#business

If I had to choose, I’d definitely choose to return to the job market of the 2010s, so I can be paid more to work less and have more job security. I’m not an idiot. But the silver lining to actually having to ship is that you’re no longer living in a dream. If you’re realistic about how things work, the job of software engineering becomes much easier to understand: Providing value to the company gets you rewarded Not providing value to the company gets you punished “Value to the company” means furthering the explicit plans of your company’s executives

The Blade Battery was born from grief. It was engineered by people who had watched their own lab burn, and who decided, with a resolve that borders on the religious, that it would never happen again.

Despite the CEOs' repsonses, PwC concludes more investment is required. It claims that "isolated, tactical AI projects" often don't deliver measurable value, and that tangible returns instead come from enterprise-wide deployments consistent with business strategy.

It’s no accident that the Firefox guy is taking over, by the way. “Priority one [for Mozilla] is still building the best browser,” he says. “I am very pragmatic that that is our core business, and it would take a lot to prove otherwise.” Going forward, when Mozilla launches new products, they’re likely to be tied to Firefox — Enzor-DeMeo mentions that Mozilla VPN is coming to Firefox next year, just to name one, and says there are other features in the works.

Programs that have their own agenda and that are trying to make it yours, too. Programs that want you to think about them. Programs that think they are entitled to a part of your attention. “Pick me” programs. And you know what? Fuck these programs. Give me back my computer.

While the ethics of this technology’s ecological and social impact are debated, use of the technology comes with repeated controversy. This instance of AI-assisted art from the company that made the award-winning Star Realms deck-building game has caused some to take to social media in disappointment and frustration. A few fans of the company state they won’t purchase another game by Wise Wizard, with at least one store stating it will no longer be stocking the company’s products. This anti-AI sentiment is not unanimous, however. Projects like Wonders of the First, Grimcoven, and Terraforming Mars still raised millions of dollars from thousands of backers as recently as June of this year — giving crowdfunding platforms an incentive to keep AI projects on the site, as long as the money is still there.

In recent years, a new wave of peer-reviewed research indicates that launching a business can dramatically reduce stress and improve physical and mental health. That revelation first gained traction with a groundbreaking paper published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology. In it, researchers compared a nationally representative sample of employees and entrepreneurs on various health factors, including blood pressure, physician visits, physical and mental illness, and overall well-being. The results overwhelmingly favored entrepreneurs, who evidenced significantly lower blood pressure and hypertension rates, fewer hospital visits, and reduced incidence of physical and mental illnesses. How can starting a business, which many justifiably consider a massive and nerve-wracking undertaking, possibly reduce stress?

As Gideon Haigh observed 20 years ago, the era of neoliberalism has been associated with the “cult of the CEO”. The office has been the shrine of that cult. In their plaintive call for a return there, CEOs are like declining deities who see their votaries deserting them.

Anyway, I’d like to posit seven basic rules for any internet CEO looking to avoid the enshittification death cycle. Think of these as the rules that Steve Huffman maybe should have learned years ago, rather than whatever the fuck he’s doing now.

Anyway, I’d like to posit seven basic rules for any internet CEO looking to avoid the enshittification death cycle. Think of these as the rules that Steve Huffman maybe should have learned years ago, rather than whatever the fuck he’s doing now.

A micropayments system assumes a solution to the mental accounting problem. If somebody could actually solve the this problem, rather than merely claiming to have solved it via some mysterious means ("intelligent agents", et. al.), the savings would be enormous even in existing business such as long distance and Internet service -- not to mention all the new possibilities possible by lower transaction costs.

American companies have been pretending to offer a superior product for a superior price while simultaneously cutting costs and cheating customers.

American companies have been pretending to offer a superior product for a superior price while simultaneously cutting costs and cheating customers.

As I understand, a hugely divisive internal debate occurred among Twitter employees around this time. One camp wanted to build the entire business around their realtime API. In this scenario, Twitter would have turned into something like a realtime cloud API company. The other camp looked at Google’s advertising model for inspiration, and decided that building their own version of AdWords would be the right way to go.

Maybe your goal is best met by building a stable yet undemanding career that leaves plenty of time for family, friends, community, and self improvement.

Your creation and a price → → a short link you can share to sell.

I keep hearing how this strike forced them to liquidate. How we should just take it and be glad to have a job. What an unpatriotic view point. The reason these jobs provided me with a middle class opportunity is because people like my father in law and his father fought for my Union rights. I received that pay and those benefits because previous Union members fought for them. I won't sell them, or my coworkers, out.

If you own a software patent, you should feel bad.

You see, for a long time we’ve chanted this refrain wherever we could: If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold. We point to Facebook and Delicious and ad-supported sites and lament the fact that we’re all just a set of eyeballs being sold to advertisers. So we came up with a solution. We decided that we don’t want to be free users any more. We decided that we want to pay independent developers directly so that they can have sustainable businesses and happy lives.

You see, for a long time we’ve chanted this refrain wherever we could: If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold. We point to Facebook and Delicious and ad-supported sites and lament the fact that we’re all just a set of eyeballs being sold to advertisers. So we came up with a solution. We decided that we don’t want to be free users any more. We decided that we want to pay independent developers directly so that they can have sustainable businesses and happy lives.

Last fall, we moved all the editorial in our apps, including the magazine, into a simple RSS feed in a river of news. We dumped the digital replica. Now we're redesigning Technologyreview.com, which we made entirely free for use, and we'll follow the Financial Times in using HTML5, so that a reader will see Web pages optimized for any device, whether a desktop or laptop computer, a tablet, or a smart phone. Then we'll kill our apps, too.

Last fall, we moved all the editorial in our apps, including the magazine, into a simple RSS feed in a river of news. We dumped the digital replica. Now we're redesigning Technologyreview.com, which we made entirely free for use, and we'll follow the Financial Times in using HTML5, so that a reader will see Web pages optimized for any device, whether a desktop or laptop computer, a tablet, or a smart phone. Then we'll kill our apps, too.

When people write critically about Facebook, they often say that “you are the product being sold,” but I think that by now we all get that. The digital substance of our friendships belongs to these companies, and they are loath to share it with others. So we build our little content farms within, friending and upthumbing, learning to accept that our new landlords are people who grew up on Power Rangers. This is, after all, the way of our new product-based civilization — in order to participate as a citizen of the social web, you must yourself manufacture content. Progress requires that forms must be filled. Thus it is a critical choice of any adult as to where they will perform their free labor. Tens of millions of people made a decision to spend their time with the simple, mobile photo-sharing application that was not Facebook because they liked its subtle interface and little filters. And so Facebook bought the thing that is hardest to fake. It bought sincerity.

The federal government has been paying lip service to the idea that it wants to encourage new businesses and startups in the US. And this is truly important to the economy, as studies have shown that almost all of the net job growth in this country is coming from internet startups. Thankfully some politicians recognize this, but the federal government seems to be going in the other direction. With the JotForm situation unfolding, where the US government shut down an entire website with no notice or explanation, people are beginning to recognize that the US is not safe for internet startups.

These projects are all very different, but the dynamic is the same. Someone builds a cool, free product, it gets popular, and that popularity attracts a buyer. The new owner shuts the product down and the founders issue a glowing press release about how excited they are about synergies going forward. They are never heard from again. Whether or not this is done in good faith, in practice this kind of 'exit event' is a pump-and-dump scheme. The very popularity that attracts a buyer also makes the project financially unsustainable. The owners cash out, the acquirer gets some good engineers, and the users get screwed.

He's telling you the story of, "If you bust your ass and don't sleep, you'll get rich" because the only way that people in his line of work get richer is if young, poorly-socialized, naive geniuses believe that story! Without those coat-tails to ride, VCs might have to work for a living. Once that kid burns out, they'll just slot a new one in.

Should we open source Grit or keep it proprietary? Keeping it private would provide a higher hurdle for competing Ruby-based Git hosting sites, giving us an advantage. Open sourcing it would mean thousands of people worldwide could use it to build interesting Git tools, creating an even more vibrant Git ecosystem. After a small amount of debate we decided to open source Grit. I don't recall the specifics of the conversation but that decision nearly four years ago has led to what I think is one of our most important core values: open source (almost) everything.

If Google wants to win the hearts and minds of these developers, it has to get more systematic and clear about roadmaps, has to be more circumspect about changing things without notice, and be precise about how apps that run on Google infrastructure now will or won’t run on other infrastructure in the future. The problem is, it’s not all that clear that Google itself is serious about this market. And if it isn’t, why should anyone else take the plunge?

And for its part, the McRib makes a mockery of this whole terribly labor-intensive system of barbecue, turning it into a capital-intensive one. The patty is assembled by machinery probably babysat by some lone sadsack, and it is shipped to distribution centers by black-beauty-addicted truckers, to be shipped again to franchises by different truckers, to be assembled at the point of sale by someone who McDonald’s corporate hopes can soon be replaced by a robot, and paid for using some form of electronic payment that will eventually render the cashier obsolete.

In order to determine which employees would be asked to give stock back, Pincus and his executives tried to pinpoint workers whose contributions to Zynga--in the execs' eyes--didn't necessarily justify the potential cash windfall they could receive when the company went public, the Journal claims. One Journal source said that Zynga executives were especially concerned with not creating a "Google chef" scenario.

Here's a story that touches on a few different issues of importance around these parts. We'll get to the details of the legal ruling in a bit, but the background is really the key part. At the beginning of 2009, a company in Valencia, California, called L&M Optical Disc West, received an order from an authorized partner of the producers of the film Milk to manufacture the DVDs of the film. They began doing exactly that. On February 2nd, as part of a supposedly unrelated police raid, police saw those DVDs and found them "suspicious." They rang up the MPAA who sent over an "investigator," who falsely declared that the DVDs were unauthorized, leading the police to seize them (though, oddly, allowing the private investigation firm to hold them) and to declare to the press that they had found "pirated" DVDs of Milk. This happened despite multiple attempts by L&M staff to explain that they had a legitimate order, even offering to show the "investigator" the details of the order.

To any non-technical person planning on starting a web company, I have one key piece of advice: Become a Minimum Viable Developer.

"In the summer of 1980, MIT graduates Donald Faber and Peter Haberle moved into an empty two-car garage and started work building their first ever personal home computer. Almost 30 years later, what began as a humble two-man operation has since grown into an even more humble, even more cramped computer company, based out of an even smaller single-car garage."

"Your employees will love it ... You can hire great people wherever you find them ... You will use better communication tools ... You can still be social ... Your offices will be more fun"

"37signals is now a $100 billion dollar company, according to a group of investors who have agreed to purchase 0.000000001% of the company in exchange for $1."

"John Schnatter sold the gold-and-black 1971 Chevrolet Camaro Z28 for $2,800 in 1983. The money helped save his father's tavern in Jeffersonville, Ind., and he used the rest to start what would become a worldwide pizza business. But he still missed his beloved Camaro and spent years searching for it. He created a website on the search, held promotional appearances and eventually offered $250,000 to whoever found it."

"When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it."

"However, one of the world's biggest hardware vendors - whose name every single reader will be familiar with, and whose hardware a good share of you will be using right now - apparently didn't do their homework. When Opera's sysadmin booted up the server to test its web-based administration interface, they came across a single JavaScript statement that managed to piss off everyone up to and including the CTO."

"the reality is that nowadays, one can choose between a game costing £40 that will last weeks, or a £10 CD with two great tracks and eight dud ones. I think a lot of people are choosing the game - and downloading the two tracks. That's real discretion in spending. It's hurting the music industry, sure. But let's not cloud the argument with false claims about downloads."

"I just nearly burst my appendix laughing at Chris Applegate’s 20 signs you don’t want that social media project. I am thus inspired to write my own list of tips that, perhaps, one doesn’t really want that internal social media project after all."

"In short, my view is that if GM can’t figure out ways to get their managers and executives to understand the experience of owning a car for the average person, if they can’t get rid of those jets, and if they can’t reduce the number of brands, and if they can’t make a host of other changes required to make them competitive, than my answer is “no, you can’t have our money.” "

Yikes. This is really making me hope that Android or Palm linux phones grow up fast. "It seems that the engineers at Opera developed a version of Opera Mini that would run on the iPhone (and the iPod touch), but this browser will never see light of day because Apple rejected it from the App Store."

"Southeast Michigan's creative business community will get a boost as a result of Governor Granholm's signature on a series of bills that would make creative businesses eligible for state MEGA tax credits."

"Even though our financials were immaculate they just didn't 'get' what a comic shop was and so they wouldn't rent to us. We tried to rent the Wizzywig location near State Street (now closed) but they told us they didn't want 'our kind of business.'"

"Ideas on their own are just not that important. It’s incredibly rare that someone comes up with an idea so unique, so protectable that the success story writes itself. Most ideas are nothing without execution."

"But in general, the nerds with minimal social lives like me are well down in the Valley, and the cool kids with the trendy glasses and Prada shoes who like to go to parties are in San Francisco"

"many such accomplished and ambitious members of the digital elite still do not think of themselves as particularly fortunate, in part because they are surrounded by people with more wealth"

"Pleasant Ridge-based ePrize today launched its Caffeine Promotions Platform -- a product that allows small businesses to jump into the world of big-time Internet contest and promotions."

"If figuring out your taxes were easy, why would anyone bother to hire H&R Block?"

"no matter whether they are barbarian lords, deranged wizards, mad scientists, or alien invaders, they always seem to make the same basic mistakes every single time."

"So the next time you're unsure how you're going to grow your small business, remember the secret. Raise your rates."

"Business, Labor Practices In India, Colombia At Issue"

"Paul Graham has a theory. He believes that, given $10,000 and 3-6 months, two or three entrepreneurs can create a start up worth investing in, and ultimately (within a few years), worth buying for at least $1,000,000."

"Relinquishing control is becoming a requirement in all aspects of Internet businesses."

"Create your own Web 2.0 company NOW!!"

"There isn't the buzz and excitement about computer science that there should be"

"In reality, a good software developer should be able to do just that — deliver a disposable, short lived product that addresses only the pressing needs of the moment, and then simply disappears."

"Be the middle gazelle."

"When the door to a new business opportunity opens, some fortunate people seem to step through it easily and pick up a new life on the other side."

"Having enough money to keep your company in business long enough to get noticed is probably the biggest factor in a successful ISV (except maybe the quality of the product, maybe)."

"... there are 14 stages in taking a venture from idea to IPO..."

"Use the relative quiet of the comfort zone to get organized for the next big push toward your ultimate goal."

"I am not saying it will be easy."

"I have been a little slow in the blogging department recently, as I am finally compiling the best of Ripples' business posts into a book."

"Exchange is the key. It is the fundamental activity of any business, especially a micro-business where you are self-employed. Many people have it backward."

"I can easily see the day coming when a new graduate chooses a career as a salaried employee only because he or she hasn't got the necessary confidence and skill to start their own business."