August 19, 2013

Facebook and Google Plus Rants --- Profitable Software Business --- Part 3

Great skills can still lead to weak or nearly useless products.


How ?

When you don't understand your domain properly, or if you don't plan ahead for changes.

I don't make money teaching design. But developers, software business owners should listen to Hoare, David Parnas, Dijskstra (small head), Eric Evans, Peter Coad, Richard Feynman, Rasmus Lerdof, Linus Torvald, Charles Simonyi (MS Word, Intentional software). Scott Bain, Kent Beck etc.

If they don't know them or won't listen, they should not be in software business, right? Can anyone claim to be wiser( streetwise or worldly wise or whatever) than their collective wisdom?

On bitbucket, google code repository, GitHub, I find a lot of django/GoogleAppEnginePython codes for almost anything: social network, forum, message board, LMS(learning mgmt system), ERP, CMS(content mgmt system), wiki, quizz, collaborative writing, shared whiteboard, mobile app etc.

Shouldn't we extract some value from them?

As we all know, Python is not Perl/PHP or even Java. It's very good-natured language.

Log-in, log-out from App1, quiz from App2, friendship invite from App3 etc are there for us to mix and match as our kids play with Lego.

If some of us can find a business model to go with that Lego-style app, we may make some money for us.

Does anyone have some guide/advice for that kind of not-cut-and-paste but rip-off-and-rebuild development? HAPPY NEW YEAR!


I asked a Singaporean programmers group this:




"Ok. Find me something that looks like this. (1) It's free and online. (2) I type main question, then choices, including if necessary, images too. And the answer. (3) I can add as many question I like. (4) I can print it out, and it comes out nicely. (5) I can let my students practice there. (6) There can be tip/hints for students. (7) Answers are graded. (8) I can edit them. (9) I can download my question sets. They work offline too! (10) I can go on, but this should be enough. This is 1 of 1000 things we can do for education/training etc. So I have no need to protect this. ... Please don't mention SCORM, IMS, Moodle, Atutor, Coursera, hot potatoes, whatever. If a nice thing is there, why would I code or ask others to code."



They cannot find. Mine is world's first and very good. Still they don't want to work for me for 8 hrs * 15 days for free. They cannot see the benefits.

4 comments:

  1. In this Aug BusinessWeek issue, Bill Gates compared MOOC to "asking students to read textbooks," next to useless.
    Well, we can do better?

    ReplyDelete


  2. Q: What do you get when you mix technical people and management people without a Steve Jobs as the "product picker"?
    A: Dodgeball, or Foursquare etc.
    Jobs picked his products based on these factors: People behaviour, technical trends, your team's finance and skills levels, and competitive landscape.
    If you need a picker, please pick my brains ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  3. http://www.straitstimes.com/premium/forum-letters/story/dangerous-rest-laurels-20130902

    "the majority of the 4,000 Singapore citizens who took part in an Our Singapore Conversation exercise in January were prepared to trade off economic growth for a slower pace of life"

    Einstein, Niels Bohr, Leonardo da Vinci etc were slow, and good.
    Feynman was fast, and good too.

    Bruce Lee was young and fast, and good.
    Morihei Ueshiba(Aikido founder) was old and fast, and good too.

    Steve Jobs was extremely slow and late and good.
    instagram, Facebook are fast and good too.

    ReplyDelete
  4. http://www.onlineocr.net/default.aspx
    http://www.free-ocr.com/
    http://www.newocr.com/

    http://www.free-online-ocr.com/

    http://www.i2ocr.com/

    http://www.ocr-extract.com/

    ReplyDelete

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