Monday, April 7, 2008
Economics Rule
The question then becomes, who will pay for all this free content to be created? The answer is simple; free, infinite goods will help sell the scarce goods produced by companies and individuals. This could be any number of things, such as a free music track helping create fans for an artist or an e-book sparking a desire to buy a book you never would have considered. The point is that, at the core, it is all basic economics.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Redefining Internet Safety
Thursday, March 27, 2008
The Art of the Prototype
These problems could be lessened if more companies would invest in a serious prototyping stage. I'm not talking about a PowerPoint presentation showing the imagined functionality of your software. I mean pulling out the rapid prototyping tools, creating something that meets the core needs of your users to solve the basic problem, and rolling it out to 20-30% of your users to watch while they use it for 6 months. When we do this, we are following Brooks' council in planning to throw away the prototype, but saving time and energy by not wasting a lot of time creating a tool that has a good probability of begin fundamentally flawed.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Outsourcing is your friend
First, it’s important to note that the idea that computer science graduates are only prepared to sling code is absolutely false (or, at least, should be). Universities strive to produce well-rounded students who can not only implement projects in code, but think about long-term sustainability of the systems they design and create elegant, algorithmic solutions to a problem. The jobs which require these skills are not being shipped across the ocean. The jobs that are leaving the
The idea that jobs in IT are scarce is another falsehood. By most accounts, the jobs available for IT workers are only increasing, and are increasing at such a rate that the current supply of US workers can’t meet the need. Hence, companies are fighting over the ability to bring in foreign workers to fill their backlog of IT positions. Hence the problem the past two years with the shortage of H-1B work visas. For a qualified graduate student, there is no scarcity of jobs in IT.
The amount of jobs existing in the