Jeff Devine

On Wednesday, I’m on a call with Big Vendor #1, and they are very interested in expanding their business with my employer. They are sure that upgrading to their premium API makes sense, so I ask my typical line of “techie” questions about REST vs SOAP and I get the typical, “We’ll talk to our tech people and get back to you.”

In their follow-up email, they send me a high-level PowerPoint and provide a URL I should “send to my techies and see what they think.” Clearly I must not know my ass from a compiler.

On Thursday, I’m in a meeting with Even Bigger Vendor #2, and they are very interested in expanding their business with my employer. Surely using their newly acquired rules engine will solve all my company’s risk-management needs. My concern that they were providing a technological solution for a business problem that doesn’t exist didn’t stop them at all. They spent the rest of the meeting speaking down to me as if I was clearly a techonlogist who could never understand “Real World” business problems.

My years of experience in P&C Insurance and intimate knowledge of my company’s problems were trumped by Vendor #2′s countless years selling Websphere to investment banks.

Both vendors followed up the very next day, eager to know how soon we could move forward. Neither vendor took the time to get to know me, my place in the company and what I could offer to better position them. Why would I ever give them the keys to the kingdom?

When it comes to vendors, relationships are everything. An Enterprise Software company, whose only connection to a customer is its army of faceless, apathetic sales team, will not survive in the long run.

Anyone with an idea, a credit card, and the passion to succeed has access to world-class infrastructure. Regardless of your opinion of what cloud computing is or is not: it is a new paradigm, giving anyone the ability to compete on the same level as established players.

It isn’t the silver bullet nor does it guarantee success, but it does change the game. It will take time, years perhaps, but the Enterprise Software industry doesn’t stand a chance.

Acquisitions may buy you people and technology, but you can never acquire agility or passion.

The CEO of Meebo, Seth Sternberg, started a TechCrunch series focusing on the decisions a young entrepreneur needs to make. His first post, “From Nothing To Something. How To Get There” recommends you focus on building a product and forget about VC:

“At the exact moment you had your idea, ten other people had the exact same idea. There was just something in the environment that made it the right time for folks to think that one up. The race has already begun! Who’s going to execute first? Who’s going to execute best? If you want to waste nine months trying to raise VC money for that idea, great. But six months in, you’re gonna cry when you see someone else put out that same product you’re pitching me right now. Like I said, forget everything else and just get your product out the door. Now.”

This weekend I also rediscovered Martin Kleppmann’s excellent blog Yes/No/Cancel. First it was building simple REST APIs in Scala but felt strangely validated reading The Python Paradox is now the Scala Paradox. He uses an argument from Paul Graham that:

“…a company can hire smarter programmers if it chooses to write its code in a “comparatively esoteric” programming language”

While Paul Graham was arguing about Python at the time, Kleppmann argues that Scala is this year’s black and has had great success using it to build parts of Go Test It:

“…but provided the technology is suitable and won’t increase your costs disproportionately, why not do something fashionable and adventurous? In an innovation-based technology business, the quality of your developers is key. Investments into things which make your good developers happy will pay off handsomely.”

I’m with Seth that every minute I’m not working on my ideas someone else is, but I struggle with what risks I add by using tech that is new to me. Is it worth adding a few months to get a solid architecture in place as opposed to throwing together a shell that’s mostly throwaway? When you have no product you can only consider the opportunity cost.

In the end none of it matters if I don’t have a working prototype, but this does continue to occupy me… especially as I wait on GWT to compile with Snow Leopard fixes.

Amazing set of visualizations by Jonathan Jarvis that explains how the credit crisis occurred. This takes esoteric concepts such as CDOs and distills them in a very concise way.