| The Ultimate Business Machine Technology, business And, not least, about Weblog • Archive • Cutedge by: Bernard Teo
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Wed 12 May 2004 Patents and the PenguinCategory : Commentary/patentsPenguin.txt This is a very interesting article, "Patents and the Penguin". On the one hand, one can see how fast MySQL has grown in terms of market penetration, using the Open Source model in parallel with an ability to sell profitable services alongside the free downloads. But MySQL AB has, sort of, hedged its bets with a dual licensing model, so they have a lot of flexibility to play their cards no matter which way the game turns. And nobody knows how all these will pan out. The issues about intellectual property rights and patents are complex, as the article above clearly shows. But it's still important for any business to try to understand them. You can choose to work in a business, as a self-employed person. Or to work on a business, as a business owner. But the second is the nicer, more evolved and preferred position to be in. That's because you've established the procedures, methods, and systems so that the business will run without your needing to be there. And it makes it that much more attractive, as a going concern, for other investors to want to buy into because it doesn't matter much to them, then, if you do get run over by a truck. But before you say, watch out Hawaii (or substitute your dream retirement enclave), here I come, you've got to make sure that you really do own the procedures, methods and systems, because that's what the investors are buying. That's why intellectual property issues are so important to understand and track. Maybe, more so because there doesn't seem to be that many lawyers around who understand a thing at all. Features, Functions, and BenefitsCategory : Commentary/featuresFunctionsBenefits.txt Zig Ziglar, in The Ultimate Handbook for the Complete Sales Professional, makes a very clear distinction between features, functions, and benefits, adding that you can only sell on benefits - because everyone tunes into WII-FM (what's in it for me!). That's why I have a lot of problems with the Mac-BMW comparisons. It's a nice analogy but it has zero effectiveness. Expensive cars are but one of the many ways people have at their disposal to signal an elevated status (whether real or imagined). We can talk all we want about the features of a BMW, or an Audi (like the author of the following article did when comparing the Mac to an Audi), as the case may be. But the chief benefit that an expensive car confer its owner is status. Now, when do you ever hear of people buying expensive computers to gain instant status recognition, and arouse envy among the neighbours? Okay, geeks may understand the phrase, "So, how much is your mind worth?", and some Mac users may feel that they're using the BMW of computing. But the argument that we can get ordinary people to plunk their money down for the most expensive computers, just so they can feel rich, is inane, isn't it? I don't have to work very hard to prove that it doesn't work. There's a saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different outcome. So why not try selling it a different way? You've got to sell on benefits and you've got to think about what those benefits are. And there are real benefits to using a Mac. But you've got to think really differently, for a change. Tue 11 May 2004 Postfix Enabler 1.1 Beta 3Category : Technology/pfe1dot1beta3.txt Beta 3 now includes an updated French localisation, contributed by Michel Pansanel, www.carpo.org. Postfix Enabler has included a French localisation since version 1.0.9, due to work done by Michel Poulain (La Shampoo.net). On behalf of the French users of Postfix Enabler, I'd like to say thanks to both Michel Pansanel and Michel Poulain. www.carpo.org contains two tutorials in French about using Postfix Enabler. You can find them by following the links below : Utiliser Postfix pour gŽrer son propre serveur SMTP Utiliser Postfix pour gŽrer un serveur SMTP - 2¡ partie : offrir le SMTP ˆ un rŽseau interne Beta 3 also contains a bug fix - again related to the SpamAssassin installation. If you turn on SpamAssassin, but did not have any SMTP-Authentication active (either using SASLDB or the built-in OS X user accounts mechanism), you will see this error among the log entries : fatal: parameter "smtpd_recipient_restrictions": specify at least one working instance of: check_relay_domains, reject_unauth_destination, reject, defer or defer_if_permit I need to make the smtpd_recipient_restrictions line look like this : smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_mynetworks, check_recipient_access hash:/etc/postfix/filtered_domains, reject_unauth_destination I'm misssing the "reject_unauth_destination" directive when no SMTP-Authentication mechanism is active. Thanks, Sean Alcorn, for reporting the bug, and sorry about that. Even though the number of combinations to test for is getting to be quite a lot, this is one bug that shouldn't have slipped through. I've since fixed this and the Postfix Enabler 1.1 Beta page is now containing the best and latest version. Fri 07 May 2004 Bug in Postfix Enabler 1.1 BetaCategory : Commentary/pfe1dot1bug.txt Now that I have more people testing Postfix Enabler 1.1 Beta, I've just had a bug report. It affects people who're using Postfix Enabler for the first time and also trying to install SpamAssassin, all at one go. I have a bug that caused SpamAssassin not to be activated for such cases, but this bug doesn't affect those who are installing SpamAssassin on top of a mail server that had already been set up by Postfix Enabler. It's hard to explain but I've just fixed it. So, given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow, didn't they say? The Feedback LoopCategory : Commentary/feedbackLoop.txt I did an experiment with the Postfix Enabler page, when I felt sure that the new beta release of Postfix Enabler was doing okay in real-world use. I added a line to that page, announcing the existence of the beta and providing a link to it. I placed the line below the version release notes and above the first graphic, where it would be seen when the page first loads without the reader having to scroll to it. But, other than that, I didn't take any special care to highlight it, e.g., I didn't set any of the keywords to bold, etc. And I monitored the web server log for a couple of days. No follow through. Very few people, among the many who visited the page, actually clicked through to the beta release page. Then I made a couple of very simple changes. I added the words "SpamAssassin", "anti-virus", and "mail traffic statistics" to the line, and set the keywords to bold. Now, the click-through is almost 80% (okay, at least better than 50%). It's so interesting to be able to do things like this. The key is having a tracking tool you can use so that you can take an action and then track the response to that action. In this case, the tool is a very simple web server traffic log that I wrote. It doesn't even do any consolidation or analysis. It simply lists the web server hits in reverse chronological order, albeit in a nicer format than you'll get looking at the actual server logs. But, the point is, you can build feedback tools into almost any information system that you're using. And, my observation is, very few users understand just how much power you can get, when you look at information systems in terms of feedback loops. For example, in an insurance system, the feedback loop is established through monitoring the claims coming in, in parallel with tracking the policies that are being sold. We've built systems that correlate the claims with the policies that resulted in those claims, and put them all in the same window. But we've observed that they're not being used in the way we designed them, simply because claims were done by the claims handling department, and policies were sold by the sales department, and never the twain shall meet. So how are prices set? By pegging the prices against what the competition is charging. But the competitors may be catering to different sets of clientele resulting in a different claims experiences. The irony is that the users actually have better information, right under their noses, to prove or disprove this thesis. In any case, they should be able to work out, statistically and in much quicker time than they could employing third-party actuaries, the prices to charge to cover the costs of the claims. The feedback loop gives them eyes to see so that they can navigate their way to profitability. But it's not being used So, the next thing is to ask is : is this peculiar only to Singapore - that we have somehow much dumber people. But we've worked for years with the multi-nationals - French, Germans, and the Americans (as in US of A) - and I believe the problem could be universal. I think it's due more to the dismal state of the IT industry, where the emphasis is on technology rather than the information. We should understand that we're really in the business of understanding information, and technology is just the tool. I believe the users can be persuaded that there's a better way. Sure, a lot of people just want to go through the motions and get paid each month - if they can get away with it. But you can start with the proposition, "Wouldn't you want to earn more, each month? We can do it if we're more profitable", and take it from there. But getting the IT department to change - to stop blocking initiatives that didn't originate from Redmond - that's a harder thing. Try talking about understanding information when every IT guy you meet wants to talk about .Net and Visual Basic, and making obeissance to Bill Gates. You can change things if you can get a lot people moving in sync with you. But you can get bogged down with "due diligence" and all that sort of oversight, especially when the "Mac Way" of doing things you are trying to cultivate among the users start to threaten the authority of the IT department. Quoting this MacNewsWorld article : "... it's not that hard to support the idea that we tend to value the wrong kinds of expertise in deciding who the IT experts are ... IT decision-makers, the people whose expertise led to the rapid rise of the IBM PC and blocked Apple's early effort to serve the enterprise computing market ... that kind of expertise, in which the wrong people apply inapplicable experience to make wrong decisions..." Unfortunately, it's these kinds of people who're controlling the IT industry discourse, deciding what is important and what's not, what is standard, and what's not. People like Rob Enderle, ironically from the same journal. So what can we do? Quoting the MacNewsWorld article again, "In the short term, nothing. The people in charge in the data centers will perpetuate their ideas until younger companies with smarter leadership do a sufficiently better job of meeting consumer needs either to put their employers out of business or take them over." But, I may be dead by then. "In the long run, we're all dead." Wed 05 May 2004 SerendipityCategory : Commentary/secondhandbookstore.txt I was searching Google for second hand bookstores near my office. I have more books than I know what to do with, and we may be moving office. I was hoping to sell some of the less memorable ones to a second hand bookstore nearby so I don't have to cart them around. Look what I found. First, a suggestion that perhaps some of the more notable figures among our political opposition would be better off going into business themselves, like running a second hand bookshop. Got to give credit to the contributor. It's hard to fault his or her logic. I even believe it may work. But it'll probably not be taken up. Next, a case study of a second hand book store in Ireland - "KennyÕs Second Hand Bookstore opened its doors on Friday 19th November 1940 selling a selection of second hand schoolbooks donated to Des and Maureen Kenny by their friends. Since then, KennyÕs has come to be regarded as the worldwide specialists in both published Irish Literature and antiquarian books in a range of subjects." - it's a very interesting read, and soon I was forgetting what I was supposed to be doing and following the links on this site. Which leads me to Enterprise-Ireland.com - "Helping Irish companies grow in world markets". If you've ever spent any part of your waking life worrying about how to make your company grow, you will find something interesting here. There've compiled a very wide range of case studies and they're very well-organised and easy to navigate. These people are definitely not going through the motions here. Tue 04 May 2004 Building Better MousetrapsCategory : Technology/betterMouseTraps.txt "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door." Ralph Waldo Emerson. Postfix and Sendmail Enablers are not, most definitely, commercial successes. Not by a long way. But I'm happy that they've been useful. It would have been nice to see more PayPal notifications. But it's nice enough, for the moment, to see the variety of places where they've been used. For example, these are some of the places they've been referred to : Moodle - http://moodle.org/doc/ Sol4.Net - Sending Email from Perl - http://sol4.net/projects/project1.shtml The Postfix Site : http://www.postfix.org/addon.html We're learning something everyday from doing this. I'm learning how to handle the tech support requests better. And we're learning, as we experiment, about building things that people would want to use. People whom we've never met before, and who don't know us from Adam. But will they still use the stuff if they have to pay for it? For ten years, we had gotten by well enough building custom software and providing custom site support. And getting paid by PC users while hanging on to our Macs was a trick that worked for us. But I don't how the other guys in the business could keep on doing this because the energy, the intensity of focus you have to supply to keep the business going, is simply not sustainable. I think Michael Gerber described it best in "The E-Myth Revisited". Part of the reasons for all this rambling is that I'm far from clear how to find the way out. And this weblog is my way of letting out the noise when the thinking gets too loud. For example, I was writing the documentation for Luca, an accounting system that we built, and I was saying something like how Luca allows a company to manage a really sizeable business with, at most, one accounts manager and maybe just one clerk. Like how a company using Luca could handle the same amount of transactions, both in terms of dollar volume and the number of vouchers processed, as another company which had almost five times the amount of staff. And this actually did happen. But imagine the accounts manager (whose company is using Luca) attending a (wedding) dinner, say, where she happens to find her friend who is the financial controller for that other larger company (at least in terms of staff strength but, remember, the two companies do almost the same amount of business, but who at the dinner table would know that?). Imagine how she feels when she says she has just one person reporting to her and the other could mention five or six. That's why her friend has a better title - she has more people reporting to her. So the idealism that went into the design (to get the work done in the most efficient way possible) gets undermined in social situations like these. This is similar to the challenges Apple faces with the IT departments. (In passing, read Rob Enderle's latest column and you can see why Apple may never be able to get past the biases and entrenched interests - "... the market likes standards and Apple isn't one"). If you're starting a company, it pays to watch Apple and learn from its trials and tribulations. You're never going to be able to take a Microsoft-like posture because it's going to be pain, contempt, despair, and yet more pain. Watch Apple and see if there's method in its madness and whether some of it could work for you. Mon 03 May 2004 Apple is to Computers as BMW is to Cars? WrongCategory : Technology/appleBMWcomparison.txt Got this from the Mac OS rumors site, and the more people who read this the better : "Steve Jobs loves to throw out the handy little statistic that Apple has more marketshare than BMW in an effort to justify the Mac's 3% of the US computer market. "There is one fundamental flaw in his thinking, however. "Whether one drives a BMW or a Chevy, one uses the same fuel. However, if you use a Mac, you need software that is incompatible with 97% of the computer market. "Imagine if BMWs required special fuel. How many people would buy them?" And, having worked in corporations and watched Macs being "cleansed" out from them, I can contribute a few more examples why that analogy fails. So Steve Jobs ought to think different, himself. For example, you may laugh at the PCs being Yugos but the IT department could build the equivalent of roads with widths that only the Yuogos can run on. And they will do it just because they can. The Internet has, sort of, saved the Mac. Back in the days when corporations were evaluating mail systems with names like Da Vinci and Network Courier (names you may not have heard of today because they probably all died with the advent of the Internet), it was very easy for IT departments to kill the Macs by choosing just one out of the many that would not support the Mac. Java has also saved the Mac. It was possible, before we had the abundance of JDBC drivers that came with Java, to say that none of the standard database systems will work with the Mac. So, off with it. But today - Oracle, MySQL, PostgresSQL, Sybase - all these will work on the Mac. So, if we seem to have escaped from irrelevance, it may probably be due more to accident than by design. Or didn't Guy Kawasaki say that the continued existence of the Mac is proof enough that God exists? Sun 02 May 2004 Cocoa BindingsCategory : Technology/cocoabindings.txt I believe Steve Jobs said, while morphing NeXTStep into Cocoa, that the best code is the code you don't have to write. I've just read, for the first time, about Cocoa Bindings, and it looks like we could find a lot of use for it in Luca. The less code you have to write, the less you have to debug. So the more of these the better. The example given is in Objective-C. But what about Java? There's so much to know in so little time. Sat 01 May 2004 Weblog.hqxCategory : Technology/weblogHQX.txt There had been quite a few downloads recently of the PHP-based weblog system that is used to drive this site. Unfortunately, I hadn't been updating it much. For example, initially the Search Weblog and Send-A-Mail feature didn't quite work. But I had solved it a long time ago but hadn't updated the download package with the latest version. But I've just done that. Sorry about that. If you download it now and enable PHP on your built-in Apache web server, you can set up your own weblog by dragging the expanded folder anywhere inside /Library/WebServer/Documents. If you do that, clicking on this link will show you what you should see when you do a http://localhost/weblog The documentation is still outdated because it's already taken longer than I have the time to spare to update the download package. But most of the documentation is still valid. If you need to update the weblog remotely, after you've saved the day's blog item into the docs folder, execute the following Unix shell script from the terminal (with your own modifications), and that should do the trick : #!/bin/sh If you're using BBEdit, you can create a file to store that script and stuff that file into BBEdit's Unix Support/Unix Scripts folder, in which case it will appear on BBedit's Unix Scripts menu, which will then allow you to update your weblog from within BBedit. Not quite totally the Mac Way. But close enough for now. Thu 29 Apr 2004 iTunesCategory : Commentary/iTunes.txt Is it only me? But I believe the music sounds better on my iBook since I did the latest iTunes update. There's so much to admire about Apple's interface design. You read about Party Shuffle and you sort of understand why it'll be cool to have such a feature. But then, when you finally get to trying it, it all makes sense, and you go "but, of course!". Want to do really good user interface design? Use a Mac. Every day. (And I thought I had gotten being a Mac evangelist out of my system). In all the notes about Steve Jobs' iTunes Music Store anniversary interviews, I think one item stands out - about the two thirds of the music that is not in print anymore. "A somewhat intriguing glimpse of the future was offered when Steve Jobs said that one of the biggest challenges in working with the labels was getting their out of print archives online. Mr. Jobs said that most of the labels had less than 1/3 of their entire catalog in print, largely because of the physical and financial limits the real world imposes on physical inventory. He added that "it's getting even worse with the demise of small record stores." "According to Mr. Jobs, Apple would like to get that back catalog on the iTMS. That would offer untold options for music lovers of all varieties to get what we currently consider to be "hard to find" songs." (MacObserver) It makes perfect business sense. These pieces of music are not in print because of the old economics prevailing. You may have a certain number of people who have a very deep yearning to buy, collect and listen to these old pieces again. But there wouldn't be enough of them to make it worth the distribution overheads. But the beauty of being digital is that you're shipping bits directly to desktops and then to ipods. You've nuked the overheads and changed the rules of the game. Zooming out from talking about iTunes for a while, I've spent a lot of my time looking for a business we can run ourselves that uses our own technology, and where I don't have to argue with an IT department about using a Mac, or doing things the Mac way, etc, because I know it all works and that there are so many ways to kill your competition using it. It seems like Apple has found it. They've found a way whereby their iTunes, iPods, Music Store, Apple Store, experience streaming huge amounts of content out their Movie Trailer servers, and the whole Apple design gestalt come together in a business enterprise which just works and which cannot be easily duplicated because the magic is in the whole gestalt rather than in any individual piece. This is what I'm envious of. That's the way to do it. Use your own technology, stop trying to persuade people, and kill the competition. It's the best revenge. Man, you've got to love all this music. iTunes takes you out of this world and into the world of memories. Java-on-Mac MeetupCategory : Commentary/JavaMeetup.txt These are some of the pictures Timmy Yeo took a couple of nights ago at Burger King (at Novena Square, where there's glorious free wireless surfing and we should use it while it lasts!) when a few of us met up to take a look at Java on OS X. I think I was trying to explain Model-View-Controller, using the iBook, handphone, and what-else as props.
James Gallagher is doing a blog editor tool in Java and Cocoa, using XML-RPC to talk to a MoveableType server. I persuaded Hai Hwee to come along because, being the Java-Cocoa guru (and I'm just the "suit"), she would be of better help. There's Siva (bottom, left), self-confessed "MacAddict", who's using the version of PHPosxom that I mangled (basically I made changes to it to make it easier to design the look of the web page without tripping over the PHP code), and who has since helped a few other people set up blogs.
Then there's also Hanx (top, left), a long time Mac user and "evangelist", and Seng Aik (top, right), who had set up MacRebels ("Rebel Against Stupidity"). Also, I just remember - we're going to have the usual monthly Mac meet-up next week, Tuesday. So, the Mac scene is alive and well in Singapore. I was reading this article about the design of the Apple Store, yesterday, and about how Apple feel the stores may have contributed to Mac sales, ever since they were started. But, the question is : just how many people were pre-sold about the benefits of the Mac in sessions like these, all over the world, before they even walk into an Apple store or an AppleCentre. If the entity in Apple that oversees the sales figures of our local office is happy with its performance, then the impact of all these non-paid Mac "evangelists" must have been significant. Because, for years, watching Apple perform in Singapore was like watching a team in smart cool jerseys get walloped 10-nil every time they take the field. And they could still give themselves high-fives when they leave the field. And there's nothing you can do about it, if you can't bring yourself to work on Windows. Love me, love my dog. So, if you can't help sharing your enthusiasm for the platform, you're probably going to help sell a few Macs, which makes Apple salespeople think they're so smart, since they can sell so much without doing a thing themselves. Which could be the reason why they seem so smug. And the cycle goes on and on. But it struck me clearly, last week at Sun Tech Day, that Java has given me a way to dis-engage. No more throwing a body in the line of a rabid Windows or Linux user. Be my guest, take a swipe. You can continue using what is probably the best hardware/software combination. Yet, you don't marginalise yourself out in the fringes. I would love it if Apple Singapore perform better and get their act together because it would be no more than the long-suffering Mac users deserve. But we should leave this worrying of the (small) size of the Mac market to the guys who're paid to do it (even if they always seem so determined to run the company to the ground, and then return to the safety of their IBMs and HPs). I don't believe we will see any improvement until Apple hires people who really love the platform for their Singapore office. I was actually astounded to read the last paragraph in the Apple Store article: "But I think the one thing that sets apart our stores and Apple, is fundamentally two types of people in the world, in my view. There are believers and there are skeptics," Johnson said. "Apple is filled with believers. And believers tend to think of what can be, and they just go do it, and they don't spend time asking why not. They go and make it happen." "Apple is filled with believers." If this were true, I don't see it in our neighbourhood. Finally, Apple's success with OS X shows that, some day, some Taiwanese or Chinese company will wake up to the same conclusion - that they can take their skills building computer hardware, and marry that with an ability to integrate all these free, Open Source stuff, the way Apple has done. The Microsoft business model may not be the only model that could succeed and Apple has shown a viable alternative. So, it may be all geek-talk. But geeks can feel the ground shift before others can. It'll be interesting to see how this works out. Read more ... |
Mac@Work
Services running on this server, a Mac Mini running Mac OS X 10.9.2 Mavericks:
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