Jason Fried (of 37Signals) says:
If you are trying to decide between a few people to fill your position, always hire the better writer. I don’t care if that person is a designer, programmer, marketer, salesperson, whatever. Assuming your candidates are fairly equally skilled and qualified overall, always hire the better writer.
I couldn't agree more. Ms. Quin, my 12th-grade English teacher, would be so proud. And this maxim applies especially to programmers. It's not enough to do brilliant work — you have to be able to explain it to the rest of the team, or it's almost useless.
Gino Tocchetti has translated the Open Company Test into Italian. How cool is that? Thanks, Gino!
Nike no stranger to controversy. But this quote from a FT article today is a nice summary of lessons learned by a company who has for too long followed the "hide and hope the problem goes away" strategy of communication.
"We felt the risks of any future lawsuit were far outweighed by benefits of transparency," says Hannah Jones, Nike's vice-president of corporate responsibility. "Because if we've learned anything as a company, it's that closing down and not talking about the challenges and opportunities doesn't get you far."
Nike is learning the hard way to be a more Open Company. Even though they make shoes instead of software, the same core principles apply. It's worthwhile to remember that Nike doesn't do anything that's not in the best interest of the bottom line.
This may be, of course, nothing more than corporate happy-speak on Nike's part — a snowjob to keep their critics quiet. But I remain hopeful.
Link via WorldChanging.
John Udell has another great post today, this one about Greasemonkey. I knew Greasemonkey was a cool little app, but I failed to grok how important it actually is until reading John's post today. He points to a guy who added a persistant search feature to Gmail.
This guy saw that Gmail was missing a feature that he liked from his other email clients. And despite the fact that Gmail is in no way open-source, he said: "I can fix that." And so he did, and gave his work back to the community.
This is a brilliant example of the remix culture, played out in software. In the new world, your product is going to be opensource, whether you like it or not. You'd be smarter to harness that energy (like Amazon) instead of fighting it (like RIAA).
PVRBlog reports that TiVo's CFO announced that there are no plans for a Mac version of TiVoToGo.
That's it. I'm done. I'm going to start seriously looking into MythTV or EyeTV or SnapStream or anything else that may be out there.
I'm going to find something without any obnoxious DRM restrictions. But I need to get started now, because I have to find something before July 1st.
Here's a little quiz. Where do you think I heard the following conversation?
Guy: How can you even have an opinion on Ubuntu if you haven't tried it? 2.6 kernel, live CD, they even had Gnome 2.8 the day Warty Warthog came out!
Girl: I'm sorry! I'm perfectly content with OS X. I can have all the awk, grep and sed I want without any need for that pitiful [unintelligble] application.
Guy: But the fonts are de-uglified! And it's free! Ugh. You know what, keep living in the dark ages!
Girl: I know what I like.
I've been seeing the proliferation of free wiki hosting services lately. Two that have lately come on my radar are Wikispaces, and Schtuff (Not a fan of the name). There are even more listed here.
Wikispaces seems especially nice, at first glance. It has a wonderfully clean interface — easy to understand, easy to use. Of course, it's also pretty early in development so there's not a lot of clutter. And they do an excellent job with the out of the box experience.
Wikispaces is focusing the wiki community. And it really is a community: once you've logged in, you can edit any page on any wiki, whether you created it or not. As they say, "Wikispaces are public, so everyone else will have the ability to help build and edit pages."
Interestingly, their T&Cs insist that everything you submit to one of their wikis is automatically under the CC Share-alike license. So that's going to make it unsuitable for a lot of applications, but it's a noble sentiment. This could mean that they compete more with projects like CivicSpace or Drupal than the other strictly wiki projects.
Schtuff is also fairly well-designed. It seems to be further along than Wikispaces, and is open for any kind of use. They don't mention any sort of business model, so either it's going to be advertising, or they're using this as a starting platform for something else.
Mike has a killer post today about how Atlassian has chosen to price its software. He references Paul Graham's much-linked post about "How to Start a Startup."
I would also point to Joel's Spolsky's post about software pricing that I have written about before. On the other hand, Joel's FogBugz is one of JIRA's competitors, so perhaps Mike just figured it wasn't smart to be sending more traffic his way. (Interestingly, it turns out that Fog Creek prices FogBugz in the same range as JIRA. It's more expensive, but still the same order of magnitude — definitely below the PowerPoint Line.*)
Also worth reading is JWZ's post about groupware, which I mentioned here.
So anyway, now that you've done your homework by reading the relevant literature in the field, on to Mike's post. His core argument is sound: selling software in the six figures is a much riskier business because there are far fewer customers capable of buying your product. You've concentrated your risk into just a few very high stakes throws of the dice.
37Signals, about whom I've written before, has issue another of their language challenges: "Explain what a Wiki is in ten words or less."
And Jason points tantalizingly at their recently announced but as-yet unrevealed new product "Backpack." So is Backpack a wiki? It could be. I know 37Signal's lead developer, DHH, worked on Instiki. It's the kind of scope that would appeal to them. And it's somewhere that they could use their design talent to really improve the state of the art. Also, they talked for a while last year about a new product called "WriteBoard" that was never actually released.
Still, I don't think this is the answer. The "Backpack" name doesn't really work as a metaphor for a wiki. Writeboard was much better. Unless it were a purely personal wiki. Hmm. That's also the kind of thing that would appeal to 37Signals: Ignore huge sections of a market and focus in on one very narrow use case — but totally nail it.
In any case, it will be interesting to see who can come up with the best ten word formulation to explain a wiki — something I know to be a challenge when trying to promote wiki adoption.
UPDATE: One striking thing about reading the comments is how totally different ideas people have about what a wiki really is — driven mostly by how they use it. Is it an encyclopedia, a collaborative website, a personal online notebook, a journal, or a content management system? Wow.
[UPDATED]: Joe has some more to say on how the 20% thing works.
Google has been rightly proud about both the quality and the quantity of talent they've been able to attract. It's been a long time since we've heard a company complaining that there aren't enough good people to hire. And when it's Google saying it, you can believe it, since they certainly aren't constrained by price.
Google is also justifiably proud of their 20% time policy. They've made investments by hiring great talent. And they've invested 20% of their time in informal, personal R&D. So the question now becomes, "how does Google get those developers to produce the maximum amount of useful code?"
Joe Beda, formerly of MS, now hailing from Google, outlines some of Google's development practices that allow Google to get the highest return on their investment.
Jonathan Nolen 