A chip on my shoulder has nothing to do with it. I've never been screwed by eBay. I simply can't get over the stupidity of people continuing to use eBay time after time after time, even though eBay fraud, I'm betting, outweighs all other online fraud combined. Everybody knows somebody that was fucked by eBay, yet so many people, even tech-saavy people, continue going back for more. It's sheer stupidity and greed on the part of buyers looking to save that extra nickel, and quite honestly, it disgusts me.
I haven't used eBay to buy or sell anything, *ever*, and I'm still alive. Can you believe it? Not only am I alive, but I'd consider myself a happy, relatively well-adjusted individual. You should also try it! I've *never* been scammed at all!
Actually, I was gonna say that with all of these massive drives, that data loss will be accordingly more massive. I'll take 5 smaller drives on RAID over one big, cheap drive any day. There's really no price that can be put on lost data (usually). 160GB, even, for a single drive, is a LOT of data (unless it's stored in XML, in which case it may just be a single phone number).
I managed to turn a $25K credit card into a $1mil+/year business in 3 years. Now, granted, that's very, very unusual, but the same principles apply.
The way I'd do a software start-up:
- Keep current job. Unless you're wealthy, you still need income. Don't expect a dime of income for 6 months-year. Work 8 hours a day, and program on nights and the weekends. If you expect ANY free tiem for the first few years, you'll be sorely disappointed. Imagine a newborn baby, but maybe twins.
- No office. They're a complete waste of money. Work at home and meet clients at your local coffee shop. An office is a luxury that you can get any time.
- For a server, grab a used PC for $100. Unless you're doing intensive graphics, or biological number crunching a "server" is a waste.
- Payroll: None. Either do it yourself, or bring in partners. But to expect to be paid at the beginning is unrealistic to the extreme. Remember, you don't even know if your idea is going to generate a nickel at the beginning.
- Food: Ramen Noodles and peanut butter.
I'm completely serious about this. This is how most successful start-ups work. Why? Because with lots of cash at the beginning (like $100K), you don't need to worry about costs, and that's a great way to start a terrible habit. Learn how cheaply you can run your business and still get by early on. Bust your ass, and *make* it work. There's no incentive to make it work if you've got tons of other people's money. Most companies also don't get any kind of financing right out of the gate. We're 3 years old, and just now looking for our first outside investors, and that's considred premature for most new businesses. We can do it beause we've had very strong growth, and most importantly: PROFIT.
What I'm describing is incredibly difficult, but it's the usual way successful companies are formed. Most of those dot-bombs with millions and millions blew threw it at an obscene rate, and still never generated a single dime of income.
What about a free e-book reader financed by advertising?
That may work great, but it still doesn't address the demand issue. There's simply not many people demanding e-books, no matter how good they are. E-Books are a product looking for a need to fill. Even with useless products that have no real demand (ie: plastic balls you throw in your washing machine that "dispense" detergent), the marketing department of the company creates a demand ("You HAVE to have this product"). E-books have been thrown out there with little to no promotion with a "if we build it, they will come" mentality that doesn't work if there's no demand already there.
Unfortunately, the scope of some business plans make self-funding impossible for those of us without a couple million sitting in the bank.
You're right. Some business plans, generally those that involve manufacturing, will take a good bit of cash. Software companies have extremely low barriers to entry, and thus software companies should not need very much at all. I can't even begin to understand why VC's would think that a software company would need any more than $50K to start.
My retail business was started with a credit card a few years ago. And with that credit card, I had to pay rent, upfit the location, buy inventory, buy a point-of-sale system, etc.
And how, exactly, does searching for information have even the slightest bit to do with applications? If I need a spreadsheet, I need Excel. I can't create spreadsheets with Froogle or Google Maps. If I need to find information x, MS Word isn't going to do squat for me. They're completely unrelated, other than both being computer-related products. It's kinda' like saying that the invention of the sink would make the toilet obsolete. Sure, they both involve running water and drains, but they serve completely different needs, in which one product is in no way a substitute for another.
I don't have to justify myself to you, and I'm not about to get into some sort of dick measuring contest. Suffice to say that your cluelessness is absolutely overwhelming.
OLPC Chairman Nicholas Negroponte said, "Any previous doubt that a very-low-cost laptop could be made for education in the developing world has just gone away."
My doubt will go away once somebody actually makes one of these things for less than $100. At this point, nobody has said that it's actually possible. The company that just signed on, signed on to RESEARCH whether this is even possible. Negroponte says that it'll work as long as component makers are willing to knock 70-80% off of their prices, which is unrealistic, to say the least.
This is mentioned in other posts, but not all poor nations are "bushmen and widebeests." Generalizing the situation into "bushmen" trying to communicate with other "bushmen" is a bit narrow minded.
Ok, then if helping the poorest people of the world isn't the point of the program, then who in the hell is it supposed to help? I don't see any plans to ship these $100 laptops to urban kids in the US in inner cities that could actually use them. The poorest people in the world don't have water and food. My guess is that there are many millions of people on the planet who have never even seen a computer. How is giving them a cheap laptop supposed to help them, exactly? Are people working in India to break down giant cargo ships supposed to teach themselves how to program? Are diamond miners supposed to know what in the hell wi-fi is? This whole idea is so absolutely ridiculous that I don't even know where to start. The organizers are so completely out of touch with reality that it borders on insulting.
Quanta says the goal is achievable, "if MIT can reach an agreement with component manufacturers to supply components which are 70-80 percent cheaper".
70-80%? That's a pretty huge if. So then a company making, say, power cables that has a gross profit margin of 10% is going to somehow reduce their prices 70-80%? How is that economically possible? How is MIT going to convince companies to lose massive amounts of money? I'll believe it when I see it.
What better way to free a people then to allow them the means to learn how to grow the food or purify the water? What I'm trying to say is that teaching someone how to help themselves is worth more than you helping them along their entire lives.
Any idea as to the literacy rates in these areas? Somehow, I find it absolutely absurd that a person who lives in the bush somewhere in Central Africa is going to Google "manual water purification systems", whip out a credit card, and have one sent to them from Amazon. Or potentially find a web page written by another bushman describing the best way to skin a wildebeest.
The manufacturer wasn't picked. A company to investigate how this thing could be manufactured was picked. No company has yet to say that this is even possible. This is still ivory tower, public reltations mumbo jumbo at this stage.
:) Yeah, I can't imagine MS, with their "monopoly" issues saying otherwise... hell, or any large corporation, *especially* a consumer-oriented one for that matter.
Ford Motors: "We disklike all competition. We'd rather be the only car manufacturer on the planet."
That'd go over like a lead balloon with the public.
+5 Funny. Seriously, I've never seen an ODF document, Open Office, nor do any of my customers or vendors use them. I'd say that you're wrong abuot ODF being a standard.
And as far as PDF goes, we don't allow PDF's in our business, yet we get along just fine. How do you explain that, exactly?
That standard for Office documents is MS Office. Saying otherwise doesn't make it true.
How unusual... a business not liking having competition.... hmmm... did you go to business school at the Velvet Jones School of Bidness, by any chance? Any company that says that they do love their competition is in collusion with their competitors (Coke and Pepsi), so there isn't any real competition, anyway.
You're right, and that being said, there's erally nothing revolutionary about either eBay or Google. They didn't do anything unique, they just did it better than their competitors. Of course, anybody with any kind of business background would know that most highly successful businesses aren't necessarily revolutionary, but instead they're often a one-off company. There was lots and lots and lots of search before Google. Google did it better. eBay was definitely not the first auction site. Hell, they're not even very good at what they do. I have no idea how eBay got so many brain dead zombies to follow them. But right now, it's inertia. Their product is actually pretty rotten.
IBM can talk the talk all day but at the end of the day regardless of all the Linux lip service they really don't walk the walk, and probably never will.
I haven't been an IBM employee for several years, but the friends I still have at IBM say that IBM still isn't eating its own food. They're pretty well standardized with Windows 2000/XP across all of their internal desktops and many of their lower end servers. You'd think that a company beating the OSS drum so violently would at least get Linux working on their own desktops. As it is, the people that I know who work at IBM (sysadmins) have never even seen Linux running on any machines at IBM or otherwise. But maybe they really are pushing OSS heavily on the high end and just ignoring OSS for middle and lightweight applications. It's entirely possible.
"And while we're at it, we're pepetuating the myth that NOTHING trumps price when buying a product. Screw customer service, reputation, shipping time, return policies, reliability, selection, etc., it's ALL ABOUT THE MONEY."
And to be quite honest, Slashdot has more price whores reading and posting than I've ever seen in one place. It's all a race to the absolute bottom, isn't it?
Our business doesn't bother with Amazon, Pricegrabber, and all of the others because they do -zero- for brand recognition, and they encourage competition on pure price, which is bad for businesses, and ultimately (think long term, people), bad for consumers. Many of the businesses that advertise through these services are here today, gone tomorrow because in the race to the bottom, other minor things like making a profit are often overlooked. My business has good prices, but if somebody is interested in buying elsewhere (online or a big box store) because of a $0.25 price difference, quite honestly, we don't want their business, and we'll gladly give them directions to our competition. And, unless they're living in a cardboard box, we get most of those customers back once they realize that saving that nickel isn't worth all of the other headache involved.
I agree. Along those same lines, I happen to have a 1954 Alfa Romeo, and you can't get those plastic window rain gutter things to fit them. They don't make them to fit my car! Those stupid window rain gutter people are not going to get my business, or any other business from 1954 Alfa Romeo owners. Bastards!
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A chip on my shoulder has nothing to do with it. I've never been screwed by eBay. I simply can't get over the stupidity of people continuing to use eBay time after time after time, even though eBay fraud, I'm betting, outweighs all other online fraud combined. Everybody knows somebody that was fucked by eBay, yet so many people, even tech-saavy people, continue going back for more. It's sheer stupidity and greed on the part of buyers looking to save that extra nickel, and quite honestly, it disgusts me.
I've got a better suggestion:Don't use eBay
I haven't used eBay to buy or sell anything, *ever*, and I'm still alive. Can you believe it? Not only am I alive, but I'd consider myself a happy, relatively well-adjusted individual. You should also try it! I've *never* been scammed at all!
I now only buy things for $20 or less on ebay.
That'll show them! You're such a good little consumer. You lose $1,500, and you still go back for more. That's fucking amazing.
Actually, I was gonna say that with all of these massive drives, that data loss will be accordingly more massive. I'll take 5 smaller drives on RAID over one big, cheap drive any day. There's really no price that can be put on lost data (usually). 160GB, even, for a single drive, is a LOT of data (unless it's stored in XML, in which case it may just be a single phone number).
And cats. Especially cats.
Actually, I live in an expensive college town.
I managed to turn a $25K credit card into a $1mil+/year business in 3 years. Now, granted, that's very, very unusual, but the same principles apply.
The way I'd do a software start-up:
- Keep current job. Unless you're wealthy, you still need income. Don't expect a dime of income for 6 months-year. Work 8 hours a day, and program on nights and the weekends. If you expect ANY free tiem for the first few years, you'll be sorely disappointed. Imagine a newborn baby, but maybe twins.
- No office. They're a complete waste of money. Work at home and meet clients at your local coffee shop. An office is a luxury that you can get any time.
- For a server, grab a used PC for $100. Unless you're doing intensive graphics, or biological number crunching a "server" is a waste.
- Payroll: None. Either do it yourself, or bring in partners. But to expect to be paid at the beginning is unrealistic to the extreme. Remember, you don't even know if your idea is going to generate a nickel at the beginning.
- Food: Ramen Noodles and peanut butter.
I'm completely serious about this. This is how most successful start-ups work. Why? Because with lots of cash at the beginning (like $100K), you don't need to worry about costs, and that's a great way to start a terrible habit. Learn how cheaply you can run your business and still get by early on. Bust your ass, and *make* it work. There's no incentive to make it work if you've got tons of other people's money. Most companies also don't get any kind of financing right out of the gate. We're 3 years old, and just now looking for our first outside investors, and that's considred premature for most new businesses. We can do it beause we've had very strong growth, and most importantly: PROFIT.
What I'm describing is incredibly difficult, but it's the usual way successful companies are formed. Most of those dot-bombs with millions and millions blew threw it at an obscene rate, and still never generated a single dime of income.
What about a free e-book reader financed by advertising?
That may work great, but it still doesn't address the demand issue. There's simply not many people demanding e-books, no matter how good they are. E-Books are a product looking for a need to fill. Even with useless products that have no real demand (ie: plastic balls you throw in your washing machine that "dispense" detergent), the marketing department of the company creates a demand ("You HAVE to have this product"). E-books have been thrown out there with little to no promotion with a "if we build it, they will come" mentality that doesn't work if there's no demand already there.
Unfortunately, the scope of some business plans make self-funding impossible for those of us without a couple million sitting in the bank.
You're right. Some business plans, generally those that involve manufacturing, will take a good bit of cash. Software companies have extremely low barriers to entry, and thus software companies should not need very much at all. I can't even begin to understand why VC's would think that a software company would need any more than $50K to start.
My retail business was started with a credit card a few years ago. And with that credit card, I had to pay rent, upfit the location, buy inventory, buy a point-of-sale system, etc.
And how, exactly, does searching for information have even the slightest bit to do with applications? If I need a spreadsheet, I need Excel. I can't create spreadsheets with Froogle or Google Maps. If I need to find information x, MS Word isn't going to do squat for me. They're completely unrelated, other than both being computer-related products. It's kinda' like saying that the invention of the sink would make the toilet obsolete. Sure, they both involve running water and drains, but they serve completely different needs, in which one product is in no way a substitute for another.
E-Books: Negligible demand.
Advertising e-paper: High demand.
I don't have to justify myself to you, and I'm not about to get into some sort of dick measuring contest. Suffice to say that your cluelessness is absolutely overwhelming.
OLPC Chairman Nicholas Negroponte said, "Any previous doubt that a very-low-cost laptop could be made for education in the developing world has just gone away."
My doubt will go away once somebody actually makes one of these things for less than $100. At this point, nobody has said that it's actually possible. The company that just signed on, signed on to RESEARCH whether this is even possible. Negroponte says that it'll work as long as component makers are willing to knock 70-80% off of their prices, which is unrealistic, to say the least.
This is mentioned in other posts, but not all poor nations are "bushmen and widebeests." Generalizing the situation into "bushmen" trying to communicate with other "bushmen" is a bit narrow minded.
Ok, then if helping the poorest people of the world isn't the point of the program, then who in the hell is it supposed to help? I don't see any plans to ship these $100 laptops to urban kids in the US in inner cities that could actually use them. The poorest people in the world don't have water and food. My guess is that there are many millions of people on the planet who have never even seen a computer. How is giving them a cheap laptop supposed to help them, exactly? Are people working in India to break down giant cargo ships supposed to teach themselves how to program? Are diamond miners supposed to know what in the hell wi-fi is? This whole idea is so absolutely ridiculous that I don't even know where to start. The organizers are so completely out of touch with reality that it borders on insulting.
How is this racist? What in the hell are you talking about?
Quanta says the goal is achievable, "if MIT can reach an agreement with component manufacturers to supply components which are 70-80 percent cheaper".
70-80%? That's a pretty huge if. So then a company making, say, power cables that has a gross profit margin of 10% is going to somehow reduce their prices 70-80%? How is that economically possible? How is MIT going to convince companies to lose massive amounts of money? I'll believe it when I see it.
What better way to free a people then to allow them the means to learn how to grow the food or purify the water? What I'm trying to say is that teaching someone how to help themselves is worth more than you helping them along their entire lives.
Any idea as to the literacy rates in these areas? Somehow, I find it absolutely absurd that a person who lives in the bush somewhere in Central Africa is going to Google "manual water purification systems", whip out a credit card, and have one sent to them from Amazon. Or potentially find a web page written by another bushman describing the best way to skin a wildebeest.
The manufacturer wasn't picked. A company to investigate how this thing could be manufactured was picked. No company has yet to say that this is even possible. This is still ivory tower, public reltations mumbo jumbo at this stage.
:) Yeah, I can't imagine MS, with their "monopoly" issues saying otherwise... hell, or any large corporation, *especially* a consumer-oriented one for that matter.
Ford Motors: "We disklike all competition. We'd rather be the only car manufacturer on the planet."
That'd go over like a lead balloon with the public.
There are two standards already. ODF and PDF.
+5 Funny. Seriously, I've never seen an ODF document, Open Office, nor do any of my customers or vendors use them. I'd say that you're wrong abuot ODF being a standard.
And as far as PDF goes, we don't allow PDF's in our business, yet we get along just fine. How do you explain that, exactly?
That standard for Office documents is MS Office. Saying otherwise doesn't make it true.
How unusual... a business not liking having competition.... hmmm... did you go to business school at the Velvet Jones School of Bidness, by any chance? Any company that says that they do love their competition is in collusion with their competitors (Coke and Pepsi), so there isn't any real competition, anyway.
You're right, and that being said, there's erally nothing revolutionary about either eBay or Google. They didn't do anything unique, they just did it better than their competitors. Of course, anybody with any kind of business background would know that most highly successful businesses aren't necessarily revolutionary, but instead they're often a one-off company. There was lots and lots and lots of search before Google. Google did it better. eBay was definitely not the first auction site. Hell, they're not even very good at what they do. I have no idea how eBay got so many brain dead zombies to follow them. But right now, it's inertia. Their product is actually pretty rotten.
IBM can talk the talk all day but at the end of the day regardless of all the Linux lip service they really don't walk the walk, and probably never will.
I haven't been an IBM employee for several years, but the friends I still have at IBM say that IBM still isn't eating its own food. They're pretty well standardized with Windows 2000/XP across all of their internal desktops and many of their lower end servers. You'd think that a company beating the OSS drum so violently would at least get Linux working on their own desktops. As it is, the people that I know who work at IBM (sysadmins) have never even seen Linux running on any machines at IBM or otherwise. But maybe they really are pushing OSS heavily on the high end and just ignoring OSS for middle and lightweight applications. It's entirely possible.
"And while we're at it, we're pepetuating the myth that NOTHING trumps price when buying a product. Screw customer service, reputation, shipping time, return policies, reliability, selection, etc., it's ALL ABOUT THE MONEY."
And to be quite honest, Slashdot has more price whores reading and posting than I've ever seen in one place. It's all a race to the absolute bottom, isn't it?
Our business doesn't bother with Amazon, Pricegrabber, and all of the others because they do -zero- for brand recognition, and they encourage competition on pure price, which is bad for businesses, and ultimately (think long term, people), bad for consumers. Many of the businesses that advertise through these services are here today, gone tomorrow because in the race to the bottom, other minor things like making a profit are often overlooked. My business has good prices, but if somebody is interested in buying elsewhere (online or a big box store) because of a $0.25 price difference, quite honestly, we don't want their business, and we'll gladly give them directions to our competition. And, unless they're living in a cardboard box, we get most of those customers back once they realize that saving that nickel isn't worth all of the other headache involved.
I agree. Along those same lines, I happen to have a 1954 Alfa Romeo, and you can't get those plastic window rain gutter things to fit them. They don't make them to fit my car! Those stupid window rain gutter people are not going to get my business, or any other business from 1954 Alfa Romeo owners. Bastards!
And it's name is COURIER. Nothing else works in Lunix, anyway.
Luckily, Linux isn't even on many web designers' radar. I know that my sites certainly don't get tested on any kind of Linux box.