Thought Garage

Drupal TechTalk at Google, if you are interested in learning more about Drupal.

On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind – the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future.

 

I thought for a moment, what difference would it make, if every blogger writes something about the issue? I remembered the Starfish story. If every blogger take one single action along with writing their ideas about the issue on thier blogs, it would make a huge difference. 

“The Starfish Story” by Loren Eiseley

Once upon a time, there was a wise man who used to go to the ocean to do his writing. He had a habit of walking on the beach before he began his work. One day, as he was walking along the shore, he looked down the beach and saw a human figure moving like a dancer. He smiled to himself at the thought of someone who would dance to the day, and so, he walked faster to catch up.

As he got closer, he noticed that the figure was that of a young man, and that what he was doing was not dancing at all. The young man was reaching down to the shore, picking up small objects, and throwing them into the ocean.

He came closer still and called out “Good morning! May I ask what it is that you are doing?” The young man paused, looked up, and replied “Throwing starfish into the ocean.” “I must ask, then, why are you throwing starfish into the ocean?” asked the somewhat startled wise man. To this, the young man replied, “The sun is up and the tide is going out. If I don’t throw them in, they’ll die.”

Upon hearing this, the wise man commented, “But, young man, do you not realize that there are miles and miles of beach and there are starfish all along every mile? You can’t possibly make a difference!” At this, the young man bent down, picked up yet another starfish, and threw it into the ocean. As it met the water, he said, “It made a difference for that one.”

The Sun Startup Essentials program was launched the U.S. on November 2, 2006 on an experimental basis, and was launched in India on  August 8, 2007.  Sun Startup Essentials offers startup companies groundbreaking Sun technologies and software at breathtaking prices or free.

For more program specifics, take a look at the Sun Startup Essentials Datasheet.

• Free Software : Get popular open source software, such as Apache, MySQL, Perl, etc. — all optimized for the Solaris operating system, free for the asking.
• Discounted Systems : Get rock-bottom prices on industry-leading Sun systems and run the OS of your choice.
• Discounted Partner Hosting : Get top-notch web hosting from Sun partners at great discounts.
• Startups Ask Sun : Our professional engineers will talk with you through emails and will try to answer your questions.

Seth Godin on ‘How to make a million’ says tyring to make a penny from hundred million almost never works. Instead try to make a dollar from million people.

One popular method is to make a dollar in profit from each of a million people. Or a penny from a hundred million. This is the China strategy. It almost never works.

It almost never works because the challenge of reaching that many people is just too great. It’s too risky and too expensive. Doesn’t matter that you’re only hoping for a dollar or a penny. The price isn’t the challenge, it’s the difficulty in spreading your idea.

Far easier to make a thousand dollars from each of a thousand people, or even $10,000 from a hundred organizations. You can focus on a small hive of people, a group that talks to itself. You can push through a smaller dip and reach a level of recommendation and dominance that makes incremental sales far easier.

And you can learn much earlier in the process if you’ve gotten it right or not. Because you’re making more per sale, you can spend the time necessary to figure out what really sells and modify your offering sooner in the process.

The irony is that many products and services that have reached huge masses of people actually have significant margins (Windows, for example, or a cup of Starbucks). They got the best of both worlds because first they focused on winning small communities over and that led to the larger market.

Apply this rule to today’s web2.0 companies and software development companies. I don’t understand where they are going.

• For most web2.0 companies, the only revenue channel is by showing ads. To make any marginal revenue out of those ads, you must server Millions of page views. Each page view paying a penny. And software companies like 37Signals does it entirely different. They only had around a Million customers. Not sure how many of them are paid customers, but they charge a minimum of 12 dollars a month for a paid customer. To generate 12 dollars in ad revenue if we go the ad route, they need a minimum of 20,000 page views. So when it comes to listening to customers and make changes in thier products, which organization is better.  In other words, if you want the organization to respond to you, you know which one to pick.
• Many companies used to sell their software by licensing it for a fixed number of servers or users or a combination. (Take for example Solaris Unix). And then they decided to offer the software for free. Motivation behind is to get more customers who pay $100 per support instead of having few customers who pay license costs that runs in thousands per license.

So finally, which one is better. Offer your product free and sell ads. Millions of signed up users to boast while you may not be making any profit. Or offer your service at a fee. You have only a few customers but you may make Millions in profits.

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Excellent visual showing almost all Apple products. I did not know most products. I haven’t even heard of most of them except a very few.  

Evolution of Apple’s Products | created by Edwin Tofslie

 

A visual I created to show the evolution of most all Apple products
created over the past 30 years.This was created to show the evolution of the
form factor and industrial design of the products, not to show every single
model or upgrade Apple has launched.
Click here to view big

Source: Apple Product Evolution