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Archive for April 2008

What the recession means for the software business: five things to think about

Today’s guest post is from Dan Nunan. Dan is Chief Marketing Officer at Red Gate, an advisor to several UK government bodies on marketing and a visiting lecturer at Cranfield university. He also spoke at Business of Software 2007. This is a re-post: unfortunately I had to pull the original. Did you hear the one [...]

Business of Software 2008 – a quick update

Here’s a quick update on Business of Software 2008. In case you weren’t aware, Joel Spolsky and I are running this conference in Boston, September 3rd – 4th. We’ve got some great speakers lined up including Seth Godin, Eric Sink, Jason Fried and Joel himself. You can find out more at www.businessofsoftware.org. Since I last [...]

It was a dark and stormy night

Elmore Leonard once wrote that the key to great writing is to leave out the boring bits that people skip. Hemingway wrote that "The first draft of anything is shit." Robert McKee: "No one has to see your failures unless you add vanity to folly and exhibit them." Hawthorne: "Easy reading is damn hard writing." [...]

The short and the long of it – why locking in your customers can be bad for you

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about some brilliant advertising I saw at a petrol station. The increasing petrol (gas) prices are an interesting illustration of how pricing changes people’s behaviour. Here in the UK, petrol is about

Solving yesterday’s problems

I’ve just come back from a short trip to Paris. Although I enjoy Paris, the Champs-

Chicken tikka carbonara – how to elicit negative feedback

I tried out a new Indian restaurant last week. The experience wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t great either. It was, well, mediocre. The waiter brought out the wrong food. My butter chicken turned out as a chicken tikka carbonara, and a poor one at that, with chunks of roasted chicken floating in a custard sauce. [...]

Business of Software 2008 – registration open

I’m pleased to announce that registration for Business of Software 2008 – A Joel on Software Conference is now open. This is the second year I’ve run this event. Last year’s event went down very well (Joel Spolsky said it was the best conference he went to last year and 94% of attendees gave it [...]

Advertising that sticks

Last week I was filling my wife’s car up with petrol (gas). It’s a big car, with a big tank. Here in the UK, petrol costs about

The paradox of the middle man

Over a million people downloaded Radiohead’s In Rainbows album in the two months it was on their web site. In 2000, when Stephen King put Riding the Bullet on his web site, the servers crashed under the load. Seth Godin estimates that over 2 million people downloaded Unleashing the Ideavirus when he released it as [...]

New software products – how open should you be?

My day job is at Red Gate. Although we focus on tools for SQL Server and .NET, I’m currently concentrating on making a fledgling Microsoft Exchange tool we’re working on a commercial success. Here’s a bit of background on what we’re doing. I think most business software sucks. It’s buggy, poorly designed, unusable and expensive. [...]



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