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Make More Mistakes

Posted by michael on from the easy-enough dept.

prostoalex writes "Eric Sink from SourceGear, well-known in the open-source world for AbiWord Suite, shares his thoughts on starting and running a software business. One of the keys to a successful business, as Thomas J. Watson once said, was to double the rate of failures. Eric Sink tells the story of what mistakes he personally made, what could be avoided, and what's important for geeks to know when starting a software company."

16 of 262 comments (clear)

  1. I'll get right on that- by squarefish · · Score: 1, Funny

    thanks for the encouragement!

    ;)

    --
    Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
  2. msdn? by prof187 · · Score: 1, Funny

    i nearly shat myself when i saw that

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    My other sig is an import.
    1. Re:msdn? by endx7 · · Score: 2, Funny

      Yes..msdn would be mistake #1.

  3. Re:Software Company vs Restaurant by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Basically if I had the money, I would start a gym, a club, a bar, a restaurant, a stripe club...
    A stripe club would fail! (I know I wouldn't want to be "spotted" in one!)

  4. My first mistake.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    ...was trying to read an MSDN article with Opera. Sends you to the deeptreeconfig.xml gulag.

    1. Re:My first mistake.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      You talk about gulag and nobody has posted a in-soviet-russia joke yet? /me is surprised ...

      .

  5. Re:Software Company vs Restaurant by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 3, Funny

    I don't know, I started a restaurant for people with anorexia : the amount of investment is limited, I can do the cooking myself, and I don't need much base products. That allows me to offer the cheapest price in town for a full 4-course meal.

    --
    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
  6. Easy! by niko9 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Post alot of Ask Slashdot's, and take the advice seriously. :P

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  7. Re:What's important to know by morganjharvey · · Score: 4, Funny

    I think investors also like it when numbers add up to 100. Right now you're at 100.000002525 %. ;)

  8. wrong title by arcanumas · · Score: 2, Funny

    Am i the only one who thinks that it would be more appropriate for /. to write it "Make more Mistaeks" ? :)

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  9. Make More Mistakes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    And when you're done, be sure to
    make clean

  10. $ make more-mistakes by Heidistein · · Score: 2, Funny

    make: *** No rule to make target `more-mistakes'. Stop.

  11. Ok, I like coffee too but... by mo · · Score: 3, Funny

    From the article:
    It involves market research and number crunching and presentations and conjecture and coffee, all of which are critical elements of business success.

    All too often these days companies place too much emphasis on market research and number crunching and not enough emphasis on coffee.

  12. Make More Mistakes! by sklib · · Score: 2, Funny

    I think we've finally uncovered SCO's core business model.

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    -S
  13. Re:What's important to know by afroborg · · Score: 2, Funny

    Do the maths again, but do it properly this time. Don't just add up every number you can see...

    --
    my sig could kick your sig's arse...
  14. Re:What's important to know by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    damn this old pentium CPU!