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New Golden Age for Outside-the-Box Startups?
jg21 writes "A brief essay on the SOA Web Services Journal claims there is a new phenomenon among startups, the 'momentary enterprise'. The article defines the term as a business that 'takes advantage of an opportunity that may only exist for months'. The piece claims that we're entering a golden age of technologies that can be glued together to create new types of information that fill an identifiable need. On example given is VOware like Groove, which is likened to IM on steroids. From the article: 'The ingredients for another wave of new companies are all around us - pervasively all around us. They include new wireless extensions of the wired network and the further exportation of technologies such as XML.' Intriguingly optimistic."
The bit in the article about how XML will solve all our data interchange problems is particularly curious. C'mon, it's just text files with a bunch of angle brackets, when it gets right down to it.
Sure they had a plan.
It was to have their company bought out by Yahoo and become instant billionaires.
The plan this time seems to actually create a working company and then watch it go bust within a year.
I suppose you can go after the principals, but if most of the money came from (and went to) a set of legally-insulated investors (e.g., in an LLC), then the managers of the company won't be the deep pockets that lawyers love. Can a dissolved entity be reconstituted (and money taken back from investors) if that company is later found liable for something?
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
My take is that it means: "Think like a start-up. (1) Identify a need that exists now. (2)Solve it. (3)Make some money (Profit!). (4)Stop."
If you're providing eg an online calendar sharing tool, your business should consist of (1) the application developers (2) the people (person) marketing & selling the tool and collecting the income. Develop it once, sell it for a year, then stop.
Any business that's in it for the long haul will inevitably build up all the admin overhead of HR, ISO-9001 teams, canteen staff, janitors, strategy co-ordinators, as well as releasing more version with increased functionality until it includes a word-processor and a newsreader.
The world has changed and we all have become metal men.
Actually, it adds markup capabilities to a Unicode text stream, something that previous markup/structured data representation technologies had troubles to do in a robust and standardized manner (even XML 1.0 itself has issues with that).
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
The problem with conference calls and meetings is mainly that the people calling them typically don't understand how to hold a productive one (and therefore may call them unnecessarily, leading to overuse). There are an incredibly large number of ways to hold unproductive calls and meetings, but the window within which one can hold a productive call or meeting is very small.
As a traveling consultant, I spend a lot of time on calls, and I can tell you that there are a lot of calls that just distract me and accomplish nothing. However, there are also a large number of calls that are the only way to resolve issues involving multiple decision makers. Without those calls, I would also accomplish nothing.
I've seen a week's worth of e-mail debate get resolved in a five-minute conference call with the right people involved and the right chairperson. I think what we really need is just for more people to understand what meetings should and should not be used for, and how you can actually make a meeting useful.
That really sounds like the way some R&D and games are done. Come together, do something, disband. Just the core infrastructure stays the same. There is one thing that makes this much easier. Technology, and a good support structure. Note that a small company can easily be put together from leased and rented parts and services. The only part that doesn't deal with quick change is of course, government.
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BTW From a wannabe businessman to a businessman. I'm looking at starting a SOHO doing software appliances. Maybe using something like Vista since this city is heavy on the medical community. e.g. hospitals, doctors offices, even universities (UIPUI, Butler).
Any advice on getting started?