BlogHer in Portland? Slashdot on Sun Tzu Business Ethics! Stuff…

So as I scan through various entries, of the gazillion I try to keep up with a few news tidbits and ideas jumped out at me.  The first is the idea of getting the BlogHer Conference here in Portland, since it just lost the OSCON to… well I won’t even discuss were it is going.  Hazelnut Tech Talk & Silicon Florist both mention the prospective event here in Portland, so go read up and see if you can help out, or know of anyone else who could.

A Slashdot Entry I Read, WOW!

So there is an entry about two business professors from Harvard and Stanford that published ‘Divide and Conquer: Competing with Free Technology Under Network Effects‘ which is a somewhat interesting read.  I see it mostly as a stupid fight, as commercial software and open source can coexist, and would do even better if it learned to.  The old adage of Benjamin Franklin and his ideals of win win capitalism is much better than our current Sun Tzu crap that most of these leaders seem to go on.  I think the simple fact that Sun Tzu was writing about committing genocide against other peoples, winning wars were people would die, is lost upon many business professionals.  Many modern day business professionals would do well to learn more about the original business ideals held by the founding fathers all the way through to Lincoln even.

So really in the end, all us developers are going to transfer ideas, open source just helps us transfer those better.  Even now Microsoft of all entities even pushes for it via the CodePlex site and in other ways.  I disagree with the us vs. them idea of the Harvard and Stanford ideals in the article that are being perpetuated, but with the multi-billion dollar Microsoft even pushing the idea because of the appeal to so many developers, to the betterment of the industry as a whole, I don’t think the us vs. them mentality will hold out for that much longer.

Thinking Thoughts of Improving Software and Software Returns

I’ve been thinking a lot lately, especially after meeting many recruiters in the Portland area, about the various aspects, values, and returns that software provides for companies and the human and office infrastructure that we have built up around that.  I’ll have more entries based on these topics very soon.  The general topics that I’ve been batting around are all out there already, but somehow I’m starting to form a more cohesive picture of how things could create much better software and in turn much larger returns from the creation of better software.

Companies generally have a prime competency.  Microsoft makes software, so does Google, and so do other companies.  Bank of America, GM, and others like that actually, do NOT make software.  The later mentioned companies however do create a lot of software, but it is not their primary purpose.  The later companies focus on financial matters, cars, and other things.  The focus is NOT software.

So why do they spend so many millions and employ so many to build software?

So how about these companies get better at focusing on their prime motive of existence, their underlying business case, and get real software creators to build software?  Well in the past there has been many issues the biggest with the poor returns and products that so many large companies, like Bank of America and GM have received from outside software creators.  That begs the questions;

How does a company, who doesn’t have a prime focus in software, get quality, fast, decent priced software today?  How do we dispel and functionally remove the bad reputation of software among CIOs and other in the non-software companies?

This is were a lot of my ideas are starting to extract and pull some interesting things together.  I hope over the next few months I’ll be able to pull these ideals and effectively pull them together.

Of all these things, the primary driving force behind my conjuring ideas is that software should be better, get done faster, and especially be better priced here in America.  So stay tuned and I’ll definitely have more ideas, thoughts, and discussion points brought up by these ideas.

Efficiency, Performance, and Quality.  That is what I’m talking about.