First Tire Change

Wow, I just had to change my first flat tire and that took way more effort than I had imagined. I wouldn’t have even been able to get the tire changed if it weren’t for 2 of my friends that happened to be kind enough to help. Geez, I have a battery powered jumper pack / light / air pump that I have always used in the past when there was a flat, but this time, the pump just stopped working. Not sure what happened, but it’s not but a year or two old so that’s surprising that it has already died on me. Oh well, I was going to post something more interesting today, but it’s too late for that now…but, there’s always tomorrow. 🙂

First Years @ Microsoft

For those of you that are interested to know what it’s like to work at Microsoft right out of college, you should check out Steven Sinofsky’s post over at blogs.msdn.com. Really gives you a great idea of what type of experiences you can expect as you start out. (And I imagine these experiences aren’t unique to MS either so even if you don’t want to work for MS, you might want to check it out.)

Side-Business Software

Ran across this article by Jason over on 37signals.com and found it pretty interesting. He thinks that the “most innovating” software in the future (at least in the next 10 years) will:

Be Web-based
Be built by small team
Be self-funded (as far as the company behind the software)
Be for “side-businesses” (or at least tiny companies he says is 1-10 people)

He points out that this market is greatly overlooked and people looking to start a side-business want a new type of software that helps them do business without the learning curve of scaled-down enterprise applications or the IT overhead associated with larger packages / non-web software.

I’m hoping that Jason is right on this…that’s one of the motivations behind the small software company I want to have. Although I do have to say I believe the first assetion, that the software will be web-based, is not one I agree with. I can understand what it looks that way, but I really do believe smart clients are the future. Web Apps are certainly getting some amazing capabilities and with browsers supporting more advanced features (although the stuff known today as AJAX has actually been around quite a while – I wrote an application that used VML – which is long gone now – and async web service calls via JavaScript 3 years ago…granted there were some bugs, but it worked…anyway, that’s a bit off topic.). But I see so much potential out there for smart clients. They just provide a much better experience to me. Plus, if your net connection goes down or you are on the road, you can take your data with you…but that’s a discussion for another post. 🙂 Interesting article though…so if you want to build software, keep the side-business market in mind.