In a recent Slashdot article, we get an article from Sal Cangeloso discussing some of the potential up and downsides of Dell's recent decision to put Ubuntu on some of their laptops. He covers some of the obvious aspects such as the potential for Dell to offer lower-cost models based on the lower licensing fees required and the new strains that will come on the infrastructure for updating/downloading software, but I think he misses one major aspect.... technical support.

Over the weekend, Robert Scoble pointed out all the technology that Steve Jobs has killed off over the years and asked a simple question:

Which features are you getting rid of to make your product/service/store/business simpler?

As I've pondered this over the last few days, I've been looking at the various products, systems, and code I've been working on and considering what could be cut away. What things can go into the next version? And even more importantly, what aspects don't need to be in any version?

Update: Unfortunately, since writing the first version of this post, Paul Graham has released an update and clarification of his original post. Obviously, I should start blogging over the weekend and give up this whole "having a life thing". ;)

In terms of disclosure, I attended the first Startup School in Cambridge in 2005. Other than the obligatory "thanks!", I've never communicated with him and have no interest in Y Combinator, etc.

A long time ago I accepted the fact that - despite our little echo chamber online - the vast majority of the work I was doing and the technologies I was using would be above the heads and simply outside the worlds of the vast majority of the people I knew. It wasn't related to the intelligence of the people involved, it was simply a completely new and different set of experiences and concepts that only existed in a handful of places just a few years before. All of that being said, I was simply floored while I was listening to the radio while running errands on Saturday. I heard the words "Firefox extension", "Gmail", and "Google Notebook" used in proper context and not as a breathless "news" story from a tech-clueless reporter.

From the archives... NIck Bradbury - the creator of such software as FeedDemon - shares a story about how he deals with pirated software and the types who demand that he fixes their stolen software... I bring this up for a couple different reasons. If you are building your mISV and end up with a product that has any value at all, it's going to get pirated. If you run a consulting shop, you can run into similar problems where customers have the product but they "forget" to pay. If you're doing consulting to build a product, you get the best of both worlds!

Let's just get this out on the table. Realistically, you can't do much. You can't order a nuclear strike on their home. You can't kill their dog. And most of the time, it's difficult - if not impossible - to take any action against them at all.

If you are involved any any Open Source project, you might have seen this article in the last couple weeks: How To Tell The Open Source Winners From The Losers fromI Information Week. It serves and an interesting reminder that although many people are motivated by ideology, etc, there are still some requirements for a successful project.

Let's get some things out of the way up front... Yes, there are tens of thousands of Open Source projects - according to the article about 140k on SourceForge alone - and they just happen to be the biggest, not all of them. And here's the thing, just like blogs, just like movies, just like everything else, there are superstars which rise to the top and dominate their niche (Linux, Apache, PHP, Firefox, Eclipse), there are lots of great ones that don't really get much appreciation (Freemind, Filezilla, dotProject), and then there are tens of thousands of pieces of... less-than-useful software (names withheld to not ridicule). So while Firefox may not represent the whole community, neither do the little projects that die.