This mismatch in science and business is the idea that is worth spreading, so enjoy this TED talk by Dan Pink. Also, at the end of the post, you will find the written wrap-up of the presentation.

(Video via wi-fi-de-do)

Here is the Wrap-up of the presentation:

The new OS to run our business revolves around three elements:

• Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives.
• Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters.
• Purpose: Purpose, the yearning to what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.

There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.

• One: Those 20th century rewards, those motivators we think are a natural part of business, do work, but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances.
• Two: Those if-then rewards often destroy creativity.
• Three: the secret to high performance, isn’t rewards and punishments, but that unseen intrinsic drive. The drive to do things for their own sake. The drive to do things cause they matter.

Resources from the presentation:

Here is a link to the Duncker’s Candle Problem.

Article by Business Week on the ROWE (or Results-Only Work Environment)

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What are cheap alternatives? In my case is any airplane flight by Delta or Ryanair. Other examples of such products or services are: winter clothing, sport apparel, laptops, designer and architect services. All of them are high in cost (and can’t be consumed periodically), however you can find cheap alternatives, that for some people might be good enough. The big dilemma is not how much you are saving, but are they really cheaper or good enough? Evermore, is how big is the risk compared to the benefit of finding out if they are good? Here is example:

Recently I took a transatlantic flight with Delta (part of it operated by Air France), from Sweden to Honduras and back. At the moment, this was was the cheapest flight I could find. Overall, the services was really bad compared to my previous flights with British Airways. First, the planes that took me from Paris to Atlanta was uncomfortable. Clearly the design of the seats and screens was not for long haul flights. Second the stuartists where not as friendly, however the worst thing is that when going and coming back, my luggage was delayed one day. In Honduras I had to go to the airport and pick it up the next day, in Sweden it was delivered to me. It was pain, it was inconvenient and the risk of me losing my stuff got higher. What will had happened, if my luggage was lost? Means that the trip will have actually cost more than a proven but higher in cost, such as British Airways.

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Was my case a anomaly? I don’t think so. I was warned before about Delta delivering the luggage  a day after. My theory is that this saves them “fuel money”, by sending the heavy luggage with other airlines. However, me elaborating on it will derailed me from the point of this post. Which is:

Companies that offer you a cheaper alternative in a competitive market, generally will  shave indirect costs from other places, which will contribute to providing a cheaper alternative, but lower in quality.You will not be able to find out how bad the quality is, until you used it.  Or sometimes they just sell you the most basic and functional part of it and charge for all extras.  Same happens with winter apparel. Cheap jackets could only last for a couple of winters, then you will have to buy a new one. Also with architects and constructors, sure they can build you a house at half of the market price, but at the end your house or flat will have more deficiencies if you agreed to pay the market price. At the end of the day companies discriminate their customers through prices: you want the good stuff, pay for it, if not then settle for the minimum and any goodies will cost you.

The dilemma is that sometimes you just need a jacket for a winter, or the inconvenience of the Delta service is just for a few hours. Tolerance becomes a habit and we start to make excuses for the companies! We consider them for the next time, instead of demanding high quality service.  Yes! It is also hard to complain to customer service and demand something back. Also, is so hard NOT to save 300 USD in a flight. Or we like to “gamble” and see if we are one for the lucky ones that get the mediocre experience (instead of the bad one). Like once I was told in a Negotiations workshop: humans are not rational beings.

Next time you are juggling with a decision on purchasing a cheaper alternative, ask yourself this: can you afford to buy the cheap one and the expensive one at the same time, because that is what most of the time we end up doing and worst is that we feel unsatisfied.

Some hours ago Gmail was down and everybody started to complain. Now is up and running and people are still complaining. This made me think that how can business and organizations rely on Gmail for business, if it goes down for around 6 hours as it did today.

Google today provides 99.99% of uptime for Gmail for Business, which translate into approximately of 53 minutes of down time. However this outage wasn’t of an hour, it was more than 6 times the guarantee they offer. This pain the current customer suffer and others don’t wish to suffer, has a partial solution: configure your account of offline use using gears, but still we have the problem of sending. Here is the thing: it is impossible for a service like Gmail to be up 100%, the whole internet and systems are to complicated, there is always a point of failure somewhere. However we could mitigate this points of failure by “not having all our eggs in one basket”, which translates to:

A third party providing a solution (generally in a server hosted by the consumer) that serves as backup for the services. For example company XYZ will host in their server room, a backup of Gmail. So ,if we have the outage we had today, the business can still read and send emails, because it doesn’t fully depend on Gmail. The same principle applies to all services that reside “in the cloud” i.e CRM, Office Suite.

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Now, this is not an easy task: to develop such backup servers, especially when the providers (such as Salesforce, Google, Microsoft) don’t have  support for such services through a API. Also, In the case of email, a third party will have to implement a spam filter and SMTP server for the Backup for Business Gmail to work. Then we have the issue of support to the backup and how to seamlessly change the customers from the web based.  And then there is, of how much to see such solution and if a there is actually a demand for such products.

Still, like Travis (a Ausie I met at the Laundry room) said: lack of resources can lead to an opportunity. Right now, we lack the resources to have 100% uptime in our services on the cloud, and the need (or pain) is there, since we now started to depend on them and get outraged when is not fixed at the moment we snap our fingers. The question is: How? Certainly I will love to find out.

The question I have been asking myself is “where are the software companies, whose cracked software can be found on the p2p networks?”. Software companies figure out long ago, that they can fight these phenomenon. Slowly, they had changed, now big companies offer basic free versions of their products, understanding that $$$ is “Business to Business”, and not with consumers. You see, if Microsoft gives out free software to students, is because they know that when this students graduate and get a job, they will ask for the software they know how to use. As a result Microsoft now offers “Express” version (in other words basic version) of many developing tools. Future developers ask for this tools when they join the workforce (or can earn enough money to buy them).

The story is different for Media companies, because they think that they depend on consumers they do anything possible to charge consumers. That dear readers is just being lazy and comfortable. They been like this for such a long time, to the point of forgetting other life than selling to consumers. For example, why don’t they focus on merchandise, spectacles, limited edition products and concerts. Let people hardcore fans by feeding the thirst for music. That is no the case, instead they turn into bulling down, any wave of change.

Wonder why the Soundcloud is not in trial? They even charge for you to upload and share music on their site. Yeah I forgot they are a new company that provides a service.

Like they used to say: lead, follow and get of the way. So I get out of the way for the recap by Torrent Freak Day Four and Five. They do a better job than most of us.

Userfly is a service that permits site owners, record the sessions of their visitors. All you need to put a script in your website and viola.  Its a pretty cool and useful tool, because you see how your visitors “behave” in the website, as well what works and what doesn’t.

When you sign up they give you 10 session recordings for free and if you want more you pay for them, at a price of 0.05 USD. Bellow is an image showing the “Buy Now” button, above it is a message that states: “Buy as many user session captures as you need for only $0.05 per capture. Captures are sold 100 at a time”.

Uh?? I can buy as many I need, but the only way to buy new captures is 100 at a time, it doesn’t make sense.

The first sentence states that I can buy as many captures I want. Sure, I need 30 more sessions that is 1.50 USD. However captures are sold 100 at a time, then what about the other 70 sessions captures I don’t need? I can use them latter, sell them to a friend, etc,  that is not the point. The point is that the company looks bad, cheap and unsecure of their product. If the product is good, why not use something that is clearer and direct:

100 captures for 5.00 USD. Captures are sold 100 at a time.

or

Minimum is 100 captures, at 0.05 USD each.

Is like buying fruit or vegetable at a market: 20 tomatoes for 5 USD, 3 mangos for 7 USD, etc.

I’m not questioning the 100 limit, they have their reasons. I guess many customers will end up using the 100 captures, because of the number of visitors a site might have. Also, they are targeting owners of business website, not the “Videos of Cat Blog” or “My Life As a Teen” blog using WordPress or Blogger.

[Yeah its might sound as a big deal, but is insulting to trying NOT to scare customers using the “5 cent” strategy. Actually, I tried to find a an email where to suggest them to change that pricing statement, couldn’t find any, so I decided to blog about it.]

The CEO of a company should be aware of what is going on the website, how the pricing is presented to the customer, not an intern. Pricing of products and services needs to be done carefully and after a lot of analysis. The wrong price may scare possible customers, or the company may miss out on revenue that will make the company profitable.

Originally this was the title of this post:

Removing your battery from your MacBook, will decrease its performance.. So what?”

I still feel the same, however I changed my mind, when thought about it from a broader point of view. If your laptop, either made by Apple, Asus, Sony, HP, Dell, slews of the performance of the CPU if its ONLY running on the power (no battery), do you care? In my case it depends, for a few it might be important, but most users might not care. As its stated in “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum“, its better to make 20% happy, than trying to satisfy everybody. More on this later…

It is reported that “Apple notebooks take huge performance hit with battery” and Apple apparently acknowledge this some time ago. After pondering on it, I got to a conclusion: so what and who cares? Is this important to most Mac owners ? My guess is that the majority will care less, what they care about is that their laptop works, in such way that they don’t have to think about what is going on under the hood. They don’t even want to think about the hood, they just want to concentrate in their books, designs, emails, art, etc. , they want to be able to create and worry about other thing and not the pains sometimes one has to suffer with computers.

Looking more into the the reduction in performance, it seems  logical, because one of the main parts of the device is not connected to it, meditate about it. Take cars for example, your car can run without a battery, but will it start? Will you be able to play some music on the stereo? Its all about the tradeoff, you give something, but you get something else: trade. Expanding more on the car example, will it be great if your car will calculate how many kilometers were left, when you are bellow one third of the full tank. Even better if it will ask me if I will like to go into “gas saver mode”, while detecting that you haven’t gone over 50 km in the last 10 minutes. It could be possible, but will complicate things more, making the care more robust and rise the cost for: tradeoff.

Here is clear example about tradeoff Wii vs Play Station 3

Its interesting to read the comments in the post mentioned above, how this is not news, talk about tradeoff or criticized Apple decisions. Here is little secret: if you don’t like it, don’t buy it, if you don’t like Apple buy another thing. I don’t like them that is why I own a “Dell From Hell” XPS 1330. I’m satisfy with it, I love the fact that has a small adapter (as MacBook). I understand when I need full power and brightness in the screen and when I need 4 hours of battery, and I appreciate the freedom of choice. It doesn’t run hot because it has a 5400 rpm and integrated video card, I don’t need more because I don’t play games. I used to have 17in, 10 pound monster, with a 2 pound power adapter. I was giving up something that now I value more than the value of having everything. I want mobility, portability, comfort. I identified that new value and decided to trade for it.

Dell from Hell – source

Back to making 20% happy: that is why Apple does best, he makes them really happy. If you think Apple design decisions are stupid, then Apple is not designing for you, is for others that find their products worth the so called “premium”. I don’t like their products, but doesn’t mean they make crappy ones, its just not for me (or maybe you). Someday this might change, like when comfort became more value than power, in the meantime I will continue to learn from Apple, understand their customers and have fun posting about it.

Approximately a month ago, I finished reading “Good in a Room“. Like most of those books they use real life cases and stories to keep the reader interested. In one of the stories of a “financial advisor”, the author uses a metaphor of a window being broken several times by some kids playing. Maybe it  really “sticked” to me, because of the simple way to describe risk or since it made me remember “the good old days” (I used to break a lot of stuff when a kid.. and still do). Anyways, here is the trimmed version of the metaphor:

Imagine that you have neighbor with a nice patio and kids. The kids like to play baseball and more often than you like, the ball ends up breaking one of your windows. You are getting kind of tired of replacing the window, every time the kids hit a “home run”. So, instead of having a window with one big glass, you could divided in a four piece crystal window (see image bellow) . The next time the ball hits your window, you will only need to replace one of the squares and not whole window.

The metaphor show a way of managing financial risks in your investment portfolio, or even how you should distribute your savings. What if your bank bankrupts today and you have 100,000 USD, but the bank guarantees your deposits up to 35,000 USD. Suddenly, you just “lost” 65,000 USD and it will be some time before you get them back. By distributing your savings in various banks, first you are closer to the deposit guarantee (that each bank might have). Second if one of you banks bankrupts you have your money in the others. Thanks to the this strategy of managing (or distributing) the risk, you hare able to take better decisions, while minimizing lose.

I love it because simplifies risk management and is more appropriate than eggs [analogy]. Although with the eggs and basket you may say, “yeah I can spread my 30 the eggs on 7 baskets”, the analogy doesn’t take into account if you “exaggerate” with the distribution,  is not a good idea as “common sense” may tell you. While you minimizing the probability that all your recourses are lost by distributing your in many places, managing that distribution also consumes resources. If not clear or convinced, lets go back to the window and dividing it in 16 squares. Are you making it more difficult to change a single square or elevating the probability that while putting a new square, the others may break? Well if the window is big enough 16 squares is not bad idea, but if the windows is small, getting those small pieces of crystal can make it a hassle. So depending on the size of the window, the more divisions you have, the higher the probability there is that the structure of the window collapses. The key is to find the sweet spot and that depends on the size of “the window” or more adequately, resources.

Risk mitigation, applies in all sort of discipline, from sports, to business, security and programming. Imagine a startup depending on just a engineer to deliver their product,  a team depending on one player or family in one source of income. This is not that easy, there are some many variables, considerations and can change over time. However the window metaphor, helps simplify and get back to the basics. And is sometimes in those basic things, is where we fail.

Lately I have heard the term “open source” and the word advantage in the same sentence. And my reaction being “aja and…”, which made me realized that people tag a new project as open source, underestimate the efforts of starting, sustaining and growing a open source project. Even more, I wonder if there are naive enough to think that such tag is enough. Do they think that the by just releasing the code under GPL, MIT, Apache or MPL [licenses], “the community” will bow to them and all the worked and problems will end there? All taggers out there, that is not the case. Like they say “one thing is to talk the talk and other is to walk the walk”.

Based on the definition of the Open Source Initiative, open source is define as:

…is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.

Think about the following: why should anybody launch a open source project or more important why should you do it ? The whole point of meditating on why people should start open source project, is to fully understand the implications of such initiative. I’m not against open source, furthermore with this post I salute open source initiative. What I don’t agree is the waste of resources of working on a project that is tagged as open source, but there is no plan or road map. Even worst, saying that what makes the project unique is that its open source.

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Here are something to think about when thinking about your project:

What are the benefits, other than the general specified in the definition above of a open source project. Is the software of value for other people and does it have potential to solve a real problem? But you don’t have the resources to pull it off by yourself. How do you attract a community, how many of those that find it useful are willing to contribute to it? Do you have a plan, how will you keep track of development versions, bugs and request of features? How long will the project be develop privately, before it becomes open source? How do I know when its ready? Finally, will you make money or do the real benefit comes from people working on it… Is this a long term commitment?

While thinking of the above, it suddenly came to me, launching a open source project is like starting a business. Can you see the similarities? Needs resources to start, its not that easy, relives a pain, has a target market, needs a plan (A B C or D), looks to be sustainable, etc. Its not easy and still people try it and many fail. Even if it was easy to start it (using a platform like sourceforge) the project still needs a community, which requires time and effort or a very mature project ( i.e. these guys or these others).

If you don’t like the business analogy, here is another: blogging. Anybody can start a blog, however does that makes you a blogger ? How many blogs are out here that are dead (by the way I have like two). It requires time, effort, long term commitment, quality and a bit of luck (to get noticed). So, just tagging your project.. will simply not make the cut.

In Tegucigalpa (Honduras) you will find individuals in the stop lights try to make a living by selling you some sort of product or service. In other occasions you will find kids asking for one Lempira* or any kind help. Its common to find kids offering to clean your windshield in exchange for some change.

Couple of weeks ago  some teens where doing some tricks with fire and other kids where cleaning the windshields. One of the last ones offered his services and gave him “one lempira” and told him the front was clean. He responded that he will clean the back and I told him not to worry. The interesting part was that he insisted to clean the back window, even when traffic advanced and stop 30 meters from the starting point. So, I agreed and proudly he clean the back.

What made this event stick to my head and ponder on the convection of the kid to not receive money for free, but do some work in exchange. In contrast when you buy a service or product from companies today, they tend to not be so eager to make your money worth. Once they see the money, they just relax while the customer stress up because its not receiving what it paid for.

More interesting is that a kid in the streets thought  me two things: something about business and that everybody has something to teach you.

*Lempira is the currency of Honduras

Currently I’m looking to buy a new laptop, the one I have right now works fine, the challenge is that is 17 inch. It’s becoming a hassle to carry it from one place to another, especially when studying a master abroad. In Honduras you will find many places where you can buy a new laptop, especially if its a DELL (I want a XPS m1330). I’ve been looking for places where to buy one with the specs I desire and it has been tough, especially because I want a video card and LED screen with mine. But this is not a post about a laptop, instead is of a remark:

“Honduras is the only place in the world (not sure but it feels like) where the customer has to chace the seller and not the other way around”

Customer service here sucks, and companies and business that provide a good one, tend to be successful. People say they will call you, send you an email with the price, availability, etc. but they never do. It reminds me of “games” some girls like to play here and even some guys. If you think about it, this is a cultural thing, your word here its worth nothing. Thinking more about it, I feel sad, knowing that people who run this country lack commitment to their word or don’t think before they speak out or promise stuff. And trust me, its so easy to get caught up in this “habit” of Chasing people around that should be chasing you around, its easy to just make our word, our promises… worthless. Why? Well somebody said once (can’t find the author):

“the person makes the habit, then the habit makes the person”