From the category archives:

Business

Follow-up to “How will it end?”

I finished reading Almost Perfect (mentioned here), a first-person account of the rise and fall of Word Perfect by Pete Peterson. Pete was one of the founding members of the company that changed the concept of word processing from one of dedicated machines such as Wang to the concept that we now know — specialized [...]

Read the full article → April 16, 2009

Meet in the middle

I’ve been struggling with an overall concept for quite some time that relates to web development and web usage. The problem is that for all of the great innovations that have already occurred since Netscape made the internet accessible, there is still a long way to go before an average person can truly participate in [...]

Read the full article → April 14, 2009

How will it end?

Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror just posted a great article about the life and death of Word Perfect, a piece of software that touched the lives of just about every person who was old enough to type during its run. Jeff provides a link to a great e-book, Almost Perfect — a first-person account [...]

Read the full article → April 6, 2009

Measuring success

A hundred objective measurements didn’t sum the worth of a garden; only the delight of its users did that. Only the use made it mean something.
Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign, 1999
US science fiction author

Consider how much time you spend looking at analytics such as web traffic, Twitter followers, Facebook friends, or Technorati rank. Now [...]

Read the full article → March 20, 2009

Your choice

On my flight home from Chicago to Phoenix Tuesday, I sat behind someone who spent the first twenty minutes of the flight complaining about how much she hates living in Phoenix and wishes she could move back to Chicago. She moved from Chicago in 1988 and has apparently lamented the move for the past 21 [...]

Read the full article → March 19, 2009

The power of free

Photography studios attract customers with free sittings. Many accounting and professional services offer free consultations. Free quotes for insurance are common. Obviously in these cases, the free portion is the lead. Nobody needs a photographic sitting, they need family photos. Nobody needs just a quote or a consultation, they need tax preparation or insurance or [...]

Read the full article → March 13, 2009

Technology is not the answer

I’ve been in the business of software development including web site development for a lot of years now. My first job was at Loral Aerospace in Goodyear, Arizona where I wrote very boring code on a very cool project. I stayed there one year before I found an opportunity to do something entrepreneurial for a [...]

Read the full article → March 12, 2009

It doesn’t happen overnight

One of the most ironic things about overnight success stories is that most of them didn’t happen overnight. It’s easy to think of Google as an overnight success — or Microsoft, or Twitter or Facebook. They weren’t. It took Google years to find a business model for their extraordinary search engine. Facebook was the also-ran [...]

Read the full article → March 11, 2009

Blog vs. traditional web site

Here’s a question I’ve been asked many times: should I build a web site for my business or should I use a blog? The answer is yes.
For a while, I suppose, there was a reason to make a distinction between a traditional web site and a blog. Those distinctions might be in how the [...]

Read the full article → March 9, 2009

Do it your way

The more you read online, the likelier you are to be confused by all of the conflicting opinions from experts (like me). Naturally we all have opinions and hopefully our opinions are evolving as we’re getting smarter. The reason that I write with strong convictions is because I have strong opinions that are weakly held [...]

Read the full article → March 3, 2009

← Previous Entries