a Technician (somebody with a great ability, for example baking pies) having an “Entrepreneurial seizure” (“it would be so much better to do it for me!”). But in each business owner, there are 3 different people with different interests: the Technician, the Manager and the Entrepreneur.

Whereas successful businesses are owned by people having “the Entrepreneur” in them shaping a vision which will lead the company to succeed, most businesses are owned by people who are Technician at 70%. They are people who have started their business thinking that by this way they will be able to dedicate entirely to what they love, without knowing that being a business owner requires many more skills.

For a Technician to develop his Entrepreneur side, he needs to think about the business as a Franchise (named the Turn Key revolution) as if he had to build a business which would have to seduce potential franchisees not for the product the business is selling but for the perfect functioning of the business itself. He has to create a Prototype business, as though it was the model for 5,000 more just like it.

I really think that Gerber has understood the psychological brakes which prevent owners from creating efficient businesses:

- Owners focus on the product rather than on the business

- Owners build a business based on their talent and personality rather than on processes, which makes impossible to grow the business or to create others on the same model

- Owners go to work in their business rather than on it

Fidji is not at all a reference in entrepreneurial success, but her mistakes make her believe that she can talk about it. You can discover her in her initial announcement or on her blog.

Like

Unlike

People,

Register now for the 2007 Tech Ed, an event organized for software developers (5 – 9 November 2007) and IT pros (12 – 16 November 2007) already familiar or willing to learn more about the Microsoft platform. It’s taking place in Barelona, Cataluña, Spain.

Since you read my blog and I’m a nice person, here are 2 passcodes that will save you EUR 300 (US$ 400) if and only if you register before July 31st 2007 online (here): TED11200 for Tech Ed Developers; SEE11555 for Tech Ed IT Pros.

If you’re serious about software development &/or IT infrastructure, you can’t miss the Tech Ed event. All the best European developers will be there. It’s gonna rock so much that I’ll do my best to be there between November 5th & November 9th, for the developer edition. It’s a pretty good occasion to go back to Barcelona, where I spent 3 great months last summer, and I’m very, very excited about the training in itself. I think I’m going to pick up sessions in both the Architect and the Web Developer tracks. What about you? I still need to confirm that I’ll actually be able to make it, but meet me there if you can!

Jeremy

Like

Unlike

If you’re a software-as-a-service publisher (eg Google as far as Google Earth or Google Gear aren’t concerned, SalesForce, Idylis, TellMeWhere, Netsuite, Excentive, Facebook, Zlio, Brainsonic, Microsoft as far as Live or Titan are concerned, U.[Lik],  eBay, Yahoo!, Inspirational Stores Group, Amazon, 37Signals, Neocase, Advance IT, Constellation, blueKiwi, SideTrade, Twitter, etc.), here are 5 reasons you’ll find hiring software developers easier than traditional software companies or, even more true, IT service companies.

1) SaaS developers enjoy faster release cycles. Indeed, go-to-market time frames tend to shrink as new functions may be implemented on a seamless basis (provided all regression tests were performed on a redundant test server or mirror environment).

2) SaaS developers don’t suffer the pain of an heterogeneous installed base (the nightmare of traditional software license vendors like Oracle and SAP). If all users work on the same environment, then it’s easier to innovate (you don’t need to take into account upgrades and regression risks) and even, dare to think about starting all over again from scratch a new version of your software.

3) SaaS developers will enjoy the pressure of having to keep up with client requests and new web technology trends constantly. Actually, since the SaaS paradigm is equivalent, roughly speaking, to a pay-as-you-go business model, then clients may decide to stop using the app and hence paying the SaaS vendor anytime they want. Which puts pressure on the software publisher team in general, and on the develops in particular who will have to keep watching what competitors do, how the market evolves, what their clients need, and what new technologies may allow (eg Silverlight and Apollo definitely open new windows of opportunities).

4) SaaS developer will work in small, agile, commando teams rather than endless product development open spaces. Why? How? Making money per US$50 / month doesn’t leave room for too aggressive recruitment campaigns. It takes a long time to build a sustainable SaaS company. Cash flow stream forecasts may grant visibility, you’re still never 100% sure that you’ll keep your clients until then. In other words, SaaS publishers don’t benefit from the huge upfront fees software license vendors collect as soon as they ship their product and find it trickier to finance their working capital. In a nutshell, viable SaaS publishers are by nature and by design very healthy, well-managed companies with conservative approaches. Software developers are key elements of the engine and this is where the money will go as soon as recruiting will become the current motto. Till then, R&D teams will remain small, agile and commando-style (testing new features, removing some, etc.). Great labs to give new software engineering methods a go for people passionate about such things!

5) SaaS developers have a chance to do the work of graphic designers as well (and modify it more often than with a software license vendor), and may, should they choose to do so, have a true impact on the user experience and general design of their application service. For instance, I heard develops @ Google do the design work themselves, keeping a few principles (simplicity, etc.) in mind, and starting from what they think the mindset of the user will be. Same for Titan (online version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM) Salesforce or Idylis (online ERP company based in Paris). In short, Software as a Service may be the best option for software developers with a strong graphic design acumen, or keen on interacting with users and brushing their design skills up!

Enough for tonight. I’m not even mentioning the possibility for develops to improve their infra- or distributed computing skills thanks to SaaS models but I’m pretty sure you would’ve thought about it. Let me know if you can think of other selling points SaaS vendors may make use of to attract software developers vs. software license vendors. Software publishers are whatsoever all amazing, be they SaaS companies or not. So if you’re a good develop in an IT service company, jump off and if you don’t know where to apply, send me an email and I’ll put you through.

Like

Unlike

This another part in the saga of my thoughts on ‘Grinding it out‘, an account of Mcdonalds, written by Ray Kroc. I’m about 3/4 into the 210-page book. Let me start with a disclaimer: ‘Grinding it out’ is a book written to promote the McDonalds way and aimed at motivating existing staff and operators, as well as attracting new blood of course. I feel like I should tell this to any person thinking about reading the book, because I don’t want to write or promote an informercial on McDonalds. Let me also say that I’m a vegetarian since a few years ago and my opinion of McDonalds is somewhat flavoured – I respect the business but I only eat there once a year.

That said, it’s not a bad book at all. In it, you will learn what made McDonalds great and much of what made Ray Kroc great. I wrote a little about him a few days ago – a blue-collar worker, who excelled in sales and at smelling opportunities. He was an operations-freak, planning out every step from the potato to the french frie or from the cow to the burger, and from the food to customers’ mouths. But it all started with location-location-location, planting a restaurant in the right spot, attracting the talent to run it, and promoting the McDonalds way. This book is a perfect example of that.

McDonalds is a complicated business, wrapped up in a simple package. Many people eating at McDonalds think the restaurant is owned by the company and all the staff works for them too. They may even think that McDonalds has farms growing potatoes and herding milkshake-cows, I’m not sure. But it’s not like that. At the time the book was published (the last edition in 1992), the company owned less than 30% of the restaurants around the world, and I’m sure it’s around the 20% mark or less today. The rest is composed of franchises, owned by independent operators, who, like entrepreneurs, have to turn an empty building and a name into a thriving ecosystem.

But the advantage of being a franchisee, especially a McDonalds-one, is that you are not really alone. Sure, you invest a considerable amount of cash into the venture and you bear most of the risk, but when you sign up for a franchise, you get working experience at a running McDonalds-restaurant, training at McDonalds-university, also for your staff, and the purchasing- and marketing-power that makes McDonalds great.

Something about purchasing-power. The last book I read on McDo was in the form of ‘Fast Food Nation‘, a drastically different view of the company. If ‘Grinding it out’ is a picture of heaven, this book presents it as hell. Some of the criticisms in that book were about the way that food was artificially flavoured to make better smelling food (I forgot how that was bad), and on how the power of McDonalds both lead to lower wages in America and the destruction of the farmer. On that last point, I think that’s probably right, then again, whether there is still space for the traditional farmer is another discussion all together. McDonalds has a lot of purchasing power, it has deep and privileged relationship with its suppliers, which result in cheaper and (hopefully) better food. This translates into an easier experience for the franchisee.

From my reading, I think there are following sub-groups in the McDonalds-umbrella, which make up the ecosystem. These are: the corporation, which runs marketing (think Ronald McDonalds), decides on real-estate locations, and maintains some (not all) of the relationships with suppliers. Then there is McDonalds University, which trains operators and staff to maintain a smooth operation and to always keep smiling. There are the suppliers, which are located all over the world. There are the franchisees. And there are the customers. In one package it a near-perfect picture of the American global capitalist system.

Well what do you know, Jeremy is a Microsoft-head, and I’m turning into Mcdonalds-one. One of several keys to franchising, I learned in a course I did with Jeremy, is to make every step so explicit, that you can write a manual about it an other people can follow it. This book is an example of evangelising a business-idea. And it’s great at that. Perhaps more to follow as I read the last pages of the book. All opinions on McDonalds aside, franchising is a great and easy way to get into running your own business, and a great way for your business to grow big.

Vincent is a co-author on Tech IT Easy. You can find out more about him on this blog’s initial announcement or on his blog. He enjoys a (fish-)burger and a milkshake about once a year. Ps. I’ll be leaving for a holiday in a few hours, so any responses to comments will be delayed by a few days.

Like

Unlike

I noticed that I’d migrated unconsciousnessly into using Google Reader as my main RSS Reader. Previously I’d used NetNewsWire Lite like many others (even occasionally using it with NewsGator Online).

There were many underlining reasons for this. First of all, NetNewsWire Lite doesn’t archive posts, so I found out that if didn’t read posts from some strangely (mis)configured feeds, they would just vanish from the app as they were removed from the RSS feed document. I don’t consider myself an internet addict, who needs to read all the feeds the instant they update, so this was a major problem as I was losing half of Freakonomic’s posts. This isn’t wasn’t a feature I was willing to pay for, as Google Reader does this even better by archiving each and every feeds each and every post. The other reason was that I’d sometimes like to access my feeds from different locations. NetNewsWire (and FeedDemon) can be used with NewsGator Online, but its interface sucks and the syncing between the website and app didn’t always go flawlessly.

The advent of Google Gears will probably make other desktop apps also irrelevant. It’s strange how even though for a long time there have been things like Java and XUL and now there’s AIR and Silverlight, they just never caught on and instead people kept hacking on with JavaScript to make a dynamic web. The downside to web apps is that the web browser UI is not good in usability sense and you’re missing out on many of the underlying OS’s frameworks – in this case it doesn’t really matter if you use any of the above mentioned platforms as they don’t unlock your OS’s special advantages but naturally try to maintain a stable cross-platform experience.

I was sure that I’m not alone with my migration pattern and tried to do some research. Unfortunately Wordpress doesn’t let us see where our RSS traffic originates from in client sense, but Netvibes (which has been mentioned here before) and Google Reader get some hits as referrers every day. So, as for desktop RSS readers, we don’t have that data. I found a poll from Read/WriteWeb, which seems to support my argument. I was surprised how many people used browsers own RSS capabilities, though. Is there are better source for information on web-based rss reader adoption? (Yes, I know)

There are similar stories on the net though. Here’s how Ades went to Google Reader, and here’s how Alex did it. I agree with Ades that it’s a major fricition-remover that so many people already use Google’s services everyday that they don’t need to login to Reader. Alex, on the other hand, sees this as a privacy issue. K-inthehouse argues that there are benefits for bloggers to use dekstop clients instead. In my opinion points 6 (individual feed refresh) and 9 (archiving) don’t matter at all on web-based readers and points 1 (labels) and 4 (grouping) are, in my opinion, pretty well achievable on web-based readers also. What I do agree is point 3 (search) and I too find it ironic that it’s not implemented in Google’s Reader. Of course, I rarely blog about other blogs (the “echo-chamber” effect) – there are other ways to put other posts on the radar, for better or worse - so maybe some people like desktop clients for that.

It looks like Brent Simmons did sell NetNewsWire at exactly the right time. It was a great achievement to develop a Mac-only RSS reader, which had the largest market share (or, more to the point, user base. so, user share?) across all platforms. I doubt this is anymore possible now even on any platform as Netvibes, Bloglines and Google Reader take on more and more people, platform-independently.

Kari has relatively few feeds he follows on a weekly-basis, so things are probably different for you. Sound off your opinion in the comments!

Like

Unlike

I had dinner tonight with a friend and technical consultant jumping from a 3-month mission for an industrial companies to another 3-month mission for another industrial company. So far, so good.

The issue is that one of these clients hates to pay for software and has the weird habit of wanting to develop in-house all its software development tools.

Result is that my friend, unwilling to spend more than 3 months at a client, had to recruit 2 developers to develop tools for IT consultants and software developers to do the job.

Which took them 1 full year. Each are paid respectively EUR36K (junior) and EUR48K (senior; 3 years exp.). That’s EUR84K + 30% of social charges corresponding to the French rate. Hence a total of EUR110K.

As a result, it took one year of a senior and one year of a junior developer to develop an IDE that does maybe 20% of what Websphere or Visual Studio can actually do in terms of both functional breadth and optional depth. Not to mention the absence modularity (vs. modular approaches for Eclipse or Visual Studio through plugins & open APIs). All clear in terms of software expenses: it all cost nothing but 2 computers and electricity. But consider the total cost of ownership of the move: EUR110K (US$ 150K) for an app that barely does one fifth of something that’s free (eg Eclipse) or almost free (Visual Studio 2005, through the Empower Pack)!!

My conclusion: such behaviors harm the software industry. For a number of reasons:

1) if there exists software vendors, it means there exists markets for software vendors and hence clients for such software vendors. Why do some clients believe they can reinvent the wheel? Why can’t they invest a few thousand dollars in Visual Studio, or Rational Rose, or even download Eclipse for free??? That’s such an egotistic thing!

2) they harm the software industry, because not only the steal 2 resources (2 good software developers) to independent software vendors, which are having a hard time recruiting develops because, in part, of competition from IT service companies, but also they display an unpleasant picture of software-savvy people. Let’s assume they would’ve matched the quality of IBM Websphere or MS Visual Studio: do these people think they would have gotten a medal for paying 2 skilled resources for 12 months and hardly matching the existing?

3) open source can be a model, in 2 ways: i) to invent new ways for software developers to collaborate; ii) to wake up established vendors if new releases take too long to go to market (eg Firefox vs. IE6). Such episodes harm the open source software industry, and hence the software industry as a whole – because such approaches are not industrial approaches but amateurish ways of creating applications. By the way, it shows how expensive open source can be in terms of total cost of ownership – if not implemented by pragmatic people but driven-by-ego or even worse, -ideology.

In short, an combo of in-house approach & open source can be a disaster for the software industry, and the nightmare for any chief financial officer.

Like

Unlike

Dubai isn’t dumb when it comes to economic policy. Some economists there have noticed software giants (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, SAP, IBM, BEA, Yahoo!, etc.) acquired companies on a valuation related to the number of software developers such preys accounted. A few years ago, it was commonly agreed that a software giant would be willing to ‘acquire’ each software developer for something like US$ 1m. In other words, a 12 developers-strong software startup would be worth something like US$ 12m. Nowadays, I would say it gets closer to EUR 1m per developer though (EUR 1 = US$ 1.37).

Dubai has noticed the trend and has started to build gated communities for software developers – very near Dubai Internet City. In terms of ROI, a relatively small initial investment (it is no secret that Dubai employs thousands of slaves from rural India, Indonesia and Pakistan to get the construction job done) for roads and houses that are soon to be refunded by individuals and taxes anyways, plus a massive communication effort in hand with both the software and IT service multinationals willing to invest in the area to attract software development talents from South America, Russia and South East Asia, will mechanically generate tremendous per capita GDP and create value for the local economy.

What if software development was a true booster for the World Economy? I wish more politicians got to know about Dubai’s measures to increase GDP. It all boils down to this: attract and train the best software development talents.

PS: many thanks to Raphaël Fétique, from eCommerce consultancy Converteo, for the info

Like

Unlike