Garrick van Buren

PedalBrain‘s Matt Bauer and I talk about the challenges, capital requirements, and multi-year timelines inherent in bringing a retail hardware product to market.

Listen to Hardware Startups with Matt Bauer.

“This race is for everyone and it is not too late to start training: .5 Kilometers is 50,000 cm–.31 cruel miles, for those of you who reject the metric system. It’s about the distance covered in four city blocks. Pro tip: practice running one side of a block per week, adding another side every week for the next month, and you’re there. This is my patented couch-to-.5K method to stamina, physical endurance, and all around excellence. You can do it!”

More training tips:

“It’s not just developers that are bad with estimates either. Everyone at some point is just winging it because it’s something they’ve never done before and won’t be able to successfully make a judgement until they have.” – Ashley Moran

Earlier this week, I gave my Wide Open Faces talk to the web design group at Hennepin Tech. Much of that talk is a dive into the differences among open source licenses (specficially OFL, GPL, and X11/MIT).

My personal preference is the X11/MIT license. It’s short (4 sentences) and basically says; while the copyright is held, you’re free to do what you need to with this software.

To my surprise – my preference for the MIT license has more to do with the location of my current residence.

Hard to imagine that if I lived 2.5 miles further west, I’d be favoring the BSD.

Years ago, I’d have regularly scheduled massage appointments to relieve the stress in my shoulders and upper back. A result of hunching over the laptop all day. Then, I compared the ongoing price of massage to a big external monitor. The monitor was a bargain.

Over the last couple weeks, I’ve been noticing the hunching and shoulder pain returning. I sat up and looked straight at my monitor.

Well – straight over my monitor.

Sitting straight up, my line of sight was right over the top of the monitor.

My next stop was Amazon – where I picked up a Ergotron LX LCD Arm and an adapter.

It took about 20 minutes to setup and – what a difference it makes. It already feels easier to think.

As a fantastic side-effect, it really helps clean off the desk.

My new, upgraded workspace.

“Jobs killed slow-selling products, most notably the Apple Newton hand-held computer, and reduced the number of product lines from sixty to just 4…” – Charles Hill, Garteth Jones, Essentials of Strategic Management

Apple’s always had a culture of not turning back, and dragging their application developers (think Adobe) & users into their future. Dropping 3 1/2″ floppies, dropping optical drives all together, adding WiFi standard, adding then removing Firewire, etc, etc, etc.

Apple’s in a very different place than they were when Jobs reduced the product line to a 2×2 grid.

	Am	Pro
Portable	iBook	PowerBook
Desk	iMac	PowerMac

Since then – they’ve brought a slew of new products to market. What if they restructured like that again? What if Apple only sold 4 products?
Easy, right:

	Am	Pro
Consuming	iPod Touch	iPhone
Producing	iPad	MacBook ProAir

Apple has killed off so many products and product features – over the years – I don’t see a change like this negatively impacting their brand perception.

So, what if other large tech companies under went a similar restructuring?

Here’s a glimpse at some other bold restructurings:

Google
• AdWords
• Search
• Email
• Maps

Everything else released to open source projects and shuttered – including the mythological 20% projects. This kind of focus on core products would have a jaw-droppingly impact on the internet. Initially, negative but very quickly it would turn highly positive. If only because of the innovation it would spur in replacing those products. That would be good for Google and for the internet.

Oh, BTW: Google’s 10+ year VP of Product Management just resigned.

Update 8 April 2011
Look like I got 2 right!

“If you want to know what [CEO Larry] Page’s priorities will be for Google, just look at this team and the products they run: search, ads, YouTube, mobile, Chrome, and social.” – Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch

I still think Chrome (aka ‘The AdSense Browser’) and ‘social’ (where ‘social’ is defined as something other than GMail & GChat) should be shuttered.

“There is of course the Steve Jobs story. But to go down that path, Google would have to return to its roots — search — and forget about dreams of being Facebook.” – Dave Winer

End of Update

How about Microsoft
• XBox
• Bing
• Azure
• HealthVault

If you scan Microsoft’s current offerings – you can see they’re already sunsetting some (namely Zune, MSN Direct, and Money).

Daniel Markham nails why I wholeheartedly disagree with pricing a book less than $25.

“After considering those numbers, I’ve decided to go high. Retail price will be $99.99. I feel like I can justify this for a few reasons: 1) If it really helps you it’s worth that money, 2) If you pay that much you’re more likely to pay attention to what I say, 3) Each sale is more of a significant event for both the author and the reader, ie, if you don’t like it you’re more likely to complain, which is a good thing, and 4) I’d rather sell 20 books to folks who are really going to get something out of it than a thousand books to folks who are putting it in the same mental category as ‘sub hunt’ on their iPhone.” – Daniel Markham

“I have strong believe (sic) that right now, somewhere, a new community site for programmers is rising. I only need to find it.” – z92