Category Archives: technology

RapidInsight: An Open source IT Operations/Event Management solution

It’s official! If there is anything I suck at, it’s predicting how long it’ll take to develop software. Granted I’m not alone in this flaw, but it’s not even funny how far off I was.

Almost a year ago, we’ve made some major decisions in the company. One of them was the move to open source. Not only developing our software as open source but also replacing existing components with open source ones wherever possible. As you can imagine, this required major (colossal?) changes to existing software. We found excellent open source solutions for web development, data storage, etc. that were similar to our in-house developed solutions, but we had to invest significant time to migrate to these technologies. I thought it would take us 3 months, doubled the amount to give some room and thought 6 months would be a realistic estimate. Well let’s just say it took longer but we’re there. Today, we’ve released RapidInsight v3, an open source automation, integration and presentation solution for IT operations management. Although it took about a year of hard work, I think it was worth the effort. It was not easy to shed what we developed specifically to fit our needs with external more generic solutions, but going forward the payoff is already clear.

I’ve written a (too) long post on iFountain blog about the history of IT Event Management (as I see it), the need for a different approach, what drove us to develop RapidInsight and why I think it’s different (and better) than alternatives currently available, open source or otherwise. But I think there is a significant gap in open source management tools in this area. RapidInsight does not compete directly with any of the open source IT management tools currently available (that I’m aware of).

There are number of open source management tools such as Nagios, OpenNMS, Zenoss, Hyperic, etc., for monitoring, Puppet, ControlTier, ZipTie for configuration/deployment automation, etc.RapidInsight does not directly compete with any of these tools. I think there is significant potential value in integrating RapidInsight with these tools, using RapidInsight built-in CMDB, to integrate IT management information, and to provide single interface (both for users and programmatically). Potential uses of RapidInsight is listed over here.

We’ve already started working on integrating RapidInsight with open source monitoring tools. Provided that these communities share our belief that there is value in the integration, we will continue improving the quality of the integration.

I’d love to hear your thoughts! Any feedback would be much appreciated. Please feel free to contact me directly or go over to our development site and participate in shaping RapidInsight.

Watch this space for the news on integration with your favorite tools. Better yet, tell us what you’d like to see integrated first!

Announcing RapidInsight as an open source project and getting slammed for it

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At iFountain, we’ve embraced the open source business model since the beginning of 2008.
Since then, we’ve been working on not only moving our code but also our development practices to open source. We’ve established a separate site for open source development, ifountain.org, where everything is out in the open, source code, documents, discussions, project plans, issues, etc. We’ve also defined what we mean by “open development“ and we try to live by it.

So far, the development is still done by iFountain employees. It should be no surprise to anyone, it wasn’t to us. Building a community is not easy, and takes time. Int he foreseeable future, we don’t expect a lot of external developer help (though it would be more than welcome) but we hope that we can establish a community that would guide where the project is heading. Most IT management folks (including this one) are not software developers, hence they may not be able to contribute code, but they are the subject matter experts, have first hand knowledge of what is needed in the field, hence can help the project immensely by guiding it with suggestions, feature requests, evangelizing etc.

The importance and value of the community for a project, even one supported by a commercial entity, is well explained and understood, so no need for me to repeat it here, needless to say, we will continue to build our community as the project takes shape. Sooner the better.

Netcoolusers is a lively mailing list based community and I started following it after I got my NCC back in 2000. There has been several discussions on the list about alternative web based interfaces that take advantage of web 2.0 technologies, etc. in the past. Several people had were interested in alternatives, stating that Webtop does not meet their requirements and some had to build in-house solutions themselves. I had not mentioned RapidInsight in the list at the time, even though it was such a solution since it was a commercial product.

Today, I’ve sent an email to netcoolusers mailing list announcing the RapidInsight open source project in the list, as it is directly relevant to the Netcool community. Email had brief summary of the motivation for the project has come from, gave some highlights and included a link to the open source site, where interested parties can learn more about the project and take a look at the demo, download the software etc.

Next think I know, I was kicked out of the mailing list by the administrator (Jim Popovitch) for “unsolicited commercial solicitation”. You can take a look at the email and judge yourself. I certainly don’t see it as such. There is well established precedence where open source projects are mentioned freely including ones by the mailing list admins. I replied to Jim’s email explaining my point of view and left it at that. As much as Netcoolusers is a “community”, it is controlled by two people afaik, and there is no mechanism for due process. They make the rules and they are the judge and the jury.

Just sigh and move on… But it didn’t end there.

Others responded to my email, asking questions, naturally unaware that I can no longer respond to their emails, as there is no indication that I got kicked out. Then came this email from another list admin, Jacob Steinberger. Now hold on a minute! How about distorting the facts, and spreading misinformation. Is that not against the TOS of the mailing list? No? How about just plain decency?

Jacob writes: “While the email initially looks like a great thing to help the IBMuse Netcool GUI move in a direction that we have longed for the last half of his email and Blurry’s forwarding of his private email, shows that he (and iFountain) are out to make a buck.”

The last half of my email lists some of the RapidInsight features describing why it may be off interest to users, and asks for feedback and participation. That somehow suggests that I have evil intentions to “make a buck”? Oh no, iFountain will offer support for an open source project, run for the hills! bad, bad boy!

What I described to Blurry was that we plan to follow what’s referred as the JBoss model, as it is well established in the market. The product will be available with GPL v2 license and we will offer support and professional services. Having said that, bear in mind, I did NOT even mention any of this in my email to the list.

“Trying to sell something, whether it’s a product, consulting services or support, is strictly against the TOS of INUG. Any violators of this policy will be removed from the list.”
There is nothing about a sale of product or services or support in my email to the list. Just the announcement of availability of RapidInsight as an open source project, that’s it. Announcement of an open source project is not a sales offer. The information on our intend to offer support was in a private email to Blurry as he asked about it directly. He chose to forward the information to the list when he found out I got banned from the list.

If that’s not bad enough, he did not stop there:
“Additionally, when a potential vendor’s website (iFoutain’s) states …

Thou shall have unrestricted access to the software. The software products will be available for download from the website without barriers. The community will be able to download and start using the software right away.
… yet requires you to create an account to download software, you have to sit back and go “humm”.”

My email to the list included one link to the ifountain.org site. From there, there is a link to download the mentioned software directly, no user accounts needed. And as I mentioned above, not only that, the source code and all its revisions (subversion) are also available directly from the site without any user restrictions, as it should be for any open source project. Why all the haste to judge?

Banning someone from the list based on rules and interpretation of those rules you’ve defined yourself is bad enough. Bad mouthing someone with false information when they can no longer respond is simply wrong. I’ve emailed Jacob before I posted this to give him a chance to correct himself but have not heard back from him.

living three waves at once: reaching from agricultural age to information age

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I’m writing this post from Findikli, Turkey, a small town on the Blacksea coast of Turkey, near Georgian border. Sitting in the terrace of my grandfather’s house, connected to the Internet via broadband. I keep repeating this fact to myself (and others) likely due to some level of disbelief. It is indeed remarkable how things changed.

25 years ago, this town was not connected to the phone network. It was possible to call someone by “registering a call” with the operator. One would have had towait in front of the phone for hours for the operator to connect the two parties. It all changed with Ozal, starting 1983, opening up the country and the economy to the world. And now, I’m sitting here with a broadband connection, integrated with the rest of the world, as I would be back home in Switzerland or anywhere else in the developed world.

I sit in the terrace and looked around to the sea, to mountains, yet people insight often capture my attention. A remarkable transformation is happening and one does not have to look very hard to see it. Couple of women are carrying down tea leaves down the hillside with huge baskets on their back. Tea farming is hard work. Three harvests a year and the terrain here is mountainous. One of the women has a mobile phone in her hand, clearly texting (and quite fast), mobile penetration is very high. Houses here have all the amenities, from dishwasher to satellite TV. Tea factories still the biggest employers.

The coast is much better connected to the rest of the world. 40 years ago, taking the ferry was the best option to travel to far away cities. Once could have arrived to Istanbul in about a week!, IF there were no weather problems. Now there are numerous flights, and coastal highway connect the towns to each other.

There has been significant migration from these towns on the coast to large cities as my parent have done a long time ago. Migrating to larger cities has been the only viable option for many to move out of the agricultural lifestyle and join the industrial era. Now, people here are not only better connected physically but also technologically.

I’m curious to see how the information wave will alter this society once again. One thing is sure, people here are accustomed to change and adapt to new things with ease, and this is their strongest suit.

It’s been 4 years since my last visit here. This year, I’m able to stay over three weeks, because I can continue working here!

Can Tasktop bring order to chaos?

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*** Update ****

This post still seems to get quite a bit of traffic via google so I wanted to note that the information in this post is not out of date. Since the time I’d written this, Tasktop folks have added Firefox integration which was my primary complaint.

**************

I’m not a developer but play one on TV youtube. Well OK, I don’t even play one on youtube, but I work with developers day in and day out, hence I’m an eclipse user by association. This is how I first run into Mylyn. The simple brilliance of the idea was striking to me. I liked it immediately, thought it was a great developer productivity tool and suggested to the team.

I do think that I loose significant amount of time context switching as I often work on different things in parallel. A tool that would keep the information organized around the different tasks I work on simply makes sense. Then I heard of Tasktop and realized that now the idea that I liked so much in mylyn was available outside development environment and got excited.

Tasktop uses the tasks you work on as the context. When you browse the web or open the documents while you work on a task, web pages and docs are automatically associated with the task you work on. If you close the task, they get closed and if you reopen the tasks, they get reopened. Simple idea and effective.

So having loved the idea, I downloaded an evaluation copy of the software and started using it to see whether I would stick with it. I started using it exclusively and after some getting used to what is what, I was comfortable using it. We use Jira for issue management in the company and I use gmail as my email client; tasktop is integrated with both which made is easy to get going. Working with Jira this way is really nice and a lot of my tasks originate from email so gmail integration is very useful. I got my tasks in and started using the tool happily.

Tasktop uses an embedded safari based browser. You can launch external browsers but it is meant to be used with the internal browser. Determined to like the tool I gave it a go. I didn’t last very long with it. I found myself going back to Firefox repeatedly and having to do some manual work with Tasktop which is not the idea. It looks like Tasktop bets the product on the assumption that people will not mind switching their browsers and will use the embedded browser. They may be right. I’m guessing that they target the corporate world which overwhelmingly uses IE and don’t think IE users have a particular loyalty to their browser and may welcome the embedded tasktop browser. This is not the case for me. The browser is the most important application I use, and no way I’ll switch to something else that easily. I think Tasktop folks may be underestimating the resistance people may have to switching browsers a bit.

There were couple of other minor issues, but they were not show stoppers that would likely to get fixed as the product matures. At the end, the experiment was a failure in my case due to the browser issue. I find myself forgetting to switch back to tasktop etc. which defeated the purpose of tasktop. I still think this is a great idea that has a very good chance of succeeding in the corporate world. It may have harder time with the usual early adaptor crowd however. I’ll keep an eye on tasktop to see where it goes.

EDS HP IBM and professional services in the IT management sector

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This week HP has announced to acquisition of EDS for $13.9 billion. Naturally, the acquisition of such size got fair bit of attention in financial circles, talking heads analyzing the numbers and speculating what it may mean for two companies in very broad terms.

With this acquisition, HP becomes an IT services behemoth, second largest only after IBM, and going forward, competition between IBM and HP is expected to be fierce, especially for large outsourcing deals. Obvious enough.

Yet this deal will likely to have massive impact on IT industry in general, not just outsourcing sector. Following IBM closely, as a strategy, HP has just created the second vertically integrated one stop IT shop for customers, providing everything from hardware to software to services. To appreciate the importance of this acquisition, I believe we need to consider this deal along with other acquisitions HP made recently (Mercury Interactive, Opsware, Peregrine,Trustgenix,Tower Software, SPI Dynamics, Bristol, etc.)

With these acquisitions along with already substantial Openview family, HP has a large portfolio of IT management software and now a large services organization that can deliver solutions using these tools. Naturally, HP services organization will still have to collaborate (when it has to) with 3rd parties to meet the requirements of their customers and not just push HP software, just as IBM professional services do, at least in theory.

In practice, experience suggest that it’ll become increasingly harder for other vendors to compete with internal HP products. Projects will have to justify why they need to use 3rd party products instead of internal ones and often the path of least resistance will be to use internal ones unless the customer explicitly dictates otherwise.

I think this is a major problem for any player that is not a one stop shop IT services provider. Software companies without substantial IT services organizations as well as independent IT services companies and systems integrators may find themselves cut off from significant portion of the market.

HP has a large and effective ecosystem. The mutually beneficial relationships HP has with its channel and integration partners has long played a significant role in HP’s success in the IT management market. With this move HP is no doubt jeopardizing its relationship with its ecosystem. It is not surprising however that HP thinks the risk is worth it, and the gains that will come from becoming a one stop shop will more than compensate for the loss of business it generates through the ecosystem.

Enterprises have long been working on reducing the number of suppliers and work with handful of preferred ones and the allure of one supplier that is responsible for everything seems to be too hard to resist for many.

The impact of loosing the channel may be greater than anticipated. Independent services organizations that partner with software companies acquired by IBM in the recent years have been finding themselves competing with their old partners and some of them have been making moves to alternatives. With HP adding a large services organizations, it also becomes a competitor for any services organization that may previously be a partner that sells and implements software products from HP’s or IBM’s portfolio of products.

BMC CEO was quick to move in to take advantage of the coming conflict and characterizes EDS acquisition as “declaration of war” by HP to its ecosystem. BMC also has been in an acquisition binge lately, acquiring BladeLogic, Emprisa Networks, RealOps and Proactivenet within the last year but BMC does not have a large professional services organization so it makes to position itself as the supplier of choice for professional services companies that will be alienated by the HP EDS acquisition. CA may also make a similar move having assembled a solid set of tools through acquisitions (Concord, Aprisma, etc.).

However, if HP’s strategy works out and HP software products starts to gain marketshare, it will not be surprising to see further consolidation in the market in the form or pairing between services organizations like Accenture and software companies like EMC, CA and BMC.

IT market is more and more looking like a Highlander movie. There can be only one a few.

Business models for open source it management companies

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As it is in many market segments, companies in IT management industry are looking for an open source business model that works. The prevailing approach seems to be the hybrid model. In this model, the companies offer both open source and proprietary versions of their products and proprietary versions typically provide additional high end features that is not available in the open source versions of their products.

This business model is only available to the companies that have the IP ownership of the open source code and not an option for more traditional open source projects where IP rights are distributed among many people and there is no single holder.

The model is a win win for both the vendors and the customers provided that the open source versions of the products are viable solutions that stand on their own and not just a ramp that requires every user to upgrade to the paid versions. Customers get access to open source software that solves their problems and vendors get well established benefits of having an open source community.

Not everyone agrees with the above statement. There is a discussion that started with cote naming the open source IT management companies “little 4″ as contrast to the proprietary “big 4″ (IBM,CA,HP,BMC), and heated up again with QClusters exit from the openQRM project, hence little 4 becoming “Little 3″ .

openQRM was not really in the same category with the other 3 in little 4 anyway, and its exit provided an opportunity to reevaluate the open source IT management companies. John Willis took a more minimalist approach, coming up with his own name, calling Hyperic and Zenoss the “mighty two“, others suggested Groundwork and OpenNMS should round up the new Little 4.

John states that Hyperic and Zenoss has a better chance to succeed in the enterprise as they are software companies with significant funding and solid infrastructure. Not surprisingly opposing view comes primarily from the OpenNMS camp (read the comments in John’s post). Tarus is not a fan of the hybrid model. He has criticized the hybrid model (and hence Hyperic and Zenoss), claiming it to be flawed, several times in his posts and comments. He advocates the OpenNMS group’s professional services only model as the superior (and even the only viable) model and states the success of the OpenNMS project as the evidence.

The hybrid model is not an option for OpenNMS group as (unlike hyperic/zenoss) they don’t own the IP rights for the code. OpenNMS apparently has an active developer community that contributes code (surprisingly rare as more and more open source code is developed by few individuals or companies) and OpenNMS group has one or two people who may be dedicated to development rather than services. OpenNMS folks seem to be content with their position, but I wonder why they don’t aspire for more.

Despite being compared to Hyperic and Zenoss, OpenNMS is different product. IMHO, it is the only true (open source) “network monitoring” product available. Hyperic/Zenoss/Nagios are primarily for server monitoring with some capabilities to monitor network devices, yet still not an option for serious network monitoring. The paste of opennms development is slow which is understandable given the fact that there is no dedicated development team. Let’s imagine for a second that OpenNMS group also used the hybrid model and external funding to staff developers to work on opennms. Could they have developed a discovery engine that auto discovers the network layers (layer 2, 3, routing, etc.)? Visual maps to represent these layers? What is OpenNMS offered this additional functionality only in the paid version but all the functionality available now was still available. What if on top of what is currently available, foss version of opennms had gotten a package that can be installed and run on windows easily 3-4 years ago? Would having the option to pay for this additional functionality be a bad thing for the community? Would removing entry barriers such as extensive documentation and easy installation packages not help increase opennms user base?

Open source companies need to continue to innovate in the business model level to find ways to fund the projects that work both for the companies and the communities. Hybrid model is what has emerged so far as one viable option. It is not perfect but it offers an alternative that is in many ways better than pure professional services model. There does not have to be “one true way”. The alternative may be getting squeezed out of the market. Tarus likes to compare OpenNMS with HP and the likes, suggesting that OpenNMS is a viable alternative to them. It is. but it is playing the catch up game instead of leading the field. The tougher competition for opennms (and other open source projects) is not coming from the large proprietary companies like HP and IBM, but from small, agile companies like solarwinds and adventnet with nicely packaged, easy to use products with often lower prices than the open source companies.

If open source companies cannot innovate both business model and technologically, they may get squeezed by these companies in the lower end of the market and the larger proprietary companies with massive sales forces in the higher end of the market.

Google Reader, Netvibes, and usability

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Last week, Google came up with a new version of their web based RSS Reader, Google Reader. Contrary to the original release, this one got very positive reviews. I had also tried the initial version of the Google Reader and gave up after a while. It was just awkward. It did not work for me at all, and I could not even speculate what they were trying to do.

I then tried Netvibes and the experience has been quite the opposite, so I have been using Netvibes as my RSS reader and have been quite happy with it.

When the new version of the Google Reader came up, I was not eager to try, then I saw other posts and comments and am interested in the “river of news ” approach, so I’ve decided to try it again. This time around, experience was much better. I did like the river of news pattern, so I’ve exported my opml from Netvibes and imported into Google Reader, and I was good to go.

I’ve been using Google Reader as my RSS Reader for the last week, and my initial positive impression gradually has been replaced with frustration as I continue to use it due to usability issues, and bad design. Google Reader UI gets in the way, and is missing some basic functionality.

Caching of the posts

I find myself waiting for the UI to get data, and this is quite annoying, and waste of time. Everytime I click to a feed, it seems to get the post for that feed on demand, and this is just not right, if you use RSS reader regularly. This is complete opposite of the Gmail experience, what were they thinking?

Netvibes on the other hand, has the posts cached in the browser, when I click something, response is immediate. I had not realized how great this was, till I got frustrated by Google Reader.

Auto refresh

Google reader does not refresh the feeds, at least by default. I have to go click refresh every time? In their video , Google engineer uses the analogy to email and says that the Google Reader is the inbox for the web. I don’t have to click get mail when I need to read email, why do I have to do that with RSS ?

Again, Netvibes shines. I can see how many new posts there are total, at each tab, and for each feed. Works for me.

No way to mark a post read

When there are a lot of new posts, I often scan the title of the posts (similar to reading the subject of an email) and decide whether or not I need to read the post. In Google Reader, I could not find a way to mark it read without opening it, and when I open a post it takes over the screen, I had to click the title again to close it. Very time consuming.

I did find out later that I can use the keyboard and push some letters to go down the list and mark a post read without opening it. Great, thanks for nothing! I can feel the developer who thinks vi is the greatest editor behind the design decisions. This is what happens when engineers develop something for their own use. Newsflash, people out there do not necessarily want to learn a set of key combinations to use a web site. In fact, the web is what it is because you can use it once you understand point and click, all sites work the same. You want to have keyboard control as well, great, have that, there are many people (read techies) who like that, but don’t make it the only way to do something.

Again, this is no issue with Netvibes, I can mark a feed or tab read with a mouse click.

So I gave up on using Google Reader once again, despite my liking to the layout. A lot of people liked the fact that it is like gmail. I guess I don’t like the fact that it is not like gmail enough. None of what I’ve listed above is hard to fix. Considering how much it improved compared to the previous release, I have every reason to hope that these issues will be resolved.

Will I give it another chance in the future, likely. In the mean time, Netvibes is getting better continuously and meeting my needs, so I’ll stick with them.

skype, a great tool no more ?

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We communicate regularly with our family members distributed all over the world from China, Turkey, US, etc. Skype video has been great for our family to stay in touch. My parents first saw my 1 week old daughter via Skype Video.

Skype has been our primary communications tool in our
little company (<10 people in three continents) for over a year now.
It’s been a key business enabler for us. I use SkypeIn, SkypeOut as well, and bought couple of Skype certified
devices, so I consider myself a run of the mill Skype customer.

But Skype has been evolving away from our needs and as time goes by problems increase rather than decrease.

I’ve seen an article in Skype journal about Skype identity crisis. It resonated with me.
Skype as an instant messaging/presence tool stayed primitive; little to no improvements. I cannot understand why on earth my status cannot be automaticaly set to “busy” or “on the phone” when I’m talking to someone. It is still not possible to show different status to different groups of people (family/colleagues/customers, etc) and this is essential, almost trivial feature for IM products.

Things also get worse. Today I’ve tried to access the chat history with a colleague and computer froze for a minute before doing anything and after that it took couple more minutes to bring up the history since it show all the history since beginning of dawn with that person.

We also had the supernode problem where one of computers have become a supernode and the router could not handle the number of connections, kept dropping the internet connection till we figured out that it was Skype causing high number of connections.

Things add up. I’m no longer sure that we will continue to use Skype as our primary communications tool. Sure I’ll probably continue to use Skype, but it will not be on all the time, and in time I may drop it completely. My colleagues are quite happy with Gtalk (we often switch to it when Skype quality is poor), and it looks like Yahoo/MS have made significant improvements. One of these tools can easily fill the shoes if Skype keeps screwing up and giving us a reason to try them.

Writely the mighty web word processor!

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It is official. My favorite “web2.0” company Writely got acquired by Google, ending what I’d imagine was an interesting dance between the interested parties and Writely folks Congragulations is in order for both the folks in Writely and Google. Congragulations to Writely (to be more precise, Upstartle) for developing such a great platform/product and congragulations to Google for their ability to recognize the potential of this platform and the talent of the people who developed it.

Not surprisingly, the usual characters took notice and posted about the acquisition in their blogs. Some quite positive , and some negative (or even clueless ), yet most of the bloggers does not seem to understand what Writely is all about, or at least the posts do not highlight the right aspects of it (There are exceptions of course). Majority of the posts approach Writely as the web based version of Microsoft Word. Obviously Writely is a word processor and so it Microsoft Word, but I believe differences outweight the similarities. Nicolas Carr attempts to live up to the expectations as the most snarky blogger by stating that he’s going to be “hanging on” to his copy of Word for a while. The bloggers with positive outlook on Writely also see Writely as a replacement for Word in the larger scheme of MS Office vs Web Office, longing for the anticipated battle ahead between Google and Microsoft.

Yet Google’s strategy wisely has not been taking on Microsoft head on so far, and this philosopy is shared by the Writely folks. Writely does not attempt to completely replace Word. Writely folks do not just attempt to replicate the feature set of Word over the web, but innovate by taking advantage of the web. They clearly state how they see their product on their website : “The beginning of a whole new way of managing documents, projects and websites online”.

Writely does not and cannot do may things Word can do easily, but also provides great functionality that goes well beyond anything that is provided by Word. I think it would be gross neglect not to emphasize the “collaborative” aspects of Writely. For me Writely solves a real problem of collaboratively working on a document. Anyone who has worked on documents that required participation of multiple parties can relate to the headaches: emailing new versions of a multiple megabytes of document to all participants (can the recipient receive a large attachment?), keeping track of the versions (am I modifying the latest version?), ensuring everbody can actually “read” your document (do they all have Word?), and others.

From this perspective Writely is priceless, and it solves a real business problem. We can now work on the same document even at the same time, be automatically alerted when a document is modified, can see who made what modification, older versions, etc. and don’t have to learn how to use weird tags). Productivity gains are tangible, life is easier with Writely. And Writely does not attempt to “lock” your document in. You can save your document as Word or OpenOffice document or publish directly as PDF file. I use both Mozilla Thunderbird and Gmail and this will likely be the case for some time to come. I suspect that the same will be true for Writely and OpenOffice. If fact I believe one area Writely can benefit is tighter integration with an offline word processor like OpenOffice. That may be the theme for another post..

Upstartle/Writely is the poster child of the new breed of companies:

Small: Only handful of talented people
Minimal funding requirements: No need for tens of millions of dollars of funding from VCs. Early funding via the founders/angels, and get acquired by a large player or go public.
Fast: The site was built in under a year (6 months!) and already operational/useful.
Open/transparent: Both from technical and social perspective, takes advantage of web technologies, has open communications with early users, integrates with other sites/products, etc.

This validates the notion that the small companies/teams are the best setup to innovate and build new technologies and the large players (like Google, Yahoo, etc.) are the best places to bring the technology to the masses. Writely has “hatched” as a small company and now Google can bring their muscle and reach into the table to provide the technology the the masses. This will be interesting …

PS: This post has been written in Writely and posted directly to my blog from Writely.

Starting a software company USA vs Turkey: What does it take?

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I don’t have any concrete data based on research but I think it is safe to assume that the US has the most “friendly” business environment for high-tech/software startups. The overhead of setting up a company is very low. Many developing countries on the other hand have very complicated regulations and procedures, and it is quite expensive to setup a company. This is quite frankly insane! The reverse correlation between the economic development of a country and how long it takes to setup a company is well researched, and high quality data is available, thanks to WorldBank.

I’ll use US and Turkey as examples, as I also had the first hand experience to start companies in both countries, hence have personal experience in addition to the available research data. In our case study, we have three computer science graduates who are high on talent and ideas that can change the world, but low in cash, trying to start up a software company. We’ll go through the motions of starting up a company for these young entrepreneurs both in Turkey and in US.
First, let’s look at the research data. According to doingbusiness.org, it takes $210 and 5 days to setup a legal entity in US vs $1,040 and 9 days in Turkey. So the cost of setting up a company is 5 times the cost of setting it up in US. Our entreprenuers in Turkey are in a disadvantage. This is bad for Turkey, in fact, it is much worse than it looks.

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