Entrepreneurism, Software Dev, WP7

Disciplined Entrepreneurism

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Recently I have had two of my most senior employees come to me seperately and suggest new products for the company to build. I encourage this of course, but find I have to help them understand some things about what I call Disciplined Entrepreneurism.

Ultimately when you decide to build a product for general sale you have three choices:
1. Invent something
2. Copy something
3. Enhance something

Each of these has its strengths and weaknesses. For #1 you have to really have a good idea and you have to bear the burden of educating the world they need something they never had before. In path #2 you have to make sure you can do it so much better that you can overtake the current vendors. And with #3 you build an add on to an existing product as part of its ecosystem, so that means your only customers are the people who bought the thing you are enhancing.

None of these is easy and none is a “sure thing”. I find that it is a slow road with luck and hard work playing equal roles in most cases. Misjudging the market is a common mistake, but not doing any market research ahead of time is by far the most common mistake.

Our head developer of our FSM product, Amr (he specifically asked me to mention him when I told him I planned to blog about this), throught that it might be a good idea for us to develop a Facebook Application. My response was to point out that Facebook, iPhone apps and other applications seem like a great way to get rich, but the failure rate is enormous
my research says that it costs tens of thousands of dollars to bring one to market successfully as very, very few make any money at all the average lose money if the idea is good enough then you have a better chance, but everyone thinks they have the killer idea. The costs go way up if you advertise it with some having spent as much as a million dollars. There really are no shortcuts to wealth

You should never just build an application. You should first figure out the odds of it actually making money otherwise you spend your life just writing code and never make any headway.

The key is to jump in before the market gets too saturated and to do some pragmatic thought about the potential of your product idea. Rather than look to Facebook or iPhone apps I think Windows Phone 7 applications is a much better landscape since there is still room for new players to make a mark. Just remember that you have to tamp down your wishful instincts…

Management, security

Juggling Tasks

While I resisted Twitter for a long time, not too long ago I started following selected individuals on Twitter including Richard Campbell (richcampbell on twitter). I plan to start using Twitter myself hopefully to communicate things of value, but for now I am using it as a comsumer.

This morning Richard tweeted “Four things to write this weekend… is it wrong to do them in the order of how much they pay?”. This got me thinking about my own task juggling over the years. When I was in college I learned that there are times that you have more to do than can humanly be done. This was in fact a central part of the pressure West Point put on us while we were cadets there. To cope I came to the conclusion that the juggling metaphor is quite apt. The thing to realize is that not all balls (tasks) are created equal. Some are made of rubber and some are made of glass. Rubber balls bounce and you recover even if you let them drop from time to time. Glass balls shatter if you drop them even once. The key is to identify which kind of ball a task represents and there lies the rub.

We see the same decision points when we undertake software development. I try to tell people over and over that security is a task of glass.

For the record, I think Richard has his priorities correct all things being equal…

Cloud

IBM Cloud Data Center in China = Epic Blunder

IBM has decided to build the mother of all Cloud Computing data centers in of all places, China. I will advise all that will listen that this is a fantastic blunder since China is the absolute worst choice for such a resource. I do not want any of my corporate code and data or the data from customers housed inside China.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not xenophobic by any means and am even not violently opposed to offshore development or data centers. The problem is that China is the capital of corporate espionage and the worst offender in the world of not respecting the intellectual property of others.

This is a big win for Microsoft Azure and Amazon unless I missed similar announcements from them (which I doubt).

The first mission of a Cloud Computing provider is to provide security of the data and I just don’t see that happening if the data is in China.

Development, Software Dev, Web Hosting

Look at Azure Now / Again

If you looked into playing with Azure in the past, but did not jump in then it is time to take another look. Microsoft has added options over the last year that really remove objections to trying it out. If you have an MSDN subscription then you pretty much get a free playground in Azure that is going to waste if you don’t use it and if you don’t there is still the Introductory Special that goes through the end of March that gives you access to the basics of the service at no cost.

To look it over go to the Windows Azure Offers page at Microsoft.com and get going. You might not have a project that fits the Azure model currently, but you will. I am working on a new product for DTS that will have an Azure component and while it is still off in the horizon the time to jump in is before you are behind.

Personal

To Egypt and All My Friends There

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I have talked to many of you over the course of the past week and have been cautious due to the fact that I was concerned for your safety. A failed rebellion is a painful thing especially when it is not known who will lead the aftermath.


Now that I see the resolve in my friends there I know that this is not a rebellion, but a revolution that deserves the support of all of us who have ever had their country ruled without democracy.


I wish I was there and could stand in the streets with you, but know that you are in my prayers and I am proud of each and every one of you. Good luck and may you win the day and your destiny In Sha Allah!

Software Dev

Good Advice – Setup Edition

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My friend and collegue Adam Cogan is a big proponent of documenting best practices. In fact his company, SSW puts all kinds of lists of these best practices up on their website.

Recently Adam chimed in on a list we are both on with a link to the best practices (Rules) around setup and I realized that even if you know a topic well you should go back to the well from time to time to ensure you are still on the right path. I think back to the days when coding by stringing together user input to make a SQL statement was accepted as the way to build a login form (before the first SQL Injection attacks). You have to seek out other sources even (maybe especially) on things that you hold yourself to be an expert with. I now find myself reviewing how we do setups at DTS to make them better and finding Adam’s advice to be a very good source of points to contemplate.

Network, Software Dev

SQL Myths – Must Read

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Paul Randall has a compiled document with all his blog posts on SQL Myths that I think is a must read if you consider SQL Server part of your core competence. It is probably not very interesting to pure devs, but I would still suggest you take a scan of this so you can avoid making assumptions that are either out of date or just plain wrong.

Find the link to the PDF here: http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/paul/CommonSQLServerMyths.pdf

Management, Software Dev

Crisis Management

We have a saying in the various companies with which I associate and it is “Any fool can manage success, but it takes talent to manage a crisis”. The leader, project manager, team leader, or whatever you call the person in charge has to not be wishful. This sounds easy, but in my experience it is one of the hardest things to do for any individual. We tend to be hopeful and that is the slippery slope / gateway drug to wishfulness.

The reason I say this is that my own biggest screw ups are almost all tracable to some point in the past where I assumed that something would happen more positively than it actually did. This sounds like the classic admonishment against assumption and to some extent it is, but wishful is more of the root cause and assumption the symptom.

As an infantry platoon leader in Iraq many years ago, I learned that you are never done planning for and defending against the things that can go wrong. When you envision contact with the enemy it is easy to expect that things will follow the simplest route and flow like water, but since there are humans involved this is highly unlikely to be the case. You might even get lucky and survive this way once or even twice, but that just means you are more likely to get killed when your luck runs out. I try to run projects the same way. What if the components that should work fine together don’t? What if the client changes the deployment server to run a 64 bit OS instead of the 32 bit OS on the test server? What if there is an illness or death in the family of my key developer the week before delivery? You can drive yourself crazy with these things and I am here to say that you should. That is the job.

The first place to start is by making plans and schedules with milestones. If you are collaborating with others it flushes out wide variations in viewpoint quickly. Either I accept your timeline or propose another (assuming I am not totally whacked). If I propose another you might discover that it just won’t work early enough to do something about it. I have seen good resources fail to deliver items well within their ability due to time wasted assuming everyone has the same, sane view of what needs to be done by when.

And to top it all off if you follow this advice and try to plan for all possible outcomes, there will still be surprises and things that you did not count on which is good because otherwise we could write a program to replace your part in the show…

Development, LockDown Podcast, security, Speaking

New Security Podcast Coming Soon

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Michele Bustamante and I have started recording the first episodes of our new security focused podcast LockDown. While the website is up, it has place holder content describing Carl Franklin of .Net Rocks fame as our first guest (that was the original plan). However as usual Carl was flying around the globe when we started and we all agreed to save him for later.

If you are interested watch the podcast url or my blog (here) for the first show when it releases.

security

Windows Identity Framework Training Kit available

The Microsoft Identity story has matured quite a bit in the last couple of years and now would be a good time to get up to speed if you have been waiting for the train to get some speed. Vittorio Bertocci has pulled together the training he has been delivering around the world into a training kit including videos of the Redmond versions of the presentations. Check out the June 2010 edition of the Identity Training Kit

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