I’ve been reading The Innovator’s Dilemma recently. The iPhone seems the perfect example of a disruptive technology as discussed in the book.
For example, I was using Drupal for this blog. However, I recently switched to Wordpress. There were a number of reasons for the switch, but the primary driver was that Wordpress now has an iPhone application.
Even before the iPhone application store came out, I was writing over half of my blog posts form the iPhone. There is just nothing like the convenience of being able to post whenever you have a spare instant: on the bus, at the beach, whenever a thought strikes you. Since Wordpress embraces that paradigm, I made the switch.
I wonder how long it will be before the iPhone replaces the laptop, like the laptop embraced the desktop before it.
I've been thinking about this for a while now. I might not be right. To be honest, my experience is limited.
Conventional wisdom is that you should always have a co-founder. This person fills in for your weaknesses (and tells you where those weaknesses are), inspires you when times are rough, gives you a sounding board to bounce things off, and generally dispell the lonliness of founding a company.
However, if you look at the traits one at a time, perhaps a co-founder is less necessary than you think.
1. Weaknesses can be filled by freelancers, consultants, and contractors at the beginning, employees later.
2. A spouse or honest friend can point out weaknesses, if you're honest enough with yourself to listen.
3. When times are rough, you can look to your existing customers to inspire you to continue. You are making something valuable for them.
4. You can bounce ideas off your community.
5. You are never lonely when you have customers that you talk to and a community to echo inspiration.
So you don't need a co-founder if you have customers and a community. In the old days, it took a long time to get customers and a community. Today, it's possible to do almmost instantly. With holdist, I had people using the product within 4 hours of starting development. Not a lot of users, but enough to keep me inspired.
We'll see how it turns out.
It is getting cheaper and cheaper to write aggregators (tools that take content from many different Web sites and display it in one place). In the not to distant future, it will be easier to collect and redisplay content than it is to create it.
What does the world look like when that happens? Think Google news for any topic. When you're looking to buy a car, you'll be able to find dozens of places that scour the entire web for the information you care about. When you hire somebody, there will be a hundred tools that collect and post resumes from all the job sites.
With so many tools available, it means the price will go to the marginal cost: $0. It also means that people will be overwhelmed by the number of aggregators. In an refreshingly recursive turn of events, we'll probably end up seeing aggregators of aggregators, helping you find your way through all the sites that were designed to help you find your way through other sites.
How does one succeed in this model? I am not sure, but I think it is by having the best tools to cut through the information and get to the knowledge that you need.
I enjoy having all my feeds on one place in Google reader, but they were misguided by releasing functionality that suggested additional feeds that you might want to read. Instead, the killer app is going to be finding and removing the feeds and posts that aren't important to you, letting you see the good stuff sooner.
Update: I'm not sure how what I described is significantly different from search, but I think it is. Perhaps the topic for another post.
High performing sales people tend to make orders of magnitude more than the engineers who built the product that is being sold. Bandwidth providers are struggling to stay afloat, but Google is making billions. Unix vendors are becoming non-existent, but Mac OS is booming.
A rule to live by is stay close to your customers. Building the interface is more important than the infrastructure. If you're building an API, developers better be your customers OR you better be building the API in such a way that developers will extend your product while allowing you to stay close to your customers.
I bring this up now because I'm working on "twitlicio.us" a service that combines twitter and del.icio.us. It's just a fun project, and I'm building it as infrastructure right now: set it up once and forget about it. This is a great approach for twitter and del.icio.us. I'm adding value to their services, which is the whole reason they released APIs.
However, it's a pretty bad approach for me personally. This is ok for now. Infrastructure is less work. The point of the project is for it to be a lightweight personal experiment with Google's App Engine.
However, the lesson remains true, and it's something I don't want to forget in the future.
I've definitely felt the degradation of my writing abilities in the years since I graduated from college. I always have prided myself on a clear, direct style of writing – clarity of thought, if not necessarily the prettiest prose to communicate it.
Lately though, especially when thinking about my blog, or twitter, or even my del.icio.us bookmarks, I've been struggling with the thoughts I want to communicate. Writing is getting harder, and it seems for the first time, thinking is getting harder too.
This could be only because I'm out of practice, but it could also be because of the new role I've taken at work. I've noticed any time my job changes dramatically, my ability to do anything that is not my job goes way down. Generally, after 3-4 months, I get more comfortable in the position, the work gets a little more rote, and I'm ready for the next challenge.
I'm starting to hit that point in my current role. It's time for me to start practice writing, and thinking, again.