Working better together - collaborative people, companies, and software,

I ain't whistlin’ dixie here, folks. The traditional telecom providers really, really, really want to change the way the internet works, switching from a model where you pay them (your high-speed Internet access provider, e.g. cable co., phone co.) for plain Internet access, and separately pay different websites their various offerings, to one where the telcos provide controlled access to everything on the web, where they decide (through various controls and user interfaces) what websites you can see, what services you can access / obtain on the web, and make sure your telcom provider (e.g. Verizon) is in the middle of the financial transaction (e.g. gets some of the money) when you pay for the service you want.

Technorati Tags: Internet, Net Neutrality

Here's a good article on the latest salvo.

I'm Managing Director of the SIP Forum. SIP is the underlying technology being used by A-IMS. The SIP Forum's mission is to promote the adoption and interoperability of SIP. IMS needs, and is built on a SIP foundation, but SIP doesn't need IMS. In fact, I for one, along with many other of the people who helped bring SIP into the successful position it has, did not intend for SIP to be used to create IMS-style Internet toll booths. SIP can be made to be very useful without the access controls SIP is being used to build.

I am concerned that the SIP Forum is going to need to take a stand on whether it supports this form of IMS, or not. We have issues: Our bills are paid by our Full Members, who are equipment vendors that want to sell equipment to Verizon. Our Participant Members are individuals who probably want a flat, open internet with no toll booths. But they don't pay our bills.

Decision day is coming for the SIP Forum: What do we stand for?

The other problem: Consumers don't have a lobby that is as effective for them as the Telcos have for themselves. So consumers can't count on regulators to protect the status quo. And as long as you only have one or two high-speed network providers as your supplier of access to the Internet, if they both do the same thing (which they're hankering to do), market forces won't protect the status quo.

I am pessimistic about the future at the moment.

Posted by Jay Batson at 04:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's not new news: Find a market need, build product to meet the need, and grow.

However, this works if you have the capital to make it work as simply as that. If you don't, you have to find ways to:

• Pay the day to day bills - yours, and your company's - while you grow;
• Pay for the development, marketing, and support of your product.

How to do this? Often, startup companies will do consulting work to bring in the cash to build the business. And therein lies interesting things.

Technorati Tags: Software

We take on consulting projects from time to time when we have some new initiative that needs investment that simply isn't in the current budget. And I guess the purpose of this post isn't so much to talk about doing consulting - it is to talk about what we see when we do the consulting.

Software development - whether desktop, server, or website software - takes discipline. Many consulting customers don't have the discipline in their DNA - either because they're not software developers, or (if they are) they get lazy. So when they write down what they want, it's amazing how much detail they don't really realize must be sorted out along the way. There are big up-front design decisions that are often simply unaddressed. And there is literally a constant stream of small decisions that customers must make, but aren't ready for the investment of time required to make them.

We're proud of one thing here at Plum Canary: We've got people who have been building software since 1984. Lots of different kinds of software. And we understand the need to be compulsive about making the small decisions in a way that looks ahead to what may be, not just what is. We may not be perfect. We're sure our products will always need some new feature or capability we didn't think of. But from our first release to our last, we strive to make the tons of small decisions disappear into the background for our users, and make software easy to use, and make it meet the need it was designed to meet.

I know this sounds like a bit of bragging, but when you see (as we do when we do consulting) how so many companies (who should really know better) don't know how to do this well, it makes us proud to know we can.

Posted by Jay Batson at 12:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'll admit: maybe I've not gotten the Blog thing quite right yet.

But I do know when I see one that is good. I define good as one that:

• Is “well-written” (in the sense of the art of writing);
• Has content that is thoughtful. Somebody actually had something useful to share;
• Made me feel I knew something new and useful when I'm done.

Running an internally-funded software company is great fun. It's also tricky. I've been the CEO of a venture-backed startup, and while it (too) has tricky stuff, there's usually some asset somewhere - money, people, technology - that can be deployed to solve a problem. There are fewer assets in an internally-funded company.

So this blog, produced by a small software vendor, is a “good” blog in my opinion, because it meets my definition of a good blog, and it's all about how to help make a small software startup better. Kudos, Patrick McKenzie, on a terrific blog.

Posted by Jay Batson at 03:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)