Source: Facebook

WORKING 18 HOUR DAYS FOR WEEKS ON END?

There was a time when I could work 110-120 hours a week for three or four months at a time. Of course I ended up in the hospital five times doing it – your body just sort of runs out of things like electrolytes. 🙂

But I”m on my third week right now, and, well, you know….. I”m still able to work most people into the ground, but it’s a lot harder on me than it was twenty years ago. I get really tired. 🙂

On the other hand, there is NOTHING like a startup. It’s awesome. You are bringing a vision to life.

FINAL STRETCH

Oversing is still very buggy right now – because it’s a very big application – but we are very close now. (You should have seen our lists at Msft back in the day.) We have to implement one more very important feature (the accounting cycle processing), and then the core of the application is done. The rest is just going through the whole thing and crushing the bug count. Then, after that, it’s just adding features as we want to. And there are a lot of features in the road map that we want to add.

PLATFORMS

One thing that has changed in the enterprise software business, is that it’s merged with the open source business – you need to work as a platform and integrate with other systems openly, so that others can do work with it. Because now, people tend to select not best of breed PRODUCTS, but best of breed FEATURES, and combine features of different products into their OWN version of a product.

And in pursuit of the platform business, one of our design decisions was to mimic the WordPress hook architecture. That means that it’s pretty easy to create plugins for our platform, and just ‘hook’ into events in it. Conversely, it means that if you want to use plugins you need your own instance. And that’s where people start spending money: customization and integration. But they don’t spend it on the product itself.

MAKING IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR COMPETITORS

The other thing is that (as Atlassian has demonstrated) if you make the product something that a reasonably intelligent person can configure without your help, and cheap enough that they can buy with a credit card, then you can make it impossible for previous generations of software vendors to compete – the cost of sales is just too high for them. I mean, Atlassian starts out getting as little as $4 a month per user, and just incrementally gets that up to $10 or more with additional features.

So our strategy with Oversing was to make it broadly useful as a general business application for managing human capital – not just for services businesses. That means we have a larger pool of people to pull from in any given business that adopts our software – not just the developers, help desk, and product management people.

We will see what the market says. It will take us two or three years longer to bring about the full vision. But I suspect that we’ve come pretty close to hitting the mark.

More later….

tired….