Trust me – I’ve been doing this for a long time

I rang Telstra to cancel my data pack (see the post here for an explanation). The customer service rep, trying to be helpful and service oriented, asked me if she could ask me a few questions about my account usage to determine if I’m on the right package. I said ‘sure’ and this is what followed…

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Merging projects in open source land – building on strengths and stopping unhealthy competition

Slashdot, one of my favourite websites, features a story on the Compiz and Beryl Projects merging. Why is this important? If you look through the major open source software repositories (like freshmeat, sourceforge), you’ll find tens of thousands of projects. More than a few of them are attempting to do the same thing, albeit from different angles.

I’ve always thought there is healthy and unhealthy competition. Healthy competition occurs when players compete against each other with their products and services with the view to improve quality, commoditise products and services and reduce prices, all in the effort to provide greater value for customers (i.e. users).

In contrast, unhealthy competition, is where players are so focussed on beating each other, that they cut prices, engage in predatory practices and sacrifice quality in the effort to ‘buy’ business. Their focus is not on the customer, but on how they can beat their competitor.

Open source software, I think, has a significant advantage over commercial operations in that the values of the people involved are the primary motivator, rather than profit at all costs. What are these values? They are about delivering projects focussing on the end users, doing things better than others have done and a focus on quality.

So why is the merger between Compiz and Beryl interesting? The source article from Linux Tech Daily suggests that the rivarly between the two projects had denigrated into a slanging match. I’ll bet that there is probably no truth to any of the accusations that people were making.

These two projects, and others like it (such as Looking Glass) have the potential to spawn a revolution in the user’s desktop. For all the advances of Microsoft Vista and Apple OS X, these two OSs are evolutionary, not revolutionary. Meanwhile, other more revolutionary projects are making significant impressions, like Jeff Tan (Jeff’s personal site can be found here).

What we need is more collaboration, not competition, in this space. There are so many smart people with smart ideas. We do not need them to start infighting and losing focus on what they’re trying to do. It’s so easy to get caught up in a slanging match and all that happens is a rapid spiral into a death vortex.

Provided the surrounding value system is right, and people on the projects are thinking more about the end goals than themselves, then healthy collaboration amongst traditional competitors is possible. There’s more than enough kudos to go around – and if the project turns commercial to recoup the costs of development and fund the next project, then there’s usually more than enough of that to go around, too.

We’re seeing around us many social networking site being built in the ‘back shed’, later being sold for hundreds of millions, and in some cases billions, of dollars. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make money out of these projects – provided sensible things happen with the funds -like paying people fair and reasonable salaries and funding the next revolutionary projects.

Even though I run a for-profit commercial organisation, I spend around 10% of gross margin on R&D and innovation, when in Australia, the national spend is around 2% of GDP. Why? The plans I have to shake the foundation of IT drive me to channel profit into activities that will have a far greater positive impact on people than me driving down the road in some silly sports car. (Mind you, if it all works out, maybe I’ll treat myself to a little one )

How to succeed in business – fire your top sales people

SignonSanDiego reports that Circuit City’s cost cutting strategy is to fire its top sales people.  I don’t know about you, but I always thought to succeed in a sales business you need to attract and retain the best sales people.  And good sales people cost money.  I wonder what will happen when they’re sales drops as fast as the cost cutting?

Perhaps a better strategy would have been to weed out the poor peforming sales people.  It’s not hard to do – you just look at their sales figures.  At the same time you’re doing this, you can analyse the proportion of sales your top people bring in compared to the rest.  It’s not unusual to find the top 10% of sales people bring in 20 – 30% of all sales.  Now why would you fire those people?

NASA shuts down its futuristic think tank

New Scientist features a story on NASA shutting down its think tank. This think tank focusses on the fringe and far-out ideas related to spaceflight and aeronautics. It receives around $USD 4M per annum – not a very big budget at all.

As a business owner-operator, I can understand the importance of trimming fat from bureaucratic and inefficient parts of organisations, but cutting R&D is probably one of the most shortsighted things you can do.

I spend around 10% of sales per year on R&D (around $AUD 250,000) and I use its outputs to develop new products and services that help me differentiate PTG Global from other firms in the market.

Back to NASA. Perhaps NASA should seek matched funding from industry? The recent growth of philanthropy from numerous dot.com and IT millionaires and billionaires and the interest in space flight suggests there would be many people interested in doing this.

If I had the funds, it’s something I would invest in. Investment could even be sought using private equity style funds, with investments from $30K. on this basis, i would definitely invest in it.  The think tank would also need to shift its thinking to include the commercialisation of its R&D to provide investors a return in their investment.

As an avid fan of Star Trek, space exploration is the final frontier and something we should not lose focus on. It’s too easy to look inward and forget about the bigger things that can cause far-reaching societal change.