Fri Nov 23/ 2007 – 11:18 am MST
Vendor Hide and Seek
One of the challenges that has emerged over the past 15 years of software proliferation has been that software comes and goes. In part, that is the inevitable evolution of capability and functionality. In part it is driven by users demand for ever greater leverage of their investments in information technology. And in part, it is multiplied by the advances in communication, featuring, naturally, the internet. When you buy a house, you don’t expect to come home one day, and find that it has vanished, and so has its builder! Read More »
Tue Nov 20/ 2007 – 8:39 am MST
The Price and Cost of Open Source Software
There is price and cost, and there is free and not so free. Price is the amount of money that you pay to the vendor of the product for the right to use the product. Sometimes support is bundled into that price. Cost though is the price PLUS
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Sun Nov 18/ 2007 – 8:31 pm MST
What Is Open Source Software?
Most people have heard of and/or used Microsoft Office, the suite of productivity suites that can be purchased to run on Windows. Type documents, build spreadsheets, prepare presentations and databases; MS Office does it all. However, MS Office also depends on an outdated and increasingly obsolete process for software development. That process is also very expensive; to recover those costs the price must be significant. A large corporation or institution will buy thousands of licenses to use the software at the cost of millions!
To counteract this problem, as well as reduce bugs and increase the rate at which improvements get developed, a concept of software engineering called “Open Source Software” or OSS was created. Using the Internet, a small core group, with potentially a wider group of affiliated developers, will develop a piece of software, and rely on other programmers using it to report bugs and glitches as well as suggest improvements. Open Source Software also uses a set of permissive licenses that either allow you to use it for free, give you open access to the source code (the original pre-compiled code that you cannot see on proprietary software), or even allow you to modify the source code!
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Tue Jul 17/ 2007 – 5:09 pm MST
There is a fairly simple answer to the question – what does a business need? The answer is most often – more. More time, more money, more sales, more people, more equipment, more exposure, more innovation, more productivity – more.
Each of the individual items listed above are interchangeable. All of them can be replaced with more money, meaning simply that they can be purchased (including time). One can replace the need for more people with more equipment and vice versa; one can purchase sales by spending money on marketing, by providing discounts and even by buying the competition!
Businesses have two main ways of getting more. They can grow through the bootstrap process, or they can raise capital to satisfy the needs. There is never enough money to meet the needs. Which neatly brings us to a major source of stress for entrepreneurs Read More »
Fri Jul 13/ 2007 – 9:49 pm MST
The human mind is a funny thing… Built over the physical structure of the brain, with its trillions of neurons and synapses, and its bafflingly complex neurotransmitter soup, the mind is organized chaos. Well, sometimes mine is organized, other times, you take your chances…
At various times, the balances of the chemical soup changes, Read More »
Tue Jul 10/ 2007 – 1:08 pm MST
We took a look at an entrepreneur a few posts ago. Bernie’s outlook on life, his view of the world was quite unlike most people’s. In his view of human beings, those who take responsibility and assert control, particularly over themselves, are adults. He simply did not place trust in those who failed to do so. The aftereffect of this is that his dealings with other people could be strained. His value system, based as it was on independence, drive, and respect for reality, could leave him without common ground with others.
There is a phrase that has become common when discussing stress and anxiety. Cognitive dissonance refers to a state where the brain is required to hold contradictory Read More »
Sat Jul 7/ 2007 – 9:44 am MST
In the 1800s, the attraction of natural resources in North America proved irresistible to a certain breed of person. The forests fed the European need for material for their ships, and the mines were a direct source of wealth, and then the underpinning of a primary manufacturing sector. The life for the (mostly) men who worked in these fields was brutal and often, short. It was a time when excesses of drive and greed fuelled the economy (no, not last week…). The success of these entrepreneurial activities demanded resourcefulness and self-sufficiency. As important as the support efforts were – food, blacksmithing, medical, transportation – none of it was of significance if the lumber was not cut, or the ore not broken.
In mining, there is a crude measurement of productivity. Known as the rule of men-at-the-face, it is the percentage of manpower that is directly used at the “face” of a mining work heading in a stope. Read More »
Tue Jul 3/ 2007 – 7:09 pm MST
I introduced you to Bernie on my last post. Obviously, I have changed names and lines of business and some other details, but he was an unusual man, even amidst a class of entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurial Attributes
In my first post on an entrepreneur’s reality, I mentioned a number of attributes, and three fundamentals. Read More »
Sun Jul 1/ 2007 – 11:18 am MST
Bernie was fourteen when he took over the family business of salvaging construction materials. He faced challenges from a sceptical business community, and a family which worried about the risk to their primary asset. His father’s untimely passing had made it necessary.
Bernie had to abandon any aspirations for formal schooling, despite his intellectual talents, in favour of learning the business from the ground up. He was an incredibly quick study, Read More »
Wed Jun 27/ 2007 – 1:48 pm MST
We all have an understanding of the world, meaning an understanding of what humans are, how they behave, how they act in groups, the institutions of society… These views are heavily influenced by our experiences and the people with whom we interact. One of the strong influences is the education system. The education system is largely a codification of abstractions that are believed to be valid and/or useful to students as they progress through life. Ideally, one would like to think that our understandings would be refined with greater experience and knowledge – one of the original goals of an advanced education. Unfortunately, the reverse happens. Read More »
