Big companies lose.0
rzwitserloot posted in startup on January 24th, 2007

I doubt there is a better example: Nintendo is beating two of the largest companies of the world; Sony and Microsoft, simply by knowing they can’t compete within the rules of the game, so they changed the rules.

I mean, Look at this…

I don’t like game consoles and I really don’t like Mortal Kombat-style games. And yet I see that and I have an instant urge to buy that thing. If I wasn’t strapped for cash and busy with a startup, I already would have*.

*) Of course, there are a ton of shortages so I doubt I’d actually manage to find one, but that’s for another day.

Thus, the lesson is: Don’t play the game of a big company. Invent a better game and fly by the competition whilst they stand there wondering what the heck just happend. Don’t let yourself get discouraged if a big company is trying ‘big company’ tactics (underselling, throwing vast amounts of money at marketing, trying to lock in the market, etcetera).

Congratulations, Alper!0
rzwitserloot posted in startup on December 20th, 2006

Well done!

Offices? Are you kidding me?2
rzwitserloot posted in startup on December 5th, 2006

Spent 2 hours yesterday team-editing a document using google docs with Jeroen, whilst voicechatting by way of skype.

I have no idea why anyone would need an office given these two fantastic tools. Whilst the ‘word’ variant of google docs is a bit sparse on the formatting, editing the text there and taking care of the layout later is all sorts of shiny. Collaboration. Simple. Free.

New Venture - itipjar.com proposal’s in the first round0
rzwitserloot posted in startup on November 9th, 2006

New Venture is one of a number of entities in the Netherlands helping startups flourish. On the advice of Lesly Mulder of YES!Delft, the local incubator project sponsered primarily by the Delft Technical University, we’ve applied a rough draft of our business plan.

The best 10 get 500 bucks. Not exactly a reason to break open the bubbly if we were to get it, but validation-wise always nice to see confirmed that the idea is sheer genius*.

I’ll keep you posted on our progress.

*) I do not pretend to be humble..

Tipjar in PHP…0
rzwitserloot posted in startup, programming on March 17th, 2006

Spent last night learning PHP. A decidedly unsexy language in that it doesn’t introduce any new concepts whatsoever, it’s proven to be even easier to pick up compared to python or even javascript.

Fortunately a lot of features introduced in PHP5 allows pushing the language quite far before you hit the unmaintainable dregs usually contributed to PHP-based projects that outgrew their language.

Right now I’m just building ORM on-the-fly, creating PHP classes that do the rough SQL work. It’s not much work at all, and any fancy dbase manipulation work for optimization purposes can always be added in later without having to learn anything but SQL which I mostly already know.

Any project that fits securely in a LAMP stack and works decidedly top-down in nature (most projects are but something like writely probably isn’t) can be built with this stuff without too much fuss. And for small/simple projects that’s really all that matters, I guess.

Tipjar - we gotta move!4
rzwitserloot posted in startup, programming on March 14th, 2006

Random check at the success of the tipjar idea: It’s currently the highest rated comment on an article by Shirky about how (mandatory) micropayments will always fail. I didn’t make that comment, someone else did.

I’m more and more convinced that we’re “on the clock” as it were. This idea is so great, it’s really just a matter of time before someone else runs with it.

In other words, I’m so utterly convinced we need to move move move on this, I’ve given in; Cris wants PHP or some similar slapdash language - we’ll go slapdash language. Anything to get a prototype out the door. Once a real use case crystallises out of what users actually do with a tipjar service, I’ll just rewrite it in hibernate/trails, RoR, or whatever robust simple web-framework is available then.

I’m mostly concerned about banking and security issues. We are dealing with payment here. Any code stuck together with spit and a prayer offends the security hobbyist inside me greatly.

Speaking of robustness, just read an interesting article about the horrors of ORM libraries. Makes one wonder how the ORM of i.e. django can ever scale up far enough to stick with tipjar in the event that it does take off big.

The answer is probably simply that any toolkit made by oracle is such a bureaucratic debacle that they managed to turn a relatively manageable problem into an utter mess, but ORM -sounds- like it should be difficult to build in such a way that it scales well.

Is that a bubble I see?1
rzwitserloot posted in startup on March 9th, 2006

Writely has just been acquired. By one of the big five - google to be exact.

I wonder how long it’s going to last, but, for now, aiming to build something cool appears to be enough to get acquired by one of the 5 (Yahoo, Ebay/Paypal, Amazon, Google, Microsoft).

Good stuff - makes it real easy to focus. As far as I know, writely hasn’t been around very long. I guess having an actual monetize strategy is just a bonus, then, these days.

Micropayments…1
rzwitserloot posted in startup on March 9th, 2006

A one-sentence description of the failure of micropayments convinced me to cook up the idea for tipjar, but a bit more robust treatise on why your average run of the mill micropayment scheme is doomed to fail can be found here (Clay Shirky).

Always nice to read a thorough report on why your future company’s basis is going to fail, especially if every relevant problem doesn’t actually apply to aforementioned company.

It’s so going to work!

(via Alper)

Open Source - good for a startup?4
rzwitserloot posted in startup, programming on March 5th, 2006

I like open source. I operate 2 linux servers which do their job very very well, and I’ve personally looked through some code of the JVM (that’s ’shared source’ but the point is there) which helped me figure something out. I even patched mplayer to do stuff I wanted it to do, which pretty much covers all 3 main ideas behind open source from a personal perspective: Use, Looking, and Modifying.

And yet, I don’t think it’s the future for software development as a whole.

Look at webservices like Reddit, basecamp, del.icio.us. None of them are ‘open source’. Yet they all extensively use open source and are in general written by upcoming, creative programmers. Depending on who you ask, web-based services are the future of software. I don’t see any Open Source happening there.

Similar sad story in the desktop world. Linux desktop still sucks (see rant on X window server below*), windows isn’t losing significant marketshare, and Os X in general beats the pants off of either and proves that it is possible to write something that’s just plain better. Why, exactly, do both Gnome (taskbar) and KDE (start menu) look so much like Windows?

Yet, looking at the development world, everything is open source, or at least shared source. You don’t stand a chance without it. Eclipse is open source. So is python and perl. java is a combination of open and shared source. Heck, even large parts of C# are more or less open source. All serious web platforms are open source (i.e.: jboss and jetty, Ruby on Rails, and django).

Might it be that Open Source works well in some areas but just doesn’t work in others?

Even kernel development is an iffy subject. Linux and FreeBSD are pretty neat, but solaris seems to be a lot more flexible in the kernel department. Given the general stability of linux and personally experience in how debian can update a box almost entirely without even letting the webserver go down, I’ll give this one to linux, though I’d love to see some sort of solaris/debian appear.

I think its because of what open source does to a programmer. Open Source is important first, making something cool is important second. That’s backwards. (I recall that gnome was started because KDE is based on QT, which is not GPL). Also, open source offers no obvious advantages:

Eric raymond said, Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. Yet it doesn’t seem to be true. I’m getting the feeling that a development team unfettered by bureaucracy and endowed with a caring attitude toward their product makes linux security bugs get fixed so quickly. Not its open source nature.

In general open source also doesn’t mean you can scratch your own itch. Many people have whined about X, it’s a very favourite thing to blast. Yet there’s still no one just getting rid of it. The only project I managed to actually patch was mplayer, which had some extremely nice and readable code. Damien Katz argues that Source is a horrible form of documentation and he’s right of course.

Open Source works in programming because the majority of serious users of any programming tools know how to derive benefit from the product’s open source nature. Anywhere else it doesn’t matter; there just needs to be a programming team with sufficient skill and drive to make a great product.

From the perspective of the programmers: Just because you open source your product, doesn’t mean you get a barrage of bug and security audits and patches sent to you. Products get security audited whether or not they are open source - they just need to be used lots.

To summarize, whether to open source or not? Irrelevant. As a client, go with a product backed by a programming team that you seem to trust. As a programmer, if you are making any development-related tool, open source it. If not, don’t. If it gets popular, you can. If you think you can sell it at some point, keep the option open.

Another interesting angle analysing the beneficial economics of open source (in the sense that in goes with free-as-in-beer most of the time) from spolsky here. It doesn’t explain what eclipse has to gain from being open source, but it certainly does explain what IBM has to gain from eclipse being free.

*) For some strange and as yet unknown reason, there are still no serious projects going on to just drop the X window system. Os X has an X11 grafted on as an afterthought. Heck, even windows has an X version. Why isn’t there a KDE or Gnome version that works straight off the framebuffer, no X required? Then emulate an X server like Os X and Windows do.