On my trip to Africa the most inspiring thing that happened to me happened on my last day, on the Nairobi international airport. This post isn’t about technology, but about globalization and, well, maybe in a small way how technology is only an enabler, it just has made things easier – but it doesn’t do things for us.

It was still couple of hours before the flight would start to board but we were already at the gate. And sitting next to us was  Phil. I don’t remember if his name was really Phil, I just think he looked like a Phil. Now, Phil was a huge, white, bald, old guy with diabetes and thick glasses. Really huge. He was wearing a traditional Kenyan suit/robe-thing. He looked like a fat white Masai. He was dozing off and told people around him that they should feel free to wake him up if he started to snore. He wouldn’t mind.

Phil really was a Buddha. He was out there. I don’t know if he knows it.

One thing lead to another and Phil started to tell why he was in Kenya. I don’t think he has ever been to any other country. Phil’s from Virginia, USA. He’s a schoolteacher.

I don’t remember all the details correctly, but that’s okay, because the details don’t matter. You see, Phil’s dad had some money, but he was in a home. Got MS. Now, being a good Christian, he had donated a bunch of money to missionaries to build a church in Africa. Church of Nazarene. Now, Phil was a good son and visited his father now and then. His dad was a bit sad about there being a church after him somewhere in Africa and he was there in a nursing home on the other side of the world. So, naturally, Phil goes and says “Gee, dad, if I could just go there and take pictures for you, I would.” So, his dad takes out his check book and asks “Would you? Here’s some money, it should cover your tickets?”. Here Phil said to me, “Who was I to say no to my dad?”

So, Phil got himself a passport and all the other stuff. He only knew that the church was somewhere in Kenya and that it was called Church of Nazarene. And that he knows no-one there but that didn’t stop him from booking a trip over the weekend to Kenya. Someone might think Phil was either simple or just insane, but, I don’t think that. He was just this unassuming guy.

At some point during his story, another flight arrived and people started to come in through the doors of our gate. There, sitting on an airport’s plastic seat, around 9pm in the evening, with the red robe on, this guy starts to greet all the people going past him, “Welcome to Kenya, hope you have a nice stay”. Most of the people don’t even blink in his general direction. Some say thanks. Some smile. But I bet most of them felt at least something. So what if you can’t please all the people who just don’t care when you can make some people feel a bit better?

So, anyway. A day before he’s leaving he gets an e-mail from some missionary that yeah, the church exists and they can take him there. So, he goes to Kenya, gets on a jeep, takes out his digital compact and starts taking a lot of pictures of the church and gets back to USA to go back to work on Monday.

Back in US, he goes to visit his dad with hundreds of pictures and he’s dad’s all excited – but he doesn’t even look at the pictures. He almost pushes the pictures away and asks “Do you wanna go over there again?” And, again, who’s Phil to say no?

“At this point I realize that I’m going visit that church every year for the rest of his life.” And so he does. Phil’s not that into the whole Church of Nazarene thing, he’s a schoolteacher. So, this one time he asks if he could visit a jail in Kenya. Normally this would be totally impossible, but as it happens, there just happens to be this guy who’s the head priest of all prisons there in the group. And well, at this point Phil’s been there for some years already so he has some street cred and the doors to the jails are open for Phil.

I totally forget if we wanted to teach these guys something or if it was something else, but anyway, Phil’s visit is a success. He starts to visit the prisoners in addition to going to see how his dad’s church is holding up, all this in over a weekend. Many years pass. I didn’t ask, but I guess his dad’s passed away since I understood he doesn’t visit the church anymore. He still visits Kenya every year for a weekend and goes to visit the prisoners.

To drive the point home: This guy takes a long-haul flight every year at the same time, for a weekend, to visit these guys. And these guys wait him like he’s Santa Claus. And to them, he is just that.

I guess these prisoners don’t get much visitors and I’ve no idea who they think Phil is back home, I don’t think Phil has any idea who they think he is. But they write to him. Last year, the prisoners asked if Phil could get them a electric piano. Now, hauling something like that from USA would be impossible and expensive, so he just arranged the piano there otherwise. These guys don’t have even clean water or anything, and they ask for a electric piano and this guy delivers. He knows that there’s a very small chance that these guys actually get to use whatever things he can procure for them, but I guess it’s the gesture that counts. Someone actually cares.

Coming back to the robe Phil is wearing. It’s not Phil’s first, and not his last. The prisoners make them for him. This year, a tailor took a measures of Phil so they can make a new one for him when he comes to visit next year. Again, these guys who are living in conditions I can’t even imagine are making these robes for this one guy who comes and visits them every year.

Now, Phil says he’s ready to die. He says it’s really great to know that you’re ready to go. This is not exactly something I look forward to hear before a 8 hour flight, but he might have a point. I’m not ready to go. Phil has had an heart attack and he tells how excited it was to be transported to ER by a helicopter. Phil said he’s on VA so it was all covered. He hasn’t talked about religion at all before this point, but it’s hard to escape the Buddhist vibe from this guy.

I told Phil that for the sake of the prisoners, I really wish that he makes it next year.

There, on Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, among all the people coming and going, mostly young western tourists going to volunteer to build something and who are there to naively save the world, was unassuming Phil who no-one took seriously. I shook his hand and thanked him for being a human.

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Phil also told when he got his heart attack at home and somehow made it to the hospital, a doctor came to see if he had got all the necessary medications. A nurse would go that yes, except for one that’s barcode didn’t register into the system. The doctor then took the medication and gave it to Phil noting to the nurse that the needs of the patient went before some accounting system.

Thinking that this guy wouldn’t have been there telling me how he gives hope to more people ever year than I ever will because of a nurse wouldn’t give some stuff to save his life because she couldn’t register into a system is something that really scares me.

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It’s wrong to say Phil said he gives hope to people. He never said that. He just told what he does and how he ended up doing that. I got the impression that the people who he teaches don’t know what he does over a certain weekend in September. Why he keeps doing that, he never said.

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I honestly don’t remember all the details correctly. I wrote this to tell you about Phil. I decided to wait for some time before writing this down so I could think the whole story over and better distill it to the point that there are way too few Phils around and too many people to whom Phil is a lifeline.

Why I decided to publish it is also in some part due to this post.

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As is usual when I take a long break from writing, my blog posts end up becoming insanely long. Take it as you will, but I’ve tried to make it as coherent a post as possible. P.S. this is a post written under de cover of my “leave of absence,” which means I still write, but less frequently. – - Vincent.

A good friend of mine, Zihni Ozdil from the Netherlands / Turkey, Historian Extraordinaire, is now publishing his wisdom online. If history, politics, and culture (“beyond the superficial”) is something you find interesting, I encourage you to check it out. On his site, I found an article entitled ‘the real Evil Empire,’ which, ignoring the provocative title, deals with the interesting topic of the cold war and the ‘demonification’ of Russia and communism at that time.

Yesterday, I had an interesting discussion with some Canadian Swedes that moved to Florida with their kids and had trouble finding a school. The only way, it seemed, to guarantee that their kid ended up in a good one is to have an A-class school in your district (which you can find via a website that profiles attendees according to race and economic background… wow…) and to have paid your electricity bills. It worked out well for them, but clearly suggests the underlying problem of a long-term selection bias.

Last night, meeting the Canadian Swedes, where I was also in the company of a Russian and a Japanese, I noted that it was strange that while both Russia and Japan, being superpowers in their own right, have infamously challenging education systems, which result in some pretty smart people graduating from either country, the US does not seem to follow that pattern, at least not at the high school level, and certainly not across all demographics. Yet, by all accounts, the US is a superpower, if not the superpower of this and the last century.

My post today is not about comparing countries’ education systems, it’s more about the strategic purpose of education. Many people don’t know this about me, but I don’t vote and I don’t generally care about (regional) politics. To me, our planet should be one country, where anyone can move and work anywhere, and services don’t have to be moved just because you physically moved  XX km/miles to another country. But I do recognise the power of competition and how that can lead to excellence. Versus a ‘group think’-like mediocrity where everyone just tries to be like everyone else and no one exceeds. So, in a way, I endorse a system of divided regions, because I think it leads to competition and thus excellence.

Education plays a strong role on the competitive advantage of nations, as it does in certain companies. Last year, applying to a lot of consultancy companies and working as one myself, I was struck at the importance that the accumulation of knowledge plays in this industry. If I were to start my own consultancy, continuous education of the staff would most certainly be a cornerstone of the business strategy, because knowledge is your product as a consultant.

I know that this thinking plays a strong part in government circles as well: how to make your/our country as strong as possible, not (just) in military terms, but in the sense of knowledge, mostly measured by the no. of graduates and the no. of patents that are published every year (as well the commercialisation thereof, which doesn’t go quite as smoothly).

I know that the no. of graduates coming out of Chinese universities is tremendous, and the no. of patents coming out of US ones is among the highest in the world also. So clearly, the US, superpower extraordinaire, is doing something right. I don’t however entirely understand why the primary/secondary school system is so abysmal then in the US. My only explanation is that, in academic circles, there are no national boundaries, and a Russian researcher can just as well (if not better) produce patents in the US as anywhere else.

There are other dimensions to the US superpower status as well, of course. It’s a military superpower, it is a cultural superpower (in terms of films, music, and literature), it has a large consumer-base. These three dimensions—safety through military strength, an easily adopted culture, a consumer’s paradise—also have the effect that they serve as an attraction point for outside academic or other talent. And while other countries may have strong educational bases, the other aspects are perhaps ignored just a little too much, still making the US a prime export location for knowlegde.

In the strategic literature, there is the concept of the resource-based view, which stipulates that company strategies are nothing more than a collection of resources, some of which are internalised and some that are not. I think that in the context of the US and education, the resources that must be internalised are those that lead to the commercial exploitation of technological advantage, which sounds abstract, but basically means making sure that the best technology/knowledge is produced in-house and generates economic benefits in-house as well.

But there other resources that must most certainly not be held onto in-house. These include standards, which facilitate the assimilation of knowledge. In education, the standards that we use are the bachelor-master-phd system, which can easily be studied in different combinations and locations. And text-books, which as many students know, are often from US-origins.

In many ways, the cultural exports from the US—movies, music, literature—are nothing more than the spreading of a standard, that of a language and a way of thinking, which makes assimilation of outside talent easier. And as long as that outside talent is used for the benefit of the US, in the form of patent exploitation, the US benefits, even if their own primary/secondary education system is quite uneven.

As mentioned, I don’t care about politics, country-differences, or governments. But if my logic is correct, I wonder if a metaphor exists for commercial superpowers, i.e. companies that are market leaders and remain so by attracting the greatest talent and finding ways to turn that into economic benefits.

Organisations are not complete economies like governments are and also have the benefit of being mobile—by law they are considered single persons, which have residence, pay taxes, etc. just like everyone else. So, as long as they obey the law, they can choose where they stay and choose to ignore local conditions, much like, I theorise, some governments do, instead focussing on the bottom-line: attracting excellence and turning that into profit, while keeping ‘unnecessary’ expenses as low as possible. Well, at least that is the stereotype of an organisation, while pressures have certainly lead some to adopt a more socially-responsible attitude.

Clearly, the question of talent, whether attracting or training it, remains a vital one for both countries and organisations. But I don’t think there is necessarily a correlation between talent and local conditions.. at all.. though local conditions do play a part in the quality of life, or lack thereof, which affects the talent’s in question desire for a certain location.

Vincent out.

(Picture courtesy of thehindubusinessline.com)

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What many of you might not know is that the reason Nokia became the biggest mobile phone manufacturer is because of Apple. When all their competitors were standing still, Nokia decided to think a bit differently. This story was one of the hidden gems in “Fast Strategy“, a book co-authored by Mikko Kosonen, a former executive at Nokia, and it tells the story how Nokia was able to challenge Motorola, Ericsson and other big players of yesteryear.

“When everyone saw mobile telephony as a professional service, Nokia’s leadership saw mobile phones as consumer – almost fashion – products. Rather than predict five or ten percent maximum penetration rate, Nokia quickly imagined everyone in the world having one – or why not several? – mobile phones for personal as well as professional use.” (page 3)

“[On the importance of strategic insight] Some insight may result from intense personal awareness and conviction, such as Pekka Ala-Pieitilä at Nokia being an avid Mac user and seeing the potential for Nokia to turn mobile phones into mass market consumer goods the way Apple was doing for personal computers.” (page 21)

One has to wonder why this Mac-love was only visible in the strategic thinking while Nokia’s Mac-support (PC Suite and other things) has been abysmal throughout the years.

So, what has changed so dramatically that blogs and business newspapers are declaring doom on Nokia? First of all, Nokia’s DNA changed the moment the became #1 mobile phone manufacturer in the world. Before that they were a challenger, trying out

The Nokia 1100, the best selling consumer electronics device in the world

different things and taking risks. But now they are playing defensive, trying to maintain their market share. According to Kosonen, Nokia is trying to counter this by being “strategically agile”.

But it isn’t just that. The backwaters of mobile innovation, USA, suddenly became relevant. I would argue that this is mostly due to Blackberry and iPhone and the huge domestic market. Also, one has to remember that the US is overpresented on the internet, so once the web broke through to mobile devices and Apple started to market the idea of software apps on mobile devices, things seemed to change a bit. Nokia has never been strong in the US, or for that matter in any market where consumers do not choose their own phones and where Nokia has never been able to work with operators. That’s probably the only thing that has been constant.

Couple of weeks ago yet another analyst group forecasted how Apple could pass Nokia in as soon as 2011. Now, this fantasy was based on how iPod users would convert to iPhone users and how Apple should launch low-cost iPhones (especially to developing countries) and sell customized ringtones and overall act in a non-Apple way (and eerily like Nokia). And yet, we’re still talking about smart phones which so far represent a tiny minority of total mobile market.

Sure, Nokia needs to get its act together, especially on the services front, but it’s too early to say that they’re doomed. Especially when you consider that Nokia is pretty strong in the developing countries. My prediction is that it’s not Nokia that will be irrelevant in the mobile phone market in the future, but the US market ’s importance will fade and it is the mobile players that win elsewhere that continue to matter. The sheer size of mobile phone markets in Africa just boggles the mind.

In the new world of the mobile web, Nokia’s biggest problem is their own legacy, something that slowed Ericsson and Motorola down when Nokia was decided to bring mobile phones to the masses. Apple, on the other hand has shown that it can take advantage of market discontinuities in many different markets where traditional barriers to entry are crumbling down.

“For decades, the dominant players were EMI and RCA, and more recently Sony Music, which had built up the assets and capabilities … In today’s digital world, however, companies like Apple, which have none of the traditional music industry capabilities, are becoming leading players.”

In summary, it’s all about bringing technology to the masses. Apple did that for smartphones, but Nokia, inspired by Apple’s success bringing personal computing to masses, did and continues to do that for mobile phones. It’s just Nokia struggles with the US and smartphones for the rest of us. In Fast Strategy, Cisco’s Corporate Vice President Strategic Allainces, Steve Steinhilber is quoted to have said “…five years ago could Nokia really have expected Apple to be the main threat to their high end phone business?”

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First of all, Paris was great! For three days, Jeremy (Fain, founder of Tech IT Easy & Verteego.com) drove me crazy in a good way, by mapping out every single minute of my life. Similarly to how we met up in Barcelona, it was a great way to get to know the city and at the same time realise that truly knowing Paris will require some further trips back.

Since Tech IT Easy was founded by a Parisian, I felt it was good to go to the source and have a “vision-refresher” as it were. At its peak, this group-blog featured 15 writers, the majority of which was from France or situated there at some point. Many are now spread across this planet and it’s sites like Tech IT Easy that represent a small node where we can occasionally brush against each other (in an intellectual way) and exchange the wisdom we have learned.

Meeting several Tech IT Easy authors, Steve Danino and Emmanuel Perez-Duarte, it reconfirmed to me the intellectual spirit in which this weblog was founded, as well as the search for something, anything, but probably tech- (and/or business!-) related. Many of our authors enjoy a solid educational background, which is both good and bad. Good, in the sense of the value it brings. Bad, because there are many opportunity costs in life and even more so for well-educated men and women. It is clear then that we all write when we can, but more often than not, we cannot.

It is all the more important then to get more (and more and more) fresh blood onto Tech IT Easy to replace those that have moved on, and to connect those who are “old” to those who are “new.” The vision, my vision for Tech IT Easy has always been that of building a community of talented people who directly and indirectly assist each other to make our world a (technological) marvel.

Does that work in practice? In my opinion, only if people work hard at making it happen and the effects are far from direct or instantaneous. Rather, if I need to speak to an interesting person in France (or anywhere really) or bounce a complicated idea of someone, I’ll often look up one of our Tech IT Easy members and vice versa.

A few blog posts that I thought were great and directly showed off the value of some of our members, were Remy Miralles’s posts about being a software developer, and Cecil Dijoux’s (who is incidentally also a musician by night) posts about High Availability Architecture. I have met neither of them yet, but I know the day will come. These posts are more the exception to the rule, which is that, on this weblog, we often do not market ourselves, but instead think out loud and whatever opportunities happen because or outside of it, are the individual’s own. The risk is that sometimes you of course do the opposite of marketing, but hey…

It is the nature of the beast that is blogging that its value is hard to determine. We host this weblog for a negligible amount and the 45 min. a day that I spend blogging on it is also negligible in terms of expense. We could value this blog by asking for money, but apart from some unobtrusive monetisation exercises on the horizon, we will not make a serious effort at that… because it would create a different kind of pressure and hence different kind of focus. But, who knows…

The value that Tech IT Easy has to me, remains to be that node, out of which occasionally there is some new strings that are formed, either intellectually or through building up a new relationship or venture. Everything else is… soft tissue.

In the words of the once great Arnold, I’ll be back!
Vincent

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Almost two years ago, Jeremy praised Kiva here on Tech IT Easy. I’m also a strong believer in microlending and Kiva. It makes a lot of sense to help build businesses and help entrepreneurship thrive in developing countries.

But, for entrepreneurship and business to work, the would-be entrepreneurs need skills. Here in the western world we might take education as granted, but this isn’t the case in many developing countries. Even if free education is available, the opportunity cost for families to let their kids attend school might be too high. If you’ve ever browsed through Kiva the entrepreneurs’ profiles, you might have noticed that many of them state they’re aiming to get their children good education and that most businesses are relatively low-tech.

Let's put those two at the top of that there.

This all is why I see that projects that aim to teach important skills to people in developing countries as at least as important as making small businesses work. And this is why I’d love if you, dear readers, could pitch in to my girlfriend Satu’s and her colleague Pia’s fundraising effort to raise £4,000 for VSO’s Accenture Kilimanjaro Challenge.

They are taking part in the Accenture Kilimanjaro Challenge, which is a charity project by VSO and Accenture to support VSO’s work in East Africa by climbing the cool Mt. Kilimanjaro. All the money these two geeks raise will go to VSO’s projects in East Africa (they’ll pay for their trip themselves). You can read what VSO does, for example in Mt. Kilimanjaro’s Tanzania. What I learned was that even though basic education is free in Tanzania, only half pass the primary learning exam. In my opinion it isn’t enough to throw OLPCs at these kids, the whole education system needs more resources, from schools to teachers and the students themselves.

So, go show some Tech IT Easy geek-love and help put these girls at top of the summit. You’ll find more information about their project at their sites. You can follow the Satu’s & Pia’s fundraising effort at their fundraising site, their blog or at their Facebook group.

I hope that through VSO’s work, we will be able to see more Tanzanian and other East African entrepreneurs on Kiva in the future. Join me in making this real by donating as little as £2 to the girls’ fundraising effort.

Also, I encourage you to start the habit of lending as little as $25 to an entrepreneur in developing world at Kiva. And, if you feel like it, give an OLPC for a kid at $199 a piece.

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As I’m currently applying for jobs, I naturally often get asked what my dream job is. I hate that question, as there’s no simple answer. My dream “job” is to set up companies, which is really a great number of jobs. Following series of steps is the way I visualise this process, seen from a business, investor’s, and somewhat European perspective, and not so much a technologist’s one. As always, my articles are meant to be the start of a discussion and your feedback is appreciated!

My framework is somewhat inspired by the “Strategic Framework” on the right, which I got from an excellent, but fat book, called “Valuation – Maximizing Corporate Value.” Along with explaining valuation very well, including what all the financial inputs mean and where (!) they can be found, it’s really meant to be a tool for building sound business-strategies. A good book for consultants, if you’re interested in a simple book on finance, and a concrete book on strategy (hard to find in that combo)!

Let’s do it!

Step 1 – the idea

This can really be sub-devided into three separate parts: the vision, the mission, and the plan. The vision is like the cloud in the sky which you spot while taking a walk. You don’t know if and how it will work yet. The mission is a long-lasting platform for you to run your company on; it’s a set of parameters, which come from both your values, your strengths, and your objectives, e.g. “I want my business to be fast, honest, and affordable.,” or Google’s: “…to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

The plan is not the business-plan per se, but the action plan that is something like this post here. It’s meant to be a set of steps that brings you from the idea to the business, and includes developing your business-idea, writing the business-plan, selecting the team, approaching investors & partners, where to locate, what technologies to use, etc.

Good knowledge to have at this stage: technical about your product, development, the industry; creative techniques; planning techniques.

Step 2 – a short market-research

Just to get an overview of the market and to what extent the problem you’re trying to solve is already being solved. I think step 1 needs to be quite far-developed before proceeding to step 2, because being confronted with a market filled with giants isn’t exactly a great motivator to develop your yet vapourous idea. The same applies to talking to other people (step 4), as those can be quite reality-distorting also.

So a short market-research, using mediums relevant to your industry. Google is always a good start, but sometimes you need to do a patent-search or a scholar-search for high-tech; at other times you need to look at Crunchbase for Web X.0; and sometimes a phone-book or the chamber of commerce databases for local stuff. And sometimes there’s no material out there (a very tricky situation!), in which case you need to look at substitutes for your product/service as well as new entrants from related industries. While that’s already substantial in terms of work, it helps with step 3: the pitch.

Good knowledge to have at this stage: marketing, both in terms of what to focus on, where to search for stuff, and how to write it up so that it makes sense.

Step 3: Pitch v. 1 – convincing your peers

The most important quality an entrepreneur must have is the ability to sell. And there’s a phrase in selling, which goes something like: you can’t sell what you don’t believe in… and vice versa. The more your idea is worked out, the more you know about the market, the more confident you can defend your ideas from the many, many sceptics that are out there.

A pitch v.1 needs to be a mini-business-plan of one to a few pages and include as much information as possible about the product, about how (you think) you will produce it, who you will (need to) hire, where you will be located, what need you are meeting, how you will market your product, how you will make money, how you will defend yourself from the competition. The more specific, the better!

And then that needs to be summarised into a pitch of ca. 2 mins, summarising all the vital data + a touch of personality & charisma!

Good knowledge to have at this stage: apart from the data from steps 1 & 2 (technical, marketing, your industry, your customers), you need some business-planning skills, which includes some (not much) financial techniques; as well as presentation skills & passion.

Step 4: find your team

There’s different philosophies about idea-generation (step 1), with many, I’m sure, arguing that you should be brainstorming with your friends on the idea from the start, that more heads have more/better ideas than one, etc. etc. I completely agree with this. But my philosophy is that without a clear direction, a team can quickly lose focus and follow political objectives, rather than pragmatic ones. While, I’ve been blessed with a few groups of people, where the chemistry was excellent and everyone was intelligent enough to be willing to listen & learn from others, many other groups have been a complete failure, because politics & brains definitely don’t always come hand in hand. So, I’m of the opinion, that an idea needs to be very well-developed & thought out before presenting it, after which it can be refined and adapted, and even rejected, according to the more specialised knowledge of group-members.

About finding team-members; for myself I have to say, after spending a long-long time on my thesis—a solitary activity—it’s not that easy. Again, networking, LinkedIN/Facebook, blogging, university (very important!), family, highschool-friends, former employers/co-workers, etc. , all good choices. Luckily for me, my thesis also brought me into contact with a large number of incubators, which are also good places to run into smart people; I worked for a venture-capital-tracking firm, ditto on the smart people; and there’s Tech IT Easy, Ditto 3x! So, really, never a shortage of smart people, when you look for them!

Good knowledge to have at this stage: material from steps 1-3; people-skills, in terms of choosing the right group of people; leadership & sales-skills; and the ability to form rational arguments & present your ideas well.

Step 5: write a business-plan

Read Jeremy’s post here.

Step 6: pitch v.2 – approaching early-stage investors

Somewhat different from later-stage investors, these are people you talk to, usually before launching your company (except maybe in web-world), and for which you don’t have that much tangible evidence to convince them with yet. So your pitch needs to be somewhat like pitch v.1 (step 3), but will include more data that you collected for your business-plan, but presented concisely and clearly showing how you will meet a need, how you plan to make your investors their money back + some more, how you will reduce the risk for them (very important!), and what you see their role to be in your business, apart from cash-cow—this only applies to active investors, such as business angels, not banks or subsidies, though not all business angels are able to be active (though they should always be able to help with contacts), and some bankers may surprise you.

Good knowledge to have at this stage: all the material from the previous steps, and similar skills as for pitch v.1. You need to speak a language that early-stage (!) investors understand!

Step 7: approaching early-stage investors

Banks & subsidies are easy to find, though sometimes you still need a little help and/or an intro; generally, banks want a lot of securities, sometimes already having a subsidy agreement and working with other, more experienced investors helps a great deal. Subsidies are a b*tch, as they make you do a lot of paper-work and impose some rules, and they generally work best for innovative, sustainable, or export-related ideas.

Business angels are a little harder. Usually, it helps going through trustworthy (& older) people that have built a network themselves. I can’t say more about that, except that entrepreneurs should avoid acting predatory and avoid predatory investors (both happen way too frequently), and you can mostly control the first (yourself), not so much the latter (though it helps going through someone you know).

Good knowledge to have at this stage: know your business-plan inside out; know how to present it and the financial data concisely; people-skills, in terms of evaluating the people you meet and selling yourself; having a network helps; having a good team in place helps a lot; having collateral helps with banks; having a tolerance for bureaucracy helps with subsidies, as does an association with a public research-institute (e.g. an incubator or your university).

Step 8: preparing an action-plan

Technically, this should’ve been part of your business-plan (step 5), but the point is that you now have money, you’ve made certain agreements based on it, and your objective is to use that money wisely to get your business off the ground. So now you need to decide what spending needs to be done, preferably as little as possible, and how to quickly get to the next stage. If you’re in web/software, you should already have a prototype, and focus on developing it, and build an early customer-base. In which case, you need someone to do the developing and someone to do the marketing/selling; usually technical staff outweighs the marketing staff at this stage, the latter often being the role of the entrepreneur himself. If you’re into high-tech, a prototype still needs to be built, which means technical work. This stage is really too specific to generalise; it depends on the type of product, business, and industry. Something in bio- or meditech, for instance, can take a decade to complete.

You also need to decide on whether your basement/garage will be enough, and on what type of legal protection your product needs, as well as the legal structure of your business. Which includes talking to lawyers, like this one.

Good knowledge to have at this stage: an understanding of what the new stakeholders in your business require; the ability to focus on what matters most for your business; a holistic understanding of a wide variety of business-matters, including hiring-practices, location-choice, development, legal & accounting tasks.

Step 9: spend (wisely)

Hire the people that you need, try to find smart ways to get smart people for cheap, either through internships, summer-programmes, or stock-options. And some smart people obviously need to be paid more or less what they are worth.

Locate cheaply while developing. For software, I’d suggest Eastern Europe, close to software-universities, but a basement in Paris/Berlin/London/Amsterdam also works of course, though both the location and the people will come at a premium. Important is to consider that many investors prefer you to be geographically accessible, as do customers.

Find viral ways to market, if you’re at that stage already. Thank you, internet, for existing, but free press also helps. Find smart ways to acquire customers, e.g. involve them in product-development, use them for word of mouth and case studies, partner up with good companies, etc. This is again very product-, company-, and industry-specific.

Build synergies between partnerships & investors; again really a step 7 problem, but it helps when your lawyer or your US/Asia-based marketeers are also investors. I’m also a fan of synergies in the HR-department; giving employees stock-options is not only cheaper, but also serves as a motivator. Of course always be careful who you choose to give part of your company to!

Good knowledge to have at this stage: everything from the steps until now; people-, negotiation- & management-skills, guts to market & sell; the dedication to work as many hours as it takes; etc.

Step 10: pitch v.3 – approaching round 2 (series A round) investors

While building your business, you should also build your business-plan and have a much better idea of the inputs for your valuation and the (projected) revenue-potential. And you should have surrounded yourself with a nice set of advisors and “network-nodes” that get your business-plan to be placed on top of a pile somewhere. You’ll still need a pitch of course, but that shouldn’t be a problem anymore at this stage.

Good knowledge to have at this stage: everything from before, especially how to pitch and what to pitch; and a network helps tremendously.

Step 11: round 2 (series A) investors

Bearing in mind that over 80% of businesses don’t make it this far, in theory, a business goes through a number of stages, before ultimately going public or being acquired. Web-businesses have distorted that process somewhat, as has the Enron-aftermath. But many early-stage investors may wish to be bought out at this point, an exit for them, and you may even want to do the same. VCs like replacing entrepreneurs with experienced CEOs, especially if the entrepreneur is a technical person, who will then likely be “promoted” to something like CTO or CIO. Investors do this because they have to account for the money they invest in you, and hence have to show their “bosses” that they do everything possible to mimimise people-risk.

While there are cultural & VC-specific differences, the risks that you need to have already covered here are usually both technology- and market-risk, translating into a workable product and one that preferably already has customers (lined up).

Good knowledge to have at this stage: either the ability to grow with the business; i.e. become more of a manager, less of an entrepreneur; or the ability to step back.

Step 12: launching the rocket-ship

A good VC will take your business far, and that’s where I’ll end it.

Some further reading

If you haven’t read enough already…

• “Valuation – Maximizing Corporate Value.”
• “Crossing the chasm” – on tech-marketing, -sales, and -strategy.
• Venture Hacks’ Term Sheet Hacks – on investors, mostly
• Ask the Wizard – on lot’s of interesting entrepreneurship problems
• TechITEasy.org – on lots of interesting tech & business-subjects, if you dig deep, i.e. use the search.

This may qualify as the longest post on Tech IT Easy, I don’t know. I think I covered the main topics on a global level and obviously there are plenty of feedback loops and some short-cuts, but please let me know if there’s things I missed!

Vincent

P.S. I’m always interested in building great companies, as well as discussing this topic. So if you’re a smart (tech-)person, looking for a biz dev. guy, or you just want to discuss you idea in confidence, feel free to give me a shout.

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 In chess, a gambetto – say it with an Italian accent, consists in sacrificing a piece at the beginning of a game to gain a competitive position on the exchequer – for example through the control of the center of the chessboard or one of the long diagonals.

Getting back to business (we’ll get back to the gambetto later), it is very common to say that the state of an economy is reflected by the strength of its currency when the Euro currency is weak – and hence that the economy of the EU are in poor shape. However, when the Euro gets stronger, companies and officials claim that corporations are constrained in their efforts to export goods and services and that the situation should be reversed or the EU will soon enter an economic turmoil.

I think this is all too easy and bullshit.

God Dollar used to be the only viable currency in international trade, until the Euro came out of nowhere in January 2000 (2001 for actual pocket coins and bills). The European Union is the world’s largest consumer market, and a gateway to the Middle East and Africa for American companies. Although the Dollar still dominates international transactions of goods (slightly) and financial transactions (easily), the Euro has emerged as a tangible alternative considering the political stability of the region.

Consequently, the Euro vs. US Dollar exchange rate has kept growing insanely from 1 EUR = USD 0.85 in mid 2000 (1 EUR = 1.19 USD on January 1st 2000) to 1 EURO = USD 1.47 USD today. Althoug I acknowledge the trickiness of the situation for export businesses, high tech or not, I see very few corporations have implemented hedging strategies or make proper use of forward contracts – which is a shame. Still, instead of lamenting, I believe economic decision makers of both the US and the EU should roll up their sleeves and act in such a way (hell yeah I’m even givin’ lessons now, love blogging…):

For US High Tech companies: go for internationalization. Acquiring hardware, software, telco devices, consumer electronics and services labeled in USD has never been cheaper. So why wait? I’m pretty sure any potential buyer would understand this reasoning. A weak USD is a fantastic opportunity for American exporters to thrive abroad, and win strategic, long-term projects. It doesn’t matter whether the profitability of these projects is low: what matters is to build reputation on new markets, or to highlight your competitive advantage against local players. Remember, the gambetto? Be ready to sacrifice a few cents today (anyways, the dollar rates so low that it’s no big loss whatsoever) to be in the real race when that moment comes.

For European high tech ventures: shop for intellectual property and talents in the US since the Euro has never been so strong against the US Dollar – which will make acquiring quality companies cheap, and build production capability in China and India (or go and get cheap but excellent developers in Eastern Europe, before the Euro comes there, or Israel) to reduce the cost of goods sold, enhance their competitiveness and therefore be ready for a shift during harsher economic times or win back market share on their competitors’ behalf. EU corporations, especially the big ones, find it hard to tear the P&L from the balance sheet and should learn to make better investments. Remember when the VCs said that few large European high tech corporations had a real, sound external growth strategy? Even though making the quarter may seem tough because of a strong Euro, acquiring today technologies that will generate tomorrow’s revenues boils down to ’sacrificing’ a small slice of the pie to weaken the competition, and build a better product offer for tomorrow. Gambetto again.

Now waiting for the Chinese Yuan to offer a third way…

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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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Tech IT Easy is dead, long live Tech IT Easy!

Today is our Independence Day: this blog is now fully accessible through www.techiteasy.org. All existing jeremyfain.wordpress.com/something trackbacks are automatically redirected to www.techiteasy.org/something. Our search engine referencing might suffer for a couple weeks, but since I noticed we have quite a captive audience (people coming back every single day are very, very numerous – like 600 / 900), it’s not going to get too bad.

Step by step, you will see my personal references (Flickr feed, CartoReso maybe, Developer Pages, Del.icio.us, blogroll) vanish to leave the Tech IT Easy community do what it has to do with this very blog.

When I find some time (most probably in July or August), the template will evolve and integrate external widgets.

Back to the Tech IT Easy vision:

A community blog where professionals passionate about technology (software, web, consumer electronics, eCommerce, media, hardware, robotics, telecommunications, computer networking – from both market & technology view points) share their thoughts and analyses with the world. The only rule that applies to all contributors is that there should be no rule whatsoever: no control, no hassle, no constraint. Once you’re in the community, you’re there forever unless you decide to leave it. The idea is not to go after TechCrunch, TechMeme, GigaOM, VentureBeat, Read/Write Web and their likes: rather than information, we deliver original content deeply rooted in the background of the authors. To say the least, we should complement existing tech information blogs rather than compete with them. On top of that, we are all amateurs and none of us blogging full-time, this should position us in quite a different way. Last but not least, we enjoy answering valuable comments and emails: one thing we all share is our willingness to stay close to our readers.

PS: just opened my personal blog in French, named Jeremy Fain in French. Accessible right here. I’ll be testing a new open source platform, after Wordpress for Tech IT Easy: DotClear2.

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You tell me!

In a few days, we will celebrate the first anniversary of Tech IT Easy. Although the growth of Tech IT Easy has overall been pretty amazing (+25% / month on average), it’s been slowing down a bit in May and beginning of June.

For next year (24th June 2007 –> 24th June 2008), I would like us (we’re a big and growing team now, a happy crowd) to multiply by 5 and move from 800 – 900 single visitors waters to 4000 – 5000 single visitors territories. Looks ambitious but since we’ve proofed our concept, I believe Tech IT Easy has what it takes to reach that milestone within 12 months.

I’m planning to take different steps to increase traffic:

• Host this blog ourselves to be able to incorporate the widgets we want in our sidebar and slightly change our layout (to make it look less sort of serious);
• Move to a proper techiteasy.org/blablabla address, keep jeremyfain.wordpress.com for myself only; my issue being that I’m not moving an inch until we find a solution not to loose our trackbacks. Any expert in the room?
• Hire more bloggers (goal: 35 tech-passionate bloggers in 18 months; how: no constraint whatsoever, publish whenever you want on the topic you want)
• Hiring direction: topic diversity matters (web experts, software buddies, develops, usability consultants, consultants, VC, entrepreneurs, sales, marketers, acad, etc.) as well as geographical diversity (still weak on Oceania, Asia, Mideast, Africa & Americas analysis coverage – very strong on Europe & South Pole innovation clusters)
• Bring in prominent bloggers publishing in their native language only (eg German, French, Italian, Spanish) or entrepreneurs who don’t have time to run a blog full-time to discuss their business with you contributors
• Organize a physical reunion of co-bloggers to strengthen links within our geeky community
• Evangelize shorter posts, alternating rogue news and in-depth analyses, and push towards embedding more videos?

In your opinion, what action should we take to go the extra mile? I’m not asking for praise, but for criticism: what’s wrong about Tech IT Easy? How would you improve things if you were on board (or if you are a Tech IT Easy blogger already)? Thank you in advance for your feedback. We’ll make sure we implement all relevant advice in reasonable time frames.

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Marseilles, Southern France, is a hot place for mobility start ups. The city has been investing heavily in promoting not only the warm climate but also the tremendous human capital & software capabilities in the region. So far, nothing so original, except this feeling of sincere and deep commitment from all the authorities there: the PACA (Provence Alpes Côtes d’Azur) region’s huge entrepreneurial potential cannot whatsoever be denied. I believe Marseilles will soon be a major player in the European software landscape.

One of the initiatives that struck me most when I visited Marseille’s innovation ecosystem a couple weeks ago was PACA Mobile Center, that I would definitely qualify as a regional best practice.

PACA Mobile Center stands on the highest floor of the incubator “Belle de Mai“, located a few hundred meters away from the central railway station from which Paris is 3 hours away only by TGV (French high speed train).

The purpose of PACA Mobile Center is to allow mobile start ups (undergoing, by definition, severe resource constraints) to test their solutions on all sorts of mobile devices available on the market (see picture).

The fee is symbolic as PACA Mobile Center is nothing else than a non-for-profit organization. The team (Alexandre & François Joseph) that manages the center seems really well organized and definitely is talented & cool.

Successful companies based in Marseille (Miyowa, an IDEAS program start up; Mobile Distillery) use the resources of the center, but not exclusively. Mobile companies travel from far away to make use of the PACA Mobile Center infrastructure – Paris-based & recent Microsoft acquisition ScreenTonic for instance.

PACA Mobile Center is a very unique initiative in Europe that I hope will be replicated to help mobility software entrepreneurs optimize the experience of their users.

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I’m about to organize a demonstration in the streets of Paris to protest about a software architect not blogging about software architecture.

My friend Youssef el Alaoui, aka Joseph Cargo when online, is a software architecture specialist in a Paris-based consultancy. And you know what? Youssef has blogged about everything (politics, books, TV shows, education, EVERYTHING!!) but software architecture. I’ve blackmailed him, and I even removed him from my blogroll. And he still doesn’t blog about software architecture.

Youssef, listen to me if you don’t start writing about software architecture in English, I am to organize the biggest online wildcat strike action ever.

People, readers, dear friends and enemies, let’s all post the following comment, “Youssef, I love you”, on his blog until he starts writing about software architecture.

I badly want to read the interesting things he’s got to say about it.

Come on Youss, do it!

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It’s not the ‘what’ or the ‘which’, it is the ‘how’. Desktop applications haven’t killed server applications: the former has taken the lead over the latter but server apps have in no way disappeared. Both technologies cooperate, collaborate & co-exist.

The same will go for web applications: Software as a Service won’t kill desktop applications, although the desktop apps business is necessarily to suffer from the rise of web apps. Just like server software suffered from the introduction of client software.

People are starting to have the choice to either use client software (desktop applications), or service software (SaaS, web apps), or both. The decision could be compared to purchasing and using a car vs. taking the subway – or both.

Using client software is like purchasing and driving a car: it is a true investment that is either pleasure-driven or efficiency-driven. The sales cycle may result pretty long, but you’re likely to get a discount. Maintainability (upgrades, support, administration) and energy supply (gas = electricity supply to host servers) can be costly , but in the long run, the availability rate should be pretty high (no need for Internet access to use it). The main hassle of using a car is probably the time it takes to find a parking space (hard drive space). A car can be pretty comfortable, customized (parameterized), and is a consistent choice when making a long trip. Furthermore, there’s no pickpocket in a car (better data security: hosted on site) but it is likely that you’re not going to meet many people (not so collaborative after all).

Using service software is like taking the Subway: you pay as you go (ticket) if you don’t travel so often, or you pay a subscription (monthly or yearly metro card); it’s pretty cheap and one may not negotiate prices. It might be quite unsafe sometimes (unless there are many security agents and then you feel like watched). However, it’s pretty handy, certainly more democratic, but available only in certain areas (big cities). Subways sometimes may not be so reliable (strikes), or comfortable (lots of traffic), but with the right state of mind, you’re certain to meet people. Last thing: the subway runs all the time and not only when you’re in the process of using it.

From this parallelism, I would like to draw 2 sorts of conclusions:

1. the generalization of subways in all metropolis hasn’t constrained the democratization of the use of cars. A growing and everyday more globalized world is no zero-sum game: both Software as a Service and client applications markets will keep on growing.
2. people living in cities (in our parallelism, people who have the choice ie well-off enough to be able to access the Internet) tend to be huge fans of cars, if they have a car at all. But pay well attention to car owners consuming habits and you’ll notice that in many, but very specific, occasions they choose to take the subway rather than driving. In other words, car drivers use a mix of both worlds to go from one point to another.

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Unlike in the software industry, 0-default in terms of integration is the quality standard of aeronautic giants Airbus, Boeing, Dassault, Cessna and Embraer.

It takes thousands of suppliers to manufacture a plane. And guess what? Suppliers don’t immediately get paid for their work. Airbus, for instance, has built risk sharing partnerships with all its suppliers to reduce its working capital and enhance interest alignment.

But what is a risk sharing partnership? Basically, for each plane sold to an airline company, the supplier gets a percentage of the revenues corresponding to the relative value in complexity and workload it has put into the project. As an example, Messier Bugatti wouldn’t get paid when it ships carbon brakes, but would receive x% of all revenues derived from Airbus using Messier Bugatti’s aeronautical braking systems – x most probably being the result of both a negotiation and a cost breakdown analysis.

When it comes to hacking code, it seems so many complains about offshore development quality that it’s the responsibility of both software module suppliers and their clients (quality’s usually good when the client know what it takes to manage a project) to define new business models to align interests of all parties involved in information system projects. For instance: fee per SQL request, percentage of each transaction, percentage of each sale in B-to-B markets, etc. I don’t abide anymore by the paid-per-man/day dogma: it lacks the handcuffs to help invisible contractors turn into business partners.

In my opinion, risk sharing partnerships represent an elegant solution to the drawbacks of offshore development.

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You don’t steal what you bash!

On the one hand, I see many people using cracked versions of (amongst others and for instance) Microsoft Vista and Microsoft Office 2007. These people often pride themselves by saying they never bought a software from Microsoft apart from OEM versions. And on the other hand, the very same people spend a lot of energy, saliva and time knocking to (for instance) Microsoft software.

After watching this type of behavior for several years and giving it some thought, I now systematically step against these people and engage discussions based on the following rationale. you can’t steal products from a company and criticize it at the same time. If you criticize these products so harshly, it may well mean you don’t need these products. So why download and crack these?

By stealing a product from a company (be it software or cheese), you actually disfranchise this company to a revenue equaling the price of the product. This revenue would have been partially reinvested in building a better version of the very same product. Those who pay have the right to criticize because they contribute to improving the product. Those who steal have in my opinion no right to criticize the product as having these pirates saying “this product sucks and is getting worse” is a self fulfilling prophecy. Indeed, how do these guys want this product to get any better if the company that manufactures it doesn’t have the revenues to reinvest in building a better product? Where do product teams find the motivation to give their best, take their work the extra mile?

Things get even worse in the very case of software applications. Quite understandably, Pirates hardly register to the software vendor. So, the software vendor don’t get user feedback from these users – meaning not only do software pirates prevent software vendors from cash they would need to reinvest in building a better version fast, but crackers also harm the capability of software vendors to collect accurate market data and work in the right direction. Hence the fact that pirates also harm the user experience of people who actually purchase software in the mid run. Isn’t that sort of behavior called killing 3 birds with 1 shot?

Let’s briefly examine the case of Microsoft now: I don’t know the exact software license piracy rate figures, but I know the French ones (40%) and the Chinese ones (70%). Let’s be optimistic and assume the global license cracking rate to approach the 1/3 waters (and I’m being very optimistic). So, Microsoft making US$44 billion in revenues from selling software licenses representing 2/3 of the revenues it should have generated means true Microsoft’s sales (net of piracy) should reach 66 billion US dollars.

As structural costs are already taken into account and the marginal software distribution cost is negligible, and providing that the utopia of seeing piracy suddenly stop came true, Microsoft would have JUST THIS YEAR 22 billion US dollars of additional free cash flows to work on improving its applications (recruiting more developers, investing in better CRM, support and feedback collection system, etc.) and working on building better communication channels with its software users. 22 billion USD in one single year, that’s a massive amount you crackers steal from we users who actually pay for the software we use (and not necessarily always like, I acknowledge). Because it’s 3:30am (still with a pile of stuff to do for tomorrow) and I don’t have accurate numbers to crunch, I’m not delving into the all times cost-of-piracy-at-Microsoft calculation, but I guess it easily tops 100 billion USD. This sum of money could also be used to offer software rental services in Africa for instance, to help democratize the use of computers. But there’s no way you would spend the slightest penny on a product, like a software app, that is not material – am I right?

I hope I’m making my point: if you do crack software (like something like one third of the world computer literate population does), then criticizing the software itself and its vendor is, in the eyes of many and hopefully yours now, at an ethical border line.

And yet, the law hasn’t been mentioned in any way in this demonstration…

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