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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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