insider information - Web Industry News and Views on Design, Hosting and ECommerce by Travis Snelling

Do we really need Microsoft?

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 13:40:52 -0500

Keeping this item in mind, picture the turmoil Microsoft could cause by doing the same thing to the U.S. and the rest of the world.

Picture Microsoft shutting its doors, forever, and never answering another support call or putting out another update for its software.
What would the world do?

All those systems reliant on Windows, all those corporations reliant on the Office suite - sure, the economy would recover eventually, but just how much of an impact could the closing of Microsoft cause?

I'm not trying to incite some sort of paranoia-fed conspiracy theories, but just think about it. A lot of Linux advocates dream of a day when Microsoft no longer exists, but do they really know what they're asking for?

Hate to see them go but love to watch them leave?

Wed, 23 Feb 2005 16:13:39 -0500

Ever have a customer who has provided more headaches and hardships than they paid for? Sometimes there's those clients who think that just because they're the ones paying for the service that they're in total control and can manipulate their way into receiving the best possible "deal".
I can appreciate somebody who shops around... I implore people to. What I can't appreciate is a customer who takes the deliberate stance of being difficult and hard to please - I truly do whatever I can to make a customer happy so I know that if a customer is unhappy with price and payment policy (one bill a year - harsh, I know) than I've got a customer who would be better off somewhere else.

The Gap Between Consumers and Producers

Fri, 18 Feb 2005 15:39:36 -0500

Fresh out of school and looking for work in the IT industry? Never worked in a big-name office before? Have a plethora of great ideas and creative instincts that you just know would excel you through the ranks of a company, if only they'd take a chance on you?
You're definitely not alone, or special for that matter.

The bank of IT providers currently itching for any work they can get is enormous. Freelance/contract work is getting increasingly popular with the young and inexperienced populace of Internet/New Media hopefuls.

the GMachine

Thu, 14 Apr 2005 14:19:03 -0400

Google. They've now taken over eBay as the biggest, publicly traded, online company. They just made profits of $204.1 million in 3 months. Their stocks are trading on average above $200/each, day-in-day-out.

Can the GMachine be stopped?

As the veteran Microsoft enters the already flooded search engine industry, and Google still being fresh and refreshing to most people, it raises the question: can the old supplant the new?

Finding, Acquiring, and Keeping Customers

Wed, 02 Feb 2005 12:40:54 -0500

I've often said that the most exciting part of what I do is not doing work for somebody, but getting somebody to want me to do work for them. The sale. Boiler Room, Glengarry Glen Ross, Wall Street... all good (the best) sales movies with the same consensus: It's the thrill of the hunt.

I've learned that doing the work is easy - getting it's the hard part. I've made the mistake of being a chooser when I was so undoubtedly a beggar. It's a common issue with us self-taught IT folk who love what we do... we sometimes forget that the exciting and tightly coded shopping cart we just developed for a client may, unfortunately, not be that exciting to them. And often is the case, some of us IT folk have difficulty expressing just how exciting the product is to the general user.

Open Source to the Small Business Owner

Wed, 02 Feb 2005 12:41:09 -0500

Open source software is software that is freely distributable; software to which one can view the source code - how it was made. No secrets. Open source software bares all for the world to see, at no cost.

Is that safe? Well, that's a loaded question. In the reality of the Internet today, nothing is genuinely "safe". There is always the possibility that security can be circumvented, stability can be compromised, and data can be lifted. These issues are prevalent in almost every hard-working software release - open source or otherwise.

Dealing with Spam

Wed, 02 Feb 2005 12:41:39 -0500

Everybody knows it, everybody hates it.
You may wonder why these companies even bother sending all of the offers for cialis, rolex watches, vicodin, and not to mention all the filthy stuff.

The answer is simple: they wouldn't be doing it if they weren't making a profit.

Just how much profit? There's a report created by some researchers at Microsoft who claim that a single spam email message costs around 0.01 cent to send (cost of bandwidth, email address list purchasing, etc.) compared to the average, say, $11 they make on each sale.

When to Sub-Contract

Wed, 02 Feb 2005 12:41:53 -0500

It's becoming a common scenario with all the off-shoring and web work being done: developers simply having too much work to do.

But how do you know when the time is right to sub-contract that gig, or at least a portion of it?

The pattern I tend to see with those who sub-contract is that they're more business oriented than they are technically oriented. They thrive in the art of micromanagement. They're the sayers, not the doers. They're the ones who collect the cheques from the clients, and shave off a fraction of it for those they've hired.

To Grow or Not to Grow

Wed, 02 Feb 2005 12:42:04 -0500

When I started my venture into the webhosting industry, a business sense was something I lacked - to say the least.
I started hosting friends for free on a trusty 486 Debian Linux box (while my family wasn't using the installation of Windows on the other partition). I'm sure my friends didn't like the sporadic nature of my service, but then again, they probably wouldn't like paying for hosting, either.

Linux was, more or less, a way for me to immerse myself in an unknown technology and learn on the best way I knew how: hands on.