gettin all zoidal on ya
Will your feed reader work with a username and password?
I’ve take an approach in one of my applications where I generate a GUID and only allow HTTPS requests. So something like:
https://foo.com/rss?id=1230123012301230…
This of course should not be used with Bloglines – but its safe for desktop feed readers from what I understand since the url is encrypted.
Dan Gilmore on the 50% Problem:
…50% of all of our operations are also performing below the mid-point – but how many of us know it, or are willing to admit it? In my experience, it’s a very small minority… Why do so many companies overestimate their own supply chain performance levels? What can be done to reduce the personal risk and encourage more individuals and managers to accurately look in the mirror?
As I think about this, to be in the top you need the right people (as pointed out in this book). While there are only so many good people to go around, there needs to be vision from the top on hiring the best.
My other thought is eliminate corporate bullshit. Create a culture where you can and are expected to look at the not so happy facts. Question everything.
We’re building a “Web 2.0” application (still low key while we prepare for loads of users and move to different pricing…) and the economics of it are that the value is different to different people within the industry we’re targetting. Umair recently mentioned again one of the fundamental questions bugging us:
Is Web 2.0 really just about price discrimination?
We’d like to be able to charge more to the customers that we delivered more value to.
In addition to the above question I’ve been thinking about Tim O’Reilly’s aphorism “drive usage, monetize later”. At first this didn’t make sense to me, but the more I thought about it, the more it clicked. One way I’ve started thinking of the web is like a Monopoly board. You have pieces which individually may make little or no money, but when combined a revenue opportunity appears. The Yahoo/Konfabulator deal is the latest of these. JBoss and Hibernate is another good example.
But no one wants to buy us right now and we could never cover our costs if we started giving it away free. So how do we deliver a value to all segments, while still making a profit? Right now our plan of action is creating different plans – including a free one. We’re also working on some farther out ideas that won’t be ready for a while. I’ll certainly be reading more of Umair’s blog and be on the lookout for other ideas.
“What good is a family plan with but a single line? No good at all, and shame on carriers for advertising this way.”
From the Amazon cell phone buying instructions.
In mental effort we are likely to go still more widely astray from some childish notion that it is laudable to exert that “slow, dead heave of the will” as often as possible. But in changing habits, you will find yourself getting your results far more quickly and with less “backwas” if you engage your imagination in the process instead of calling out the biggest gun of your character equipment first.
I think one of the cool things about open source is that you it becomes easy to metric the kind of response your software is getting. You can get a rough gauge of this through mailing list volume, the number of issues filed, the number of downloads, etc. Metrics can be misleading at times, but having metrics is definitely better than having none at all.
A couple examples:
Maven mailing list volume – Whether or not you like the project, it is clear that Maven has been very successful.
Apache Axis Issues filed – They’re in their 2000s now. (Although this can be indicative of the “bugginess” as well).
Fivesight’s PXE download stats – We see that their announcement on The Server Side corresponded to a high number of downloads.
XFire Blog Citations – Whats the response in the community like? Most of those citations are probably from me, so I guess that means I have a lot of work to do!
Lately companies like IBM, BEA, and Simula Labs have been swooping in on open source projects like Spring, Geronimo, and ActiveMQ. Are they letting the open source community absorb the risk in creating software?
For instance, projects are created. They stew and incubate. The buzz spreads. Developers fawn. Hani biles. During this process the “open source community” (*cough* I hate that term) provides a feed back loop during development so it happens quickly and efficiently. Once projects mature, larger companies swoop in, pick up the developers, provide support, integrate them with their products etc. Or at least this is what I’m seeing happen.
I still question the business plans of such companies. Service and support is not in my mind a sure fire combo – and definitely not a way to come up with billions in the bank. I lost the link, but there was an article about how as more and more people become comfortable with open source, the less likely they are going to want to support. They’ll start asking, if they really need a lifeline? And, does it really pay? In addition there is the up-sell strategy and a hundred other angles…
But will they result in successful businesses with a decent ROI? Maybe… There certainly seem to be some winners lately. I think it depends on how much value you can actually add on top of the open source offering. But that is a whole new blog entry…
Thoughts?
We’ve all seen open source being adopted by major companies. Even recently Microsoft. One thing that I’ve noticed most recently is that open source projects are an efficient way to incubate and bring a project to maturity. I’m hypothesizing that by being closer to their users, getting feedback earlier on and being able to gauge project adoption, a company is able to create better software.
So I’d like to take a look how open source can help in software development and potentially in business as well during what I would call a ‘project incubation period.’ (Although let me make it clear: Open Source != Good Business IMO) Project incubation period doesn’t necessarily mean alpha or pre 1.0 as I see it, it is the time between when a development starts on a project or a portion of the project and the time when it reaches ‘success.’ Although your definition of success may vary…
Let me take an example from my development efforts: XFire. XFire started as just a way for me to play around with SOAP and develop services faster. It became clear early on that the people I talked to favored a component oriented approach. So now we have support for the Spring, Plexus, and Loom containers. It also resulted in a much more flexible design and users consistently talk about how easy it is to embed now.
By engaging your users you’re able to understand their needs more. During a marketing campaign the will always do focus groups. Developers should be doing the same thing. Product adoption isn’t always technical, it’s psychological as well. What you view as a small nitpick may be the defining hurdle that stops a user from using your project.
If this all sounds like agile programming – I think thats what it is. Open Source adds an additional spin though. By engaging a larger audience you may find “stories” which are important to your users or completely new audiences that you didn’t think of.
(more to come on this topic tomorrow…)