Seven years ago I tried to persuade my business partners and investors not to outsource our startup development to Oracle, but at the time ‘the city’ could not understand how two or three passionate programmers could compare with the might of a 20 strong team of Oracle professionals.
The detachment of the programmers supplied by the outsourcing agency meant it was impossible for them to understand our passions and goals. They clocked in at 9.00am and were out by 5.00pm at the latest. Their conversation focused on TV, football and who was being promoted where in the company.
Their attitude was infectious and soon the original hand picked team was dissolusioned and faded into the background noise of the companies general operation.
But the company hasn’t failed. Seven years after funding it remains a veteran of the pre-bubble-bursting-funded-but-not -IPO’d companies. There’s not many of them left today. Their success, if you can call it that, has been due to two general business factors.
The investors have put so much cash into the company they are not willing to let it go.
Eliminating innovation and rationalising everything to a core product where they can rely on Investor relations to produce business.
It may pay the bills but it’s Hobsons Choice, they exist at the behest of the investor who provides cash and customers.
The only regret they have is not knowing where it would have gone had they been brave enough to give the original business a chance to develop.
They had an opportunity to launch the first community based business of it’s kind but that meant relying on a handful of super-geeks. Something institutional investors claimed they would never do.
Where are those investors now? They’re still there and they still have their hands on the controls, but they wobble from one investment to the next while Google, Yahoo and Microsoft cream off the best.
If you create a lot of Wordpress blogs you probably like to prepare a list of categories for inclusion. This plugin simplifies the process by allowing you to add them all at once.
Add one category per line then click the “Add Categories” button. All categories will be created for you turning a 30 minute job into a 5 second one :)
Installation
Upload the masscats folder to your plugin folder. Activate the plugin and then locate the “Mass Category Adder” menu in the Wordpress “Manage” menu.
With a time machine most of us will be content finding out what next weeks lottery numbers are. Writing software is another way of predicting the future, the challenge is to produce the next new new thing. One thing is for certain, this video, although already old, has a frighteningly satisfying message!
Seven years ago I tried to persuade my business partners and investors not to outsource our startup development to Oracle, but at the time ‘the city’ could not understand how two or three passionate programmers could compare with the might of a 20 strong team of Oracle professionals.
