Ten Geek Business Myths

hpcanswers writes "Venture capitalist Ron Garret has posted a list of eleven (despite the title) common mistakes entrepreneurs with a technology background make. A common theme is that good ideas sell; in reality, what a customer wants sells. By extension, having a Ph.D. and holding a patent are not particularly helpful if the intended end-user does not have the same level of understanding of the widget as the creator does."

Comments

Quick list of the Myths

[zepo1a]

In case of a /.ing

Myth #1: A brilliant idea will make you rich.
Myth #2: If you build it they will come.
Myth #3: Someone will steal your idea if you don't protect it.
Myth #4: What you think matters.
Myth #5: Financial models are bogus.
Myth #6: What you know matters more than who you know.
Myth #7: A Ph.D. means something.
Myth #7: I need $5 million to start my business
Myth #8: The idea is the most important part of my business plan.
Myth #9: Having no competition is a good thing.
Myth #10: After the IPO I'll be happy.

Re:I'll go for your lesser challenge of five...

[squiggleslash]

TOS and Kickstart already had IP-Stacks.

Well, in the sense they were available, yes, but the guy was talking about Microsoft going one step further and bundling it. I never owned an Atari ST, but I can tell you that none of the TCP/IP stacks for the Amiga were ever bundled with it in Commodore's lifetime.

AS225, Commodore's own stack, was never even released outside of a handful of developers. Amiga users had to rely upon AmiTCP or KA9Q (renamed "AmigaNOS") to get it to work. AmiTCP was free software (BSD license, IIRC) up until the 3.0 betas, but controvertially went shareware with version 4. KA9Q was... uh... yeah. You didn't want to use it.

To go on to other mainstream platforms of the time: So far as I'm aware, it wasn't until the late nineties that MacOS had a stack bundled with it. Stacks were available before 1990, largely due to the Mac's entrenchment in academia, but they weren't bundled with the system. OS/2 Warp 3 "came with" a TCP/IP "stack", but for consumer versions it was close to useless. It only supported SLIP, and wasn't modular, so you couldn't just add a device driver for your Ethernet card (or just PPP) and it'd work, you'd have to throw the entire stack out and buy the premium version from IBM.

So really, other than Unix, no mainstream operating systems came bundled with a full TCP/IP stack until Windows 95 did. I hate to say it, and maybe it'd have happened anyway, but Microsoft did pioneer there.