At these levels there is almost no profit margin left in the hardware business. A $45 tablet is cheap enough to be an impulse purchase at the check-out line in Best Buy. A $45 price puts tablets within reach of a whole host of other activities not traditionally associated with computers. Tablets could be used by waiters in restaurants. By mechanics in auto body shops. By every nurse in a hospital. By pretty much any category of work that today needs a computer but where PCs are too expensive to be deployed. These are also devices built entirely for commercial reasons, no government backing, no academic sponsor, no proof-of-concept.
Year: 2012
Startup = Growth
A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of “exit.” The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.
If you want to start one it’s important to understand that. Startups are so hard that you can’t be pointed off to the side and hope to succeed. You have to know that growth is what you’re after. The good news is, if you get growth, everything else tends to fall into place. Which means you can use growth like a compass to make almost every decision you face.
On text editors
I have a text editor I’ve been using myself that is so complicated it makes VIM look like Notepad — maybe I’ll release that.
Best female t-shirt. Ever.
Kreator – Coma Of Souls
Today at the office, over the morning coffee, I somehow remembered that I had a few of those really horrible, scary t-shirts when I was a teenager. (I still have plenty of black t-shirts, but the subject changed from music to geek humor.) It took me a while to remember the name of the band for at least one of them – Kreator. The t-shirt that I had was with the cover image from the “Coma of souls” album. Here it is (mine was all black though, without red squares).
And this post wouldn’t be complete without a music sample. It does show a bit of age, but, I think, it’s still quite listenable.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5q4OFTFq70]