The death of a company..
Not my business, at least not yet.
Maybe I should say the death of a good idea because the business in
question is more likely more funded than ever now. The spirit is
gone, the original mission scrapped, the original members moved on to
bigger and better things. What is left is a shell of a company
motivated by shareholder approval and the requirement to generate
large profits. The company in question is GarageGames.com and the
situation is big corporate buyout lovin'.
It's really amazing any company survives at all. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, over 50% of small businesses fail in the first year and 95% fail within the first five years.
I'm torn. I've been on the wrong side of two buyouts and I've seen
first hand how great it can be. The formula is the same:
The owners start acting weird, you know
weird when you see it.
They start asking for inventory
numbers, how many servers do we have, etc etc.
A group of people you've never seen
before hang around and start calculating how much the company is
actually worth.
Management tells you there's nothing to
worry about.
People start resigning left and right,
you start hearing jokes about how the rats are the first to jump off
a sinking ship.
You interview for your own job.
People panic and start choosing sides.
The new regime starts identifying those
who still hold loyalty to old management and eliminates you.
The new regime starts identifying those
who had problems with old management and promotes them.
There's a reason I watch Office Space
at least twice a year. It reminds me to work harder to avoid this
cycle again. I'm the loyal guy, I don't really chose to be - it's
just my personality. Here's what it looks like from an owner's point
of view:
At the start of every week, you know
that by Friday you need X amount of money to meet payroll.
You're worried about billing and your
credit line at the bank eating any and all profits you may have had.
You're bothered by employees wanting
raises and new equipment you can't afford.
Management is busy making power point
presentations that depicts everything is fine and the company is
strong.
Employees are busily reading
Slashdot.org and planning their afternoon StarCraft session wondering
why management doesn't have a clue.
It's a non-stop stress fest on both
sides and all the sudden here comes mega-corp with an offer you can't
refuse. Here's the dirty little secret - businesses want to be eaten
within 7 years. The idea is to build up your business to attract the
attention of a larger entity. The larger entity will take the best of
what you have, get rid of the rest, and try to make as much money as
they can before liquidating whats left at the end.
There are very few small businesses who
intentionally wants to stay small. You have your auto mechanics,
dentists, dry cleaning, barber shops, service oriented in general who
will never get past the one location mark. If they're lucky and in
the right area, they can make a decent life out of it, but they would
have made more money working for someone else in the long run.
The owners, now presented with a buyout
offer now usually jump on it. It's a chance for them to cash out,
take a break, and do neat things they always wanted to do before
trying it all over again. The funny thing is, the stress is
addictive, the attempt attractive, the gamble exhilarating. Being a
business owner is nothing more than legalized gambling and the ups
and downs feel the same. So now the owners go on a shopping spree
buying up all the expensive toys they've always wanted. It may be a
bookstore, it may be a farm, but it's not long before they're right
at it again trying for the buyout again.
So let's take a look at the history of
GarageGames:
Ex-Dynamix employees see the writing on
the wall, negotiate to buy the engine they've been working on away
from the company and bail.
Take the engine, sell copies + source
for $100, call it indie and sell it anyone who wants it.
From the start it's cross-platform and
works pretty well.
Form community around said engine,
accept patches, repackage them and sell them back to new customers as
new versions.
Just looking at the publicly available
Torque Owner tags and crawling the site, it appears engine sales
generated over a million dollars alone.
They gain enough status to get console
developer licenses and port the engine over. Of course selling that
version of the engine for a much higher cost.
Microsoft gains interest, GarageGames
now a xbox ,xbox360 ,xna partner. Die hard c++ programmers are
talking about how cool c# is. Linux support all the sudden becomes
purely community driven.
TorqueX is the first GarageGames
product to hit the market on time, no doubt some sort of bonus money
from Microsoft. Jeff now questions Mac development and Linux
development drops off the planet.
Things are quiet, promises of
documentation and transparent development are made. Opengl continues
to take a back seat to directx.
IAC offers big corporate buyout lovin'.
GarageGames assures its community that
everything is cool and this just means more money to do more cool
things.
GarageGames founders and superstars
jump ship, the B team takes over.
Website takes on a web 2.0 look, engine
price triples, and community functions are crippled.
Founders and superstars make new
company, new engine, and back on the market to do it all over again.
Yes, it's sad to see something gutted
like this. Yes, I was attached to the idea of GarageGames. Yes, I'll
more than likely do business with PushButtonGames (even though I'm a
complete Flash virgin). Yes, I hope to be bought out by big corp
buyout lovin'. No, I don't like change nor how the process needs to
happen this way to turn a real profit. This is just how the world
works and it beats the alternative - your company fails, you go
bankrupt, you feel like a failure and you just can't wait to do it
all over again.
Rest in Peace GarageGames.com
2001-2008
Crazy Customers and How to Spot them..
They're out there lurking in the dark waiting to ruin your day. All businesses encounter at least one but they really hurt smaller businesses as they eat up time and resources. There is one basic rule a small business needs to follow - work on whoever is paying you the most right now. The crazy customer will monopolize your time, make unreasonable request, complain about complaining and then not pay you. I made a fundamental mistake - I started working before writing up a scope of work contract. It was a referral of a friend, so I didn't think much of it. He needed work done yesterday, I told him my rate and I went to work. So while I got screwed out of money, here's a list of how to spot the crazies and stop them before they do real damage:
Sending more than 15 emails a day.
Thinks 3 days is 2 weeks.
Calls you "bro".
Thinks a mysql backend is a magical thing only special people can understand.
Wants no scroll bars on IE maximized in a 1024x768 screen while in xp theme mode. (cause that is what *everyone* uses)
Thinks you can use a webcrawler to recover PHP code.
Wants you to work on 3 things at once and wonders why nothing is being accomplished.
Tells you he wants to start a social network for God called hisspace.com
Informs you what is easy and should cost money.
Tells you CEOs don't even make the kind of money you're charging.
And my favorite - Tells you that you are padding hours.
As soon as the customer starts telling you how to do your job - stop. When I take my car to get a tune up (and yes, all Linux people use car metaphors), I don't email my mechanic and inform him how to set the spark plug gap. People are good at different things, that's why I don't cut my own hair. Just because I own a pair of scissors doesn't mean I'm good at or even remotely qualified to instruct someone else at cutting hair. Some people spend a bunch of time behind a keyboard, but that doesn't mean you're a programmer or even a "computer guy". Owning a computer doesn't make you qualified to tell me how to do my job.
How can you avoid problems? It really depends on the scope of the project. If you write a little throw away application that takes you a couple of hours then it's not worth the trouble of writing up a contract. If they don't pay up, you're only out a couple hours and you move on. Anything more than that, take the time and do it right.
Contracts - do them. Write up a scope of work contract and make them sign it before you do anything.
Educate the customer - maybe they don't know all this computer stuff costs money. Software is expensive, custom software even more so. The bill can easily run into the tens of thousands of dollars.
Delays happen - this happens mostly when the customer starts asking for more than the original scope of work ie: the sugar buzz effect. Amend the contract.
Good luck with your crazy customer, I sure had a blast with mine.
Linux holding kids back?!
Let's talk physics. Most people have
heard of the law of conservation of energy. It says that
energy cannot be created nor destroyed, but simply changed to
something else. Economics dumbs this idea down to there's no such
thing as a free lunch.
Nothing is really free. Even that pen you borrowed and the owner told
you to keep it costs someone something. It took energy to come up
with the idea, make the pen, ship it, sell it, use it and the act of
giving it away.
So let's apply this to FOSS.
Here is a guy who reconditions old
hardware, loads Linux on it and deploys it to kids who need it. One
of the kids made copies of a Linux Live CD
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LiveDistros) and gave it to his
classmates. The teacher confiscated the CDs and wrote a nasty graham.
--- quote
"...observed one of my students
with a group of other children gathered around his laptop. Upon
looking at his computer, I saw he was giving a demonstration of some
sort. The student was showing the ability of the laptop and handing
out Linux disks. After confiscating the disks I called a confrence
with the student and that is how I came to discover you and your
organization. Mr. Starks, I am sure you strongly believe in what you
are doing but I cannot either support your efforts or allow them to
happen in my classroom. At this point, I am not sure what you are
doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception
is harmful. These children look up to adults for guidance and
discipline. I will research this as time allows and I want to assure
you, if you are doing anything illegal, I will pursue charges as the
law allows. Mr. Starks, I along with many others tried Linux during
college and I assure you, the claims you make are grossly over-stated
and hinge on falsehoods. I admire your attempts in getting computers
in the hands of disadvantaged people but putting linux on these
machines is holding our kids back.
This is a world where Windows runs on
virtually every computer and putting on a carnival show for an
operating system is not helping these children at all. I am sure if
you contacted Microsoft, they would be more than happy to supply you
with copies of an older verison of Windows and that way, your
computers would actually be of service to those receiving them..."
Karen xxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxx Middle School
AISD
--- end quote
This both amused and angered me at the
same time. So much in fact that it became the main topic of my Linux
classes for that week. Yes, I'm one of those college instructor types
that teaches Linux, part time of course, but a teacher none the less.
So let's get this out of the way - no software is free as it took
energy to make it. It can be free as in the freedom to do with it
what you want. I can, as the creator of the software, give permission
- the freedom - to the user so they can use my software as needed.
They can even change my software to suit their needs.
Real world example, FollowMeIP. I wrote
this little server for a project I had at the time and it turned in
to something useful for some people. I've been hosting the site for
years now - for free. No catch, if you want to use it, use it. Does
it cost me money to run? Yes. Do I sit up at night worrying about how
I'm going to recover that lost money? No.
One could say the quality of software
isn't as good as commercial and I'd agree in FollowMeIP's case as it
took me all of a weekend to write and I haven't put much effort into
it since. It will be my test site for that magical day where I decide
it's time for Ruby on Rails goodness. Point is, I'm going down the
non-traditional road of - here, I wrote this, it was useful to me at
some point, maybe you'll like it too.
On the other hand, take a look at
OpenOffice. Here you have a fantastic open source project funded by
Sun. The quality of this package is the same if not better than
similar commercial packages. In fact, I'm using OpenOffice to write
this blog post. So what is Sun's angle? Why dump all the time and
money into a product that they could easily sell? Instead of worrying
about the answers to those questions, I focus on the fact that I have
the source code to OpenOffice and the freedom to do neat things with
it. If Sun fell off the planet tomorrow, I can still change or patch
OpenOffice myself or even form a company that does nothing but
OpenOffice support. In my day to day life, I really could care less
about Sun's long term strategy regarding its open source initiative.
As for Linux's ease of use. This is
completely relative. If you grew up on windows, all you know is
windows and you didn't even know there was an alternative - sure
anything else is not going to be "easy" for you. I've asked
my students many times - why haven't you even tried a mac? The
answers are mostly - well, it just never occurred to me that I
should. One even said he would feel like a traitor, which means on
some level he was emotionally attached to windows. Anything you don't
use or do on a daily bases is going to be hard on some level.
My buddy Gary got me a Professor's Cube for Christmas. While
I find it fun, it's not easy nor intuitive to me at all. I suppose
the natural response for the majority of people is to simply give up
as soon as they encounter the slightest difficulty. My reaction was
to watch many videos, read many articles and to go as far as setting
up a video chat with Gary so he could help me remotely. While I still
don't fully understand some of the algorithms I used nor feel like
it's "easy", I still enjoyed the challenge.
I remember the first time I saw Linux,
Ryan had it running reading his email in a text
based console. My curiosity got the best of me, at 20 I was already
sick of windows. Here I was pulling down major bucks for rebooting NT
servers everyday and it bored me to tears. Then I saw this new and
different operating system and I had access to the source code.
Computers became fun for me again, I was energized, I couldn't get
enough of this new and continuously changing frontier called Linux.
It was computing the way it was suppose to be and it didn't take long
at all for me to nuke windows and become a Linux only shop.
Since those days, Linux has gotten a
thousand fold easier to use and is very accessible to any level of
computer user. There's guis for everything, yum installers, even wifi
drivers for windows only cards. I can install it on one computer or a
million and the cost to me? Time.
No need to call India and beg for a new
activation key if I decided to upgrade my mainboard. Freedom is good.
In closing - Karen from xxxxxxxxx
Middle School - shut the fuck up.
