Monthly Archive for June, 2010

Understanding Social Media

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on June 30, 2010
in People
. 0 Comments

Every single thing that has ever happened on the internet can be explained using two very simple rules.

Rule 1 : there is too much content available.
Rule 2: some of that content is too interesting to miss.

As a consequence, most people on the internet mostly spend their time looking for the content that they want to see. And any tools, tips, techniques or tactics they can use to find that content will be successful.

Suppose you’re looking for specific content, such as the name and location of a nearby restaurant.

You can ask an automated service for the information—here, automated means that your query is processed in real-time without human intervention, even if the data was originally typed in by a human being. Sometimes, you’re lucky enough to have a specialized service for your question (Qype for restaurants, Stack Overflow for computer programming…) Sometimes, you have to resort to a general-purpose system (Wikipedia, Google…)

A recent evolution : if you’re looking for a product or service, chances are that providers of that service will have optimized their web sites to appear at the top of the search results for that query, making Google a good way to find product or service providers. This might create an artificial monopoly, as Google provides the best results, thereby prompting most users to use Google, thereby prompting most companies to optimize their web sites for Google, thereby helping Google provide the best results.

You can ask your friends and acquaintances. Depending on how specific the question is, you might get a very good answer from a trusted friend, or a set of blank looks. If you know an expert in the field, he might at least be able to point you in the right direction (an expert could be someone who eats in restaurants a lot, and can therefore point you to an appropriate automated service). This could be done by mail, or through networking sites (LinkedIn, Facebook, Viadeo…)

A big Facebook early win was to move from “I can find someone who might know, and send them a private message” approach that originated with e-mails and was perpetuated by LinkedIn et al, to “I can just publish the question, and all of my friends will see it”. This ability to tell everyone you know without being perceived as an inbox spammer is one of the core communication advantages of the new social network generation.

You can ask random people who might know about it. This is the general idea behind discussion forums and bulletin boards: many people who share a common interest huddle together, other people come there to ask questions about that common interest, and the well-informed old-timers answer. This is usually the last (and best) recourse when looking for extremely specific information.

A classic problem for such communities is to leverage the answers once the asker has moved on. The crudest technique for doing so is the FAQ, and it’s generally the only one available in real-time mediums like IRC. Search engines may be able to find discussion threads in forums, but they are rarely in an easily readable form because they rely on context and reading through several pages of replies, or sometimes even trees of replies. A big advantage for Stack Overflow is to have participants write in an easy-to-search, easy-to-read-later format, even if it feels less natural than standard message boards.

You can ask people whose job is to know about it. This is the typical “customer support” situation where you pay for having access to someone who can answer your questions about a certain topic. Assuming that the system works as advertised, the results are of a higher quality: these people are trained to provide information, very familiar with the problem domain, and effectively act as an authority that can be trusted.

Lately, a lot of companies started using Twitter to handle customer support. There are no serious technical benefits to doing so, especially since they also have to handle standard by-mail or by-online-form support for those people who don’t use Twitter. The real benefit is to differentiate yourself from old-school firms who don’t give a damn about customer support: customers will notice that you made an effort to set up a Twitter account, and they can look at the history for that account to see how serious you are about it. Twitter is basically an embodiment of show, don’t tell for customer support.

The other side of the coin is receiving information that you’re not actively looking for. You’re glad that someone sent you that link to I Can Has Cheezburger even though you weren’t looking for cute cat pictures in the first place. It’s like randomly browsing through the comic book section of your book store to find new comics worth reading, except that you want to spend as little time as possible looking for good comics, and you want to read only those comics that you like.

You can find a large website with interesting content. If the website is large enough, chances are that you’ll spend a while there before you run out of content. The only requirement is that the content should be consistent. Not having a specific editorial line can hurt a lot because readers don’t know what to expect (yes, I should be showing instead of telling). Examples include the entire I Can Has Cheezburger network, Cracked, Snopes and even Wikipedia. Obligatory XKCD reference:

People like “Best Of” lists for a reason: they’re afraid of ending up reading mediocre content. And even if a blog or website does happen to have quality content everywhere, you will run out of content sooner or later because you consume content faster than they can produce it.

Another possibility is to find an average website with quality outgoing links that you can follow. It’s the main reason why many “echo chamber” blogs are so successful despite contributing no quality content of their own: the mere aggregation of quality content from other sources is, in itself, an added value that readers will be grateful for. How often does one see original content on, say, Ajaxian? The same goes for Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us and similar bookmarking, link-rating and link-sharing applications.

The trouble is that link-sharing sites can be perverted. Loopholes exist, and as advertiser awareness about social media grew, they managed to kill it. The main reason is that these sites aggregate anyone’s opinion, which includes the opinion of people who really want you to see their own content.

The natural solution is to only listen to people that you believe have an interesting opinion. Could be your Facebook friends. Could be Twitter accounts that you are following. The key element here is not “I know these people and trust their judgment” as much as it is opt-in. You actively choose who you start listening to.

Penetrating this kind of social bookmarking is harder for advertisers, because they can only be heard by those people who are listening to them. Penetrating e-mail was easy (hence, spam), penetrating anonymous link-sharing was easy, but as soon as you have to convince people to listen to you before telling them anything, you need to start being remarkable.

Last but not least, you can subscribe to web sites you like. The reasoning is that if a web site has interesting content, and if it’s frequently updated, then there’s a fair chance that it will have good content in the future. And you want to be notified when this happens.

The issue is that there’s no standard way of being notified. Not in the technical RSS-vs-Atom sense, but rather because person X likes being notified through RSS because he loves his feed aggregator, while person Y likes Twitter more because everyone will attempt to describe their new post in a clear 140-character title, and person Z would rather get updates by e-mail because they don’t want to learn any more software, and so on. It’s almost mandatory for blogs to deliver content updates through several channels, because plain old RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore.

In the end, it’s a constant fight between people who want to find interesting content, and people who create uninteresting content and want others to read it. The internet is slowly evolving through natural selection, as people use solutions that eliminate the noise and keep the signal. Looking for the next big trend on the internet is as silly as wondering what new species are going to emerge: it’s all about mutations, and mutations are random.

Face Your Competitors Head On (Sort Of)

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on June 29, 2010
in Strategy
. 0 Comments

I wish I’d invented Facebook. Or Twitter. Or Magento. Or the Million Dollar Homepage. But now that someone did invent them, there’s no point in trying anymore. Right? It’s like famous math problems: once someone does prove the Riemann Hypothesis, all the other people working on the topic will need to find another problem to solve. Once a problem is solved, there’s no point in solving it again.


Or is there? Facebook “replaced” FriendSet and MySpace, Magento is still fighting the good fight against oscommerce. Right now, countless small projects are mustering their feature sets, ready to take on the market leaders. The point is not to topple the titans—the sheer inertia of having to change platforms is going to keep them alive—but rather to chip away some market share.

It’s easy to imagine the leading providers as huge ogres and trolls, wielding spiked clubs and crushing you like the little puny ants that you are. Crush, crush, stomp, stomp. You look at their product, and you weep, because there’s no way you can have 2000 features done by December, and the big ogre can just imperceptibly nod in the right direction to add all of your features to their solution. Only better, cheaper and shinier.

And it’s very tempted to be original (just like everybody else), because there are plenty of examples of start-ups that were doing something completely stupid, yet managed to raise funds and find customers. It’s the gold rush mentality all over again: why should I stick around to be a weaver/farmer/carpenter if I can just go to California, where I’m going to pick the river with the gold nuggets, because I’m that good?

Sometimes, it’s easier to sneak past the ogre guarding the treasure. Or to stab him in the back.

Here are a few rivers where you might find gold nuggets:

  • Some people just don’t want to go with the mainstream product. This is the kind of person who would avoid buying an iPhone because everyone else has one. If you’re up against an established product, these people can be an interesting market to tap into.
  • In expanding markets, you don’t need to steal customers. By extension, if someone just had a great idea, there’s still time to jump on the bandwagon: there’s plenty of customers for everyone, and your combined efforts will create awareness for the product category.
  • No matter what you try, you need to be different. There are no perfect imitations: customers will find the differences. If they are not intentional, you end up with a product that tries to imitate another, but fails. If you embrace and advertise your differences, you can actually manage to be better than your competitor on a certain topic.
  • Nobody’s perfect. Not everyone is a technical genius, a marketing ace and a customer support wizard. Find the weaknesses of your competitors, and determine how you can turn them into advantages for your customers.
  • Wait until the time is right. Quite often, established companies are like frogs in boiling water: they don’t notice that the world around them is changing. If several competitors are sitting on a niche activity, they won’t necessarily notice right away if that activity gets the spotlight. You might be watching them from the sidelines, waiting to pounce, thereby gaining the advantage by adapting your strategy to the new trend.
  • You’re someone else. Every company has an image. Maybe your competitor has a hyper-professional image that appeals only to huge corporations. Maybe they have set up an edgy, cuss-words-on-the-corporate-website kind of show that alienates the more serious customers. If you can manage to be who they are not, you might capture those customers who like the products but hate the shopkeeper.

Do you have any interesting experiences to share about moving into a market with established competitor? Do you think is it easier to find a new market, or to find a niche within an existing one?

Die, little ants. Die.

Nicollet.Net Facebook Page

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on June 28, 2010
in Random
. 0 Comments

There have been three changes to the blog layout this week-end:

  • Removed the calendar from the sidebar.
  • Added a “Like” button to every post.
  • Added a fan page badge to the sidebar, using the newly created Nicollet.net fan page :
 

Dear readers and subscribers : I know that you’re more than an user agent and IP address! If you like what you’re reading on this blog, please consider joining the facebook page: it’s a simple way to help others discover this blog, you will be kept up to date with frequent updates, and I will get to see your happy little faces :)

Anyway, below is a simple tutorial for adding Facebook capabilities to a website or blog, just in case.

Adding the “Like” button

The idea behind the “Like” button is that Facebook will keep track of who liked what page on the internet, based on the page’s address. By default, it shows how many people clicked the “like” button. If the friends of a visitor liked the post, these friends will be explicitly named. If nobody has liked the page, it cleverly displays a “be the first of your friends to like this page“. Oh, and you can choose to rename “like” to “recommend” if you think the former sounds stupid.

This button is implemented as an iframe. You can generate the HTML for a certain page by going here and entering the address of the page. You will end up with HTML that looks like this:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php
?href=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nicollet.net%2F&amp;layout=sta
ndard&amp;show_faces=true&amp;width=450&amp;action=li
ke&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;height=80" scrolling="no
" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden
; width:450px; height:80px;" allowTransparency="true"
></iframe>

Hidden in this mess is the address of the page to be liked, which means you can generate it using your server. For instance, to get this nice button below every post, I edited my WordPress blog template to add this iframe at the bottom of every post, then replaced the URL address with some PHP code:

<?php echo urlencode(the_permalink()) ?>

It’s important to keep in mind that Facebook determines the number of “likes” based on the URL. So, make sure all “like” buttons for a given page use the same address (for instance, adding a “like” button to forum threads would involve using the link to the first page of the thread on all pages of the thread).

Creating a Facebook Page

This one is exceedingly simple. Go to the page creation form, fill in any required information, and go! If creating a professional page, you might want to create a Facebook account that is distinct from your private account, to use as a page administrator profile. Once the page is created, add a picture, fill in the info tab, and write a short text in the left sidebar. Then, start promoting the page.

Adding the Page Badge to your site

Actually, it’s called a “like box”, and again, there’s a clean creation form available. Fill in any required details, and copy-paste the generated HTML back on your site. The only difficulty here is figuring out your page number. It’s hidden in the URL of your page: for instance, you can find the Nicollet.Net page at

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/NicolletNet/133220253364964

The page number appears at the end of that address, so just copy-paste that value.

The Evil Overlord Problem

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on June 22, 2010
in Random
. 30 Comments

This is a contest! EDIT: and it’s closed. Round two is here.

Find the right answer to the question below, and you can win a 40€ Amazon gift card  (or $50, your choice). To participate, just leave a comment below with your answer. The deadline is July 1st 2010 at 12:00 am (GMT+0).

The problem:

Once again, the Evil Overlord is ready to take over the world. His plan involves stealing a nuke, flailing it around wildly like the madman he is, and waiting for all nations to surrender. Igor, his incompetent yet endearing henchman, informs him that the government of Probabilistan has recently built a nuclear silo, cleverly hidden under a soda storage warehouse. The problem is that there are thirty warehouses and the Dark Legions only have enough troops to storm one. Igor can’t seem to remember which one it was…

Now, the nice thing about the Probabilistan soda industry is that the supply chain is just flawless. Every day, large numbers of soda bottles are produced in the plant and every bottle will be neatly stored in a single warehouse until the delivery truck comes to take it away. A bottle in warehouse 1 always waits for one day before it’s delivered. A bottle in warehouse 2 always waits for two days. A bottle in warehouse N always waits for N days before it’s taken away. Every bottle has its manufacturing date clearly printed on its side.

And despite his incompetence, Igor managed to bring back a soda bottle from the very warehouse that sits on top of the silo! But how can a random bottle taken from a random warehouse help the Evil Overlord’s scheme? Never underestimate a mad genius!

The question:

What is the probability of the Evil Overlord sending his Dark Legions to the correct warehouse?

Edit (2010/06/26) a few clarifications:

  • The Evil Overlord is infinitely intelligent. He knows all of the above, knows the manufacturing date, and will use that data to maximize his chances of finding the correct warehouse. You know neither the location of the nuclear silo, nor the manufacturing date, nor the warehouse that will be attacked (since it probably depends on the manufacturing date anyway).
  • Bottles are stored in the warehouses at noon, and also delivered from the warehouses at noon. Igor stole the bottle at midnight (so all storage and deliveries for the day had already taken place).
  • Every day, the same number of bottles is produced (several thousands) and split evenly across all warehouses. So, there are no empty warehouses. What “stored in a single warehouse” means is that a given bottle will not be stored in two warehouses.
  • Igor took the bottle from the warehouse. So, it was in the warehouse when it was taken.
  • Probabilistan isn’t a real country.
evil

White persian cat. Evil overlord not included.

 

If several people provide the right answer, I will pick one at random using the MD5 hash of their post names and the opening price of the Dow Jones Industrial Average on July 1st 2010, as provided by Google. If the winner’s email is invalid, or if I get no answer within a week, I will pick another winner until I run out of winners, at which point I’ll buy myself a book.

Software Inbreeding

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on June 21, 2010
in Imperative
. 4 Comments

You’ve seen one of these painful, horrible business applications, uglier than hell and with no thought put into consistency or usability. No sane person would use them, but they are still used because that’s what the company paid for and that’s what the employees are going to use.

The root cause of all this suffering? Think about it : who is going to write a piece of accounting software?

Choice A : the competent former accountant who happens to know something about programming. But he’s not an expert, so he uses some PHP4 he stole off the web instead of leveraging open source tools that are too hard for him to change, he writes <marquee> everywhere because he never heard of growl, he makes weird mistakes related to unicode (which he believes is a Nazi encryption scheme from 1944) and he steals assorted icons from the 1990 Macintosh world because FamFamFam’s silk is too esoteric for him to know about.

Choice B : the competent programmer who happens to know something about accounting. [Insert here striking examples about how incompetent programmers can be when dealing with accounting :) ] And he might get bored before the end, because accounting is boring to engineering types (and that would be assuming he even knew there was a need for an accounting application in the first place).

With Choice B, you get a symphony of Ajax-CSS3-HTML5 beauty and pixel-tuned usability, but you can’t use accrual-based accounting because the programmer never heard of it, and you just can’t use an accounting program that doesn’t handle accrual-based accounting if you’re serious about it. So, you use Choice A, which is an ugly-as-hell, retina-maiming, CTS-inducing threat to humanity that handles accrual-based accounting.

People try to solve problems they are familiar with. It does not surprise me in the least when Dharmesh Shah notes ten recurring themes for young software start-ups to work on. To wit:

1. Project Management / Time Tracking / Bug Tracking
2. Community / Discussion Forums
3. Personalized News Aggregation/Filtering
4. Content Management (website, blog)
5. Social Voting and Reviews
6. Music/Events Location Application
7. Dating and Match-Making
8. Personal Information Management
9. Social Network For ______
10. Photo/video/bookmark/whatever sharing

If you’re a programming genius, not only do you have a good idea of what features these applications should have, but you would actually be standing in line to use them as soon as they are available.

On the other hand, you don’t wake up every morning to do a little dance, thinking «Woo, this order-printing application will kick so much ass!» And even if you managed to get excited about the project as a technical challenge(Woo, this next-gen F#-and-AJAX application, which happens to print orders, will kick them butts all right!), the tedium of identifying hundreds of fields and entities and relationships and business rules, and typing them in, can’t really be considered a technical challenge. And F#-and-AJAX won’t help if your ER diagram is off, so you have to ask the accountant, who will promptly bore you to death with an in-depth explanation of international VAT deduction rules.

And that’s a shame, because the non-programming hoi polloi are stuck with software from the 1980s that can’t be replaced until all the features are replicated by the new solution.

Dealing with software older than yourself is always a traumatizing experience. Think of the children.

EDIT: Seth Godin published a post around being passionate about tax accounting at the same time I published this post… my sneaky mind control schemes for owning the internet must be working.

Seven Steps for Fast Learning

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on June 17, 2010
in People
. 0 Comments

Learning an entirely new concept does not happen overnight. On the other hand, there are ways you can follow to make it happen faster or avoid reaching a dead end. Here are seven simple, three-word steps you can follow:

1. Find someone knowledgeable. By this, I mean a real person that you can meet face-to-face or on the phone, not some random person on the internet or, worse, a manual. Then, ask them to talk about the topic. If you found someone who is passionate, they’ll throw a flurry of sentences at you that are probably way too complex for you to understand. Grasp what you can, ask questions if it helps, and don’t be afraid to come back later if you have more questions or need written references.

2. Write everything down. If you’re not familiar with a topic, you are bound to forget everything you hear or read. By writing things down, you are doing a second pass on your short-term, which helps you commit that to a longer term. And besides, you’ll have it in writing for future reference. Mind maps do help: they don’t contain a lot of details, but their graphical nature helps bring back detailed memories.

3. Unravel the threads. Any domain is like a web of related concepts. You ultimately need to understand all the major concepts and relationships, and you will learn a lot of minor details along the way. So, follow the links as often as you can: every word you hear, every concept you discover should be written down so that it can be explored later on. This is a good time to start looking for manuals: Wikipedia can do a fine job explaining the general idea, but you usually need more practical textbooks or courses for the finer details.

4. Never stop exploring. It can be tempting to decide that you understand a given concept. In fact, we do it all the time because we simply don’t have time to become an expert at anything. Think you know what a backorder is? There are probably many concepts you have never heard about, or never thought were relevant, that may completely change how you look at backorders if you take the time to examine them closely. Every new concept we discover can change the way we look at things we took for granted.

5. Try explaining it. Find an audience that is unfamiliar with the topic and make yourself understood. Participate in online forums and discussions on the subject (you might want to do it anonymously at first). Thinking of an explanation or practical application for your theoretical knowledge will highlight any grey areas you might overlook. Confronting human intelligences with your ideas follows the nothing ever goes according to plan theory, which forces you to look at the subject in a different light in order to communicate.

6. Sleep on it. When you keep a lot of concepts in short-term memory, it’s easy to forget what is right, what is wrong, and what is an outdated assumption. Flushing things out of your brain by sleeping or doing something else for a while will keep only whatever ended up in your long term memory. Then, you can go back and fill the holes through more thinking or reading, thus eliminating any inconsistencies as you find them.

7. Practice, practice, practice. No amount of reading or thinking about a topic will make you into an expert. The devil is in the details, and most teachers or resources take those details for granted… or left as an exercise to the reader. Do your homework: you can learn what? from books, but how? is something taught only by experience and why? is for you to meditate on.

—

How often do you get paradigm-shifted by a new discovery that changes everything you thought you knew about something? This once happened to me very often, but the frequency is starting to decrease. I must be getting close to knowing everything :)

Related Posts

Know the Market Price

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on June 16, 2010
in Strategy
. 0 Comments

Need to eat something in Paris? Don’t know what a fair price would be? Here are some price guidelines for a small one-person meal:

eiffelDo-It-Yourself food (requires a kitchen)

  • 1.- € : vegan salad
  • 2.50 € : chicken and pasta
  • 4.- € : microwave-ready meal

Take-away food (you can’t sit down)

  • 4.- € : large hot dog or sandwich
  • 4.50 € : kebab with fries
  • 4.80 € : Mezzo di Pasta
  • 11.- € : pizza deliveries

Seated meals (alcohol not included)

  • 6.- € : typical McDonalds menu
  • 11.- € : average french/chinese/japanese/italian
  • 16.- € : good french/chinese/japanese/italian
  • 75.- € : reputable french restaurant

Of course, elite restaurants usually have prices well above these, but you also need a secret handshake to get in. And the wine sometimes costs more than the meal itself.

Everyone who would launch a new product is aware that they have to know the prices of any competing products. It’s hard to set a price appropriately without some knowledge of what other people are doing.

Do you know the price ranges for products that you buy? For products that are complementary to yours? For products sold by your customers? What channels would you follow to get that information?

Brain Dump

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on June 14, 2010
in Brain Dump
. 0 Comments

Programmer Fonts. We programmers love fonts that are fixed-width, clean and readable even with a small font size. My personal favorite is Proggy Tiny, a free programming font. Do you have your own favorite, or do you use whatever the system default is?

Stop Micromanagement. Take any game where you play as the here and have to accomplish something. Now, turn it into a game where you control the world to help the computer-controller hero accomplish the same thing. This is the difference between doing it yourself and micro-managing someone to do it.

Programming Games. On the topic of having games teach interesting concepts, the second installment of LightBot is now available on Armor Games ; the game teaches recursion, recursion-based loops, and conditionals.

Google Street Smarts. It’s fairly easy for us to search online for our own names, to see what others might find. How many of you have tried to search for pictures on geographical locations based on their names? And how can we know if we’re not on Google Street View, anyway?

New Favicon. There’s a new favicon on the blog. You should see it in the address or tab bars above, or here:

Five Bad Reasons for using Magento

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on June 11, 2010
in Dynamic
. 10 Comments

If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the e-Commerce universe the last few months, you’ve heard about Magento. It’s easy to find resources online explaining in great detail why Varien is a metaphorical messiah and Magento is the second coming and you should start using it right now.

logo

I’m not saying that « Magento sucks. » There are plenty of good reasons for using Magento. It’s reliable, backed by an active community and used by many people. There are also bad reasons for choosing it, and if you don’t know better, you will end up being disappointed.

Here are the five bad reasons I hear the most:

1. Magento is « fully customizable » by dummies

Magento is as customizable as any other open source solution : you can code away any issues you have. If you can code, that is. Sure, there’s a fair amount of customization you can achieve without ever leaving the Magento back-office (sometimes at the cost of learning XML), but unless you learn how to code or spend money on it, you can easily reach a hard limit. Don’t choose Magento because you think you’ll be able to do anything you want.

The best way to use Magento is still to pay for someone to customize it for you, and stick to the basic functionality.

2. Magento is a complete e-Commerce package

Magento is just a piece of software. This means that, once installed, you will need to do the marketing yourself, which is hard if you’re not used to internet marketing and don’t have an existing high-traffic web site to rely on. You will have to host your web site (and make backups). And will have to do any administrative tasks related to storing user information too, such as registering with government agencies.

If you don’t want to do any of that, try looking at Selling on Amazon instead.

3. Magento has been used by [large corporation]

The large corporation does not succeed because it used Magento. It succeeds because it can spend money and hire talent to leverage Magento appropriately. There’s work involved in creating a successful e-Commerce site, so make sure you can take whatever steps are necessary to create one with your tool.

Besides, almost every tool has been used by a corporation or another, including homebrew solutions like Amazon’s Obidos. To say that something has been used by a large corporation only means it’s somewhat useful, not necessarily that it’s the best thing around.

4. Magento is free

Oh, please. Magento is cheap, but certainly not free. Even assuming that you have the skills to set up and customize Magento on your own, doing so still takes time. Plus, you need hosting, accounting, logistics, shipping. And selling stuff online involves more work than just plugging products into a web site and waiting for customers to come! Setting up an e-Commerce operation is an investment, no matter how you look at it.

Or, as Jason Cohen has phrased it quite admirably:

Open-source is free like puppies are free. You don’t write a check to get it, but you have to support it for life. Your employee’s time is not free. Working around bugs is not free. Having nothing but the Web of Lies Internet to rely on for tech support is not free.

5. Magento is a complete, standalone product

This sounds like a good idea in theory — a completely standalone solution that can be used by everyone and handles everything: buying, storing, marketing, advertising, selling, invoicing, shipping… until you need to make it talk to other software. If you’re not lucky enough to use a big-name piece of software that has Magento connectors available, the application that handles your inventory or your accounting or your web site will not be connected to your e-Commerce web site.

So, you will either have to pay for a connector to be written, or copy over all the data by hand.

—

Did you choose Magento for a bad reason? Or did you ever give up on Magento for a bad reason only to find out later that you should have stayed the course? Make sure you mention it in the comments!

Related Posts

  • Hacking Magento : a peek at various common security vulnerabilities and whether Magento is subject to them
  • Jamin-Puech : a Magento-based web site I worked on
  • Seul avec l’Open Source [fr] : why open source is only half the solution, and why your own efforts will make a difference

Winning Money

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on June 9, 2010
in People
. 0 Comments

moneyWhen they refer to income, English speakers say that they earn money (to receive as return for effort and especially for work done or services rendered, to come to be duly worthy of or entitled or suited to).

French speakers say gagner de l’argent instead, which translates loosely as winning money. I find that this betrays an interesting difference in thinking as well.

In my youth, when I had trouble making myself attractive to members of the opposite sex, a smart friend told me « There’s no way for you to get laid if you genuinely believe “Getting Lucky” is a good description of getting laid. Unless you get lucky. » I’m pretty sure he stole that quote from somewhere, but it’s still great food for thought.

What’s fun about money is that it doesn’t grow on trees. Unless you somehow get lucky, the only way to get any money is for other people to give it to you. You don’t win money, you just convince people they need to give you some. You don’t earn money, you make sure people agree that you have earned some. You trade something for money.

And trade is, at the core, an act of pure communication. Technical skills might affect the quality or quantity of what you trade, but negotiation is extremely important and is a completely distinct skill from whatever you need for doing your job.

Unless your job consists in communication and negotiation, at which point you will be, on average, paid better than other people. Where do you stand?

Related Posts

1150 feed subscribers
(readers who polled a feed this week)