Category Archives: Bastos Cloud

Sponsoring WordCamp SD

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My involvement with WordCamp San Diego started in late 2009, I had been using the WordPress platform for some time as a quick and easy to set up front end for all the back end projects I had been involved with at the time. As an Open Source developer and proponent I had wanted to make sure that I used only OSS tools and WordPress had the largest and most active design and user base I could find at the time. For some time I had wanted to attend a WordCamp event but couldn’t due to school and work obligations so I went out searching to start one here in San Diego. At the time nothing was listed on WordCamp.org so after talking to the guys at Automattic, they got me in touch with Dre Armeda of Cubic Two who was working on getting an organizing committee together to bring WC to SD.

I was involved with the organizing committee until late 2010 when I had to scale back my involvement due to the birth of my son Noah and asked them to welcome in a great organizer in my place named Phelan Riessen from Digithrive who had been involved in bringing other events to San Diego like Bar Camp and Drumbeat. The entire organizing committee did a great job planning and preparing for the event and I have to give them props for putting together a 200+ person event that was sold out in less than a week so as soon as Sponsorship packages went up I made sure to show my support for this wonderful endeavor.

The reason why I bring all of this up is that I think it’s important for us as a community to support these kind of events whenever we can. Not just for because it makes great business sense (WordCamps are corporately sponsored but not advertiser focused) but because it’s just good common sense for the general tech community at large. San Diego is growing in the area of small technology startups and if we who are in the technology field already don’t put our resources behind it when it makes sense for us then we run the risk of loosing all the talent and drive to other growing tech hubs like Austin or New York. Yes, San Diego is mostly a military contract town and as a developer I could make way more getting hired by a large government contractor then I would by creating a startup, yet cities grow and die by their innovations and innovators or lack there of. I’m only one person and am limited in what I can do through partnerships and other deals, but I’m proud of San Diego’s technology sector and think if we put our focus on developing talent first and keeping it here second through opportunity, we all benefit.

Back in 2009 I created a Technology incubator called Bastos Ventures that has grown well over the last few years, we already have a few projects under our belts and are always on the look out for new partners and ideas.  Bastos Ventures just recently launched Bastos Cloud as a quick and easy fully featured WordPress cloud service for small businesses and is my main property sponsoring the event. We give you full control over your content and site setup. You can build a website or create a business in minutes and we let you try it out for yourself long before you spend a dime. Seriously. I’ll be at SDSU for the first Annual WordCampSD event on Saturday July 16th 2011 and I hope to see you all there. Look for me or hit me up if you want to meet and talk by emailing me at michael@bastosventures.com or find me on twitter @bastosmichael.

Web Design as a Commodity

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There has been much talk in the Web Development Community about growth of sites like ThemeForest.net and other that sell high quality web based themes for around $30 to $40. Many who make their living from selling themes argue that they wish prices would be hire, they are claim that in contrast these same higher quality themes would cost you roughly $2000 in the custom space but selling on through these sort of services undermines their bottom line simply does not generate as much revenue as they feel their work deserves.

Though I may agree with the pretense I don’t agree with the conclusion,  All businesses must face competition and while I think designers deserve a lot more than they are being paid now, the line between what we deserve to get and what we actually get can be extremely distant in any business let alone Web Design.

The question we should be asking is not whether theme prices are too low but on whether or not this industry which has gone from specialization to commoditization. I was a web designer back in the early 90′s when CSS was just starting out and we still coded everything within a single perl file. I got out of the design business because the fact was that within a few years prices dropped drastically, it had nothing to do with the lack of work available and had more to do with the influx of new designers and developers that were willing to work for cheaper rates.

I moved on to other forms of development but was eventually forced to move back into the web game because of clients that also wanted me to take care of their website along with everything else I did for them. At that point I decided to stay out of the design business because I felt it was too commoditized, you can tell when a business goes from specialized to commodity when the growers ask the market to make you pay more for their corn. I think there a lot of talented WordPress developers out there but seeing as I buy many themes for my own corporate needs, I do feel like WooThemes and Press75 are over priced for what they do, they’re designs are great but considering I don’t see much of a great difference between designs I’d much rather pay for a $35 design on Theme Forest that blows me away than a $200 design on Woo that looks like everyone of their other designs.

I don’t say all of this to upset to industry but the fact is that the web design and theme industry has always been a specialized business and when you go from making $2000 a web page in the mid 90′s to $35 for a fully functional site almost 15 years later, the business has commoditized and needs to think in terms of scale. I think the ThemeForest Model works because the designer can still make a substantial amount across multiple customers instead of making a ridiculous amount from a single customer. Wishing and hoping that this price point would change doesn’t better your industry, it just opens the doors for other less known dev’s to come in and corner the market with cheaper and better product.

I think the future in theme development has less to do with actual themes and more to do with individual themes allowing for greater customization from the end users. I see SquareSpace.com as the gold standard for what theme developers should strive to emulate and other companies like iThemes and Headway have already started doing this with their ridiculously easy to customize and modify themes while creating their own internal marketplace for customer creations. It’s no different than normal software development, things will get cheaper and forces people to innovate and add greater features and functionality at the same price. I think designers for too long have made good money with custom work while these new technologies are slowly making it easier and cheaper for others to enter the industry quickly and efficiently.

If you think like a designer than you’re going to want to get paid more for doing less, if you think like a software programmer then you’re job will always be to innovate and create tools that make your own jobs obsolete allowing for greater scale of their time and efforts. I’m sorry to be the buzz kill here but I’m just looking at it merely from a numbers and business perspective. Ultimately I’m more than willing to pay $200 for a theme, but it has to do more than just look pretty, the ability to take a single design and use it for many things is what causes people to want to pay more, otherwise $35 is the perfect price to experiment with on a theme and see if it’s going to fit the current project I’m working on or not. Anymore than that and I would have less wiggle room to work with and would be stuck with the design I paid so much more money for. Think less like your industry, and more like your customers and you’ll dominate your industry hands down.

Chaos Monkey saves Netflix

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There has been a lot of Dedicated Server people jumping on the anti cloud bandwagon lately after Amazon’s cloud based AWS went down for a few days. Many big named sites like Foursquare and others were offline for quite some time but amazingly one company whom uses Amazon almost exclusively seemed to stand on it’s own without any issues, Netflix stayed online. How did they do it? The secret lies in the way they structured their networks, great programmers solve problems, superb developers avoid them all together.

According to Company Rep John Ciancutti, Netflix had build an application which they named Chaos Monkey. Without going too in depth, what this program basically does it randomly takes down Netflix Instances in an attempt to test the network and ensure that there is no single point of failure on it’s streaming service. While most companies would consider this suicide, Netflix embraced virtualized architecture early on but understood the draw backs of depending on a single network or provider to do everything for them. They made sure that their site and system was robust enough that it could jump from cloud instance to instance based on availability and traffic. This is why 20% of evening internet traffic can be attributed to Netflix streaming and customers never have to see a delay or drop in service.

Now you make ask how does a single developer do something like this? We’ll it’s simple, say for example you run a Python or PHP site using Memcache or MySQL as your database backend? Much like a Raid system expands it’s data across multiple hard drives, you can create multiple MySQL services across multiple instances and mirror much of your code as well. This is important because as people come to your site and traffic begins to take off, you will need to move them onto different servers with the same information and if any one server goes down, you have a full backup of everything and can be back online with a simple DNS pointer. If you’re using Amazon another great idea is to section your data in S3 and your server content in EC2, some CMS systems like WordPress and Drupal actually have plugin modules that let you automatically save your media to S3 so your site can elastically keep up with processing demands for high traffic use. If you’re building your application yourself, Amazon has a whole class on using their S3 API’s to send and pull data to their servers.

This should be a lesson to developers out there looking at the cloud, instead of running back into your holes, buying your own dedicated machines you should all embrace the future and face your fears of being down head on. There’s nothing wrong with wanting your own dedicated service, but industries rise and fall based on innovation and what works for one company may not work for future developers. If you are a start up and looking at your options, choose cloud, choose the future in whatever instance or service that may be. Yet know the downfalls and prepare for them, I think Chaos Monkey (a monkey reaking havoc on your network on purpose) is a fantastic idea. Much like modern software developers are using fuzzing techniques to test any and all vulnerabilities in their applications, website and network developers should use similar methods to constantly test their site or service to ensure no single point of failure on their networks. Only then can we really, truly live in the cloud without wires.

The Cult of Social Media

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Social Media is a beast of a sector to understand, it’s part technology, part high school style politics and most importantly part marketing. Originally it was intended as a way for people to interact with each other online and share links, ideas, stories and so much more. Many of us that have been in technology since the mid 90′s can remember some of the first Social Media sites like Bolt.com and others before the MySpace and Friendster’s of the world made it main stream. With the advent of Mega Social Sites the Twitter or Facebook, companies and marketers have stood up and taken notice, many have gone from selling ads on TV and Radio to selling Retweets on their massive 10,000 follower twitter accounts. No one can question that these tools are a marketers dream but I want to caution people who say that there are “Rules” to Social Media and if you don’t follow them you’ll never get anywhere, that is simply untrue.

Since the time of the Pharaoh’s people have always wanted to put themselves above others and lift their interests above those of others around them. I see this all the time when I walk into a tech event and see Social Media experts expounding about the do’s and don’ts of Twitter and others. Many have great advice and I’m not bashing them for it but as a developer I fear the rise of the Social Media Cults, people who blindly follow the advice of other Social “Experts” simply because they have a few thousand people following them. They tell them things like Auto DM’s don’t work because their not personal enough or you should be on the site 24/7 answering and replying to people. This is great advice if you’re plan is to become a Social Media Wiz but it doesn’t work well for the rest of us who work for a living. I have plenty of friends which are Social guys and they make a lot of money doing this so I’m not trying to rein on their parade but basically explain to you why they make up many of these rules, because when you realize you can’t do it all yourself they know you’ll need them.

Few of us can stand in front of a computer all day and post content, in many cases we are out trying to finish projects or gain clients. So when a Social Media expert tells you that your system will never work because you’re not on Facebook 24/7 it’s because they know you can’t be but they can. I’m a programmer and most of my time is spent behind a computer screen writing code, I’ve done my best to maintain my accounts fresh and up to date but even I have a hard time doing it. There are plenty of tools out there that can help you make the most out of what you do online, one of my projects Bastos Cloud lists a slew of automated tools that can help you simplify much of what you do in the Social Media space (http://bastoscloud.com/tour/automation/) and you’ll still need to post yourself from time to time so that you don’t look like a robot but the point to be made here is that there are no real rules to all of this. Other tools like Think Up (http://thinkupapp.com) are really great in helping you go over you data and see what you’re doing wrong or right without the need to hire anyone. When you set rules you ruin creativity in the market and you end up with 100 different companies building “Social Media” sites or apps because they were all told that the rules exist.

When you remove the Social Media Cult from the equation you are free to innovate and try new things that everyone might have told you was a no go, at least if you try them for yourself then you know whether it worked for you or not. Blindly following the advice of a person who spends most of their day Re-tweeting or Liking something online is not at all a Marketing plan. Ultimately when you go against the rules you reinvent them; Twitter, Facebook and others weren’t invented by marketers, they were made by developers who said screw it to the rules and tried something new. So don’t get sucked into thinking that you have to hire some expensive Social Media person to do everything for you, if you can’t do it yourself and you need to hire someone then test them, Followers do what the crowd wants, leaders tell the crowd what’s coming next. Keep that in mind when you market online.

Intuit as a Webhost?

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I live in San Diego and thus am proud to have a tech giant like Intuit here to make us San Diego Technology guys proud. They do a great job at hosting local events and are instrumental in recruiting talent to this area so think of this post as my way of thanking them for helping our community. Recently I noticed that Intuit has decided to get into the website hosting business, it seems to make sense right? I mean they provide their Tax and Business software to a lot of small businesses so it would make sense that they want to also provide websites for their employees that syncs up well to the software they have at the office. If Intuit plans to stay within the hosting space then great, but if not then they should learn a lesson from PayPal and create a great API that Content Management System developers can take advantage of.
 
Everyone knows that businesses need to focus on building platforms that others can work with and develop on. This is the fastest growing segment of the net and accounts for the major success of companies like Google and Facebook and it’s also the reason why Microsoft and others made so much money in the software business. They’re success had to do with the idea of building dependency not just from customers but from other businesses who depended on their companies survival and thus would be interested in helping them make the product better.
 
Intuit has done one side of this so far in that they created great software that many businesses need and have really killed a very untargeted small business market with their well created and maintained software. Yet in branching into the web space they miss the opportunity of doing something even better, creating a monitization platform that links to their clients software for others to develop on. PayPal has succeeded because they decided to give up the reigns of control to developers and thus any business can do business online and have their payments made through PayPal. What’s missing right now in this space is what Intuit has, a way for small companies to keep better records of those transactions online.
 
Intuit should consider developing plugins or application add-ons for some of the largest E-Commerce engines out there like Zencart or osCommerce that would allow small companies already using these tools to easily integrate with their Quickbooks or Turbotax. They should also consider building tools for Content Management Software like WordPress, Drupal and others that is either free or attached to their own service so that businesses can choose where they want to go for their website development and still be dependent on Intuit for their main business functions. The truth is that Intuit will never get as good as website development as the big boys so why enter a market that’s already saturated, if they focus on creating systems that are adaptive and can integrate with other website components then maybe, just maybe their web business will be as big if not bigger than PayPal’s.

Fire Sheep & your WordPress site

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Many of you have read about Fire Sheep in the last few weeks since the ToorCon hacker’s conference. The program allows a novice want to be hacker to easily bring up cookie settings and be allowed to log into other people’s accounts within a local network and act as them online on any non SSL secured site. Basically if you’re in a coffee shop and you are using their free Wifi network, someone with the Fire Sheep plugin can login as you to your Facebook or any open session website online. To read more about how the program works please visit the link below for more information.

http://wiki.twit.tv/wiki/Security_Now_272

So how is this important for WordPress site owners? If you run a WordPress site, you most likely run a blog or business from it and are just as susceptible to this problem as any of the big companies like Amazon and others. If you are worried about your site’s security or the security of your users please use these tools to make your site more secure and give your users a safer experience on your site.  The first thing you will need to do is make sure that your webhost company provides SSL certificates or that they are willing to provide you the service. Then once you activate SSL you’ll need to create or use a paid for certificate so that the browsers know your site is safe. Once all that is done and it comes time for you to secure your website itself, the following plugins will really give you a head start in preventing the Fire Sheep problem on your site:

WPSSL (WordPress with SSL): http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wpssl/

This is a great plugin for you to use when you need to secure your WordPress users from the Fire Sheep problem. Once you install it you can choose which post or page you want to secure (aka an order form or contact page) by simply using the “force_ssl” under the Custom Fields section as a Name and putting a “true” value for it. There are ways of making sure that your site is SSL secure across the board but this is a good start to making sure your pages are HTTPS compatible.

Admin SSL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/admin-ssl-secure-admin/

This plugin is more important for you and your backend users than just viewing a secure page, it secures your whole WordPress login experience and is a bit more complicated to install. This is great to prevent people from automatically logging into your site as one of your users or even as you the administrator.

There are other plugins that could be useful for preventing this problem but these two are the simplest implementations so far that I’ve found to fix this problem on WordPress. My hope is that sometime soon Automatic (the guys that make WordPress) will make this a focus of theirs and will make switching to SSL a serious part of the WordPress platform on both the pages and the logins. This is something the Web 2.0 and blogging community is not use to having to deal with but I see it as a positive for internet security, the more of a problem Fire Sheep becomes, the more it will force people to make their websites more secure and ensuring their users privacy is safer.

NO to Blog & SEO Ninjas

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If you have ever read any of my posts so far you’ll know that I push for people to have a common sense approach to SEO and other web promotional online marketing ideas. There are a lot of people out there who run entire businesses solely on the idea of you paying them to market your stuff. If you choose to use those services that is fine, you as the customer have the option to basically pay whomever you want for whatever you want. Yet here is my reason for never paying for it myself nor do I suggest you try them either, if you don’t understand exactly what it is they are going to do for you, don’t pay them for it period.

Creating a blog for your company’s website or personal one takes time and remember what I always say that the more content you have the more likely you’ll be linked by someone. The quality of your content is just as important as the quantity of your posts so don’t try to artificially rig the system or hire someone to do it for you, trust that the system works if your content is genuine and you will reap great benefits for it in the Social Networks if you are honest and transparent about what it is that you are doing. There are other ideas like guest posting and automated social media sharing that works and if someone offers those kinds of services for you go for it, the difference is that you are in control of those kinds of situations and aren’t paying an arm and a leg for someone to work some magic that you can’t see for yourself.
Don’t try and go to Blog World and other social networking events in order to find people who will do this stuff for you, that’s lazy and if you go there you need to use it as a learning moment. Your site is your site and no one will promote it better than you remember that. The idea of hiring a blog expert to do all the work in your online marketing is no different than companies that hired Madison Avenue men to run their advertising campaigns in the 50′s and 60′s. They made great but expensive promises with ads that did very little for the bottom line considering how much was spent but only a few out of the millions of ad money spent during that era ever become really successful. I see people starting to have that same mindset and it worries me a bit, the old saying was that 50% of my ad revenue is wasted, I just don’t know which 50% that is. We shouldn’t be using that as an excuse for spending too much on marketing that shows no measurable results and we need to move away from the ad model online where you pay a ton of money and your marketing becomes someone else’s problem.
If you are out there and you sell yourself as an SEO ninja or kingpin that can boost people’s Google rankings with one click of a button, stop it. Very few of these guys are actually technologists or computer scientists and fewer more can be considered good marketers. If you don’t understand how Google’s engine actually works and the ideas behind it’s algorithms structure then you have no business selling your skills to others for little to now promise of results. Now don’t get me wrong, there are guys who can be good at this but we need to get away from the idea of throwing money at marketing without being able to see any real long term results from it, meaning not just a temporary boost in your Google rankings.
Many Blog Experts use loopholes to get your content out there, they artificially hype up your Google rankings by posting to forum sites and other locations in order to get you up the ranks through kind of shady artificial means. In many cases because these methods are vague and a bit wrong to use they don’t last forever and though you may pay them a ton of money to get you on the first page of a keyword at Google, that doesn’t mean you’ll stay there. In many cases even when you pay them you may not even go anywhere because they’re methods of artificial ranking may have worked for their content but it may not work for yours. If you want to do this then read the blog posts that are teaching you how to do this kind of stuff and try it out yourself, it may take some time but only by doing it on your own or next to someone who’s knowledgeable will you know what works for your content or site and what doesn’t. And please if you become good at it, don’t try to make a living selling your services to others, in many cases you’ll find yourself over promising and under performing every time.

You need Posterous & Ping

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So as I’m writing this to you I’m doing it in my email through Google Apps getting ready to send them to post@posterous.com. This is just a test of course but it’s an important one for those of you looking to blog need to remember. The hardest part of blogging in many cases is just finding the time or place to write a post. Usually when you have an idea you may not have the time or energy to start a thought that may eventually become a winning post, by using a service like Posterous, you can simply start your blog post on your native email application whether on your phone or on your desktop and once it’s finished and you’ve had a chance to type all your ideas down, you email it.

Posterous will then take your blog post, image or video and send it out to a large number of different social platforms and video or image hosting sites for your content to spread online. For those of you who have ready my old blog posts, you know that I am all about content. Content is one of the most important things for you to do online and the more tools you have to more easily create it the better. You can’t always go to your business site or blog site and post what you’re working on or something you just had an idea for so using a service like Posterous allows you to start ideas while on the go and then finally post them almost immediately after you finish your thought.

Ping.fm is another great service that does something very similar, it allows you to post shorter messages though to a large number of other social media platforms and really allow your content to spread throughout for more eyeballs to see. In social media you really need to spend your time focusing on building great relationships and you can’t do that when you try and spend most of your time posting your content and links to the large number of platforms. Instead using these kind of tools religiously so that it shortens the amount of time you spend on posting and you can spend more time on creating. Make sure you do some tests posts though as I am doing here so that you can be sure that you don’t double or triple post on networks like Facebook or Twitter. Your followers or friends won’t like it when they see 5 of the same blog posts or videos posted on those sites one right after the other. You may not be able to help having some over lap but make sure you don’t have it happen often, it’s not good to piss off people in a network that’s suppose to be social.

The Great UML Project Divide

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A UML is a Unified Modeling Language that software developers use to basically draw out the way a piece of software is going to work for their clients. There are other industry suggested paperwork that comes with it like responsabilities and details about the project, but the overall visual representation of the program comes from the UML during the development phase. If you’ve ever worked at a large corporation that is getting ready to launch a new internal program through their IT section that will hopefully make your life a whole lot easier or at least modernize the way you run your business and was disapointed by how many problems it had or was angry at how the company in one fowl swoop changed the way you did business without ever telling you ahead of time, then you’ve probably suffered consequences of the UML Divide.

What I mean by the UML divide is that usually at least in large corporations, the people responsable for telling the developer what the software is going to look like or operate are usually too high in the organizational structure to ever actually use the software. These are the executives or managers that like the idea of having a program developed to do something specific but in many cases  don’t bring in the users before developing it. The users are the guys on the ground, the bank tellers, the clerks at the counter, the office secretaries doing data entry or even the expert on the ground who’s responsible for making the business run smoothly. It’s not their fault, in many cases they may try to get suggestions from the people that will be using the program but due to the different levels of managers involved in the process in most companies, the guy below them whom they do ask is so far removed himself from the peons typing away at their keys that he in many cases has no personal stake in the way the program functiosn anyhow.

In most cases features becomes more important than user understanding or  usability, I know usability is a very vague word in the software industry but for the purposes of this article I’ll define usability as simply the users ability to pick it up quickly and use it efficiently. When executives are too focused on features they loose site of what the program is designed to do in the first place, in most cases it was paid for and built in order to remove inefficient work routines or habits that could potentially make their employees more productive. In most cases seeking to feed their hunger for more and more features they will go with an Oracle or Microsoft based setup that gives them everything they want and forces their employees to attend endless hours of classes and training seminars in order to simply learn this “new” system. I’ve always said that you need to implement things in your company that will make your employees life easier and help them be quicker at their job, executives should not be afraid to take work off their employees plat if that means that can do more of it and essentially do more in less time in the long run.

What is the solution to fixing the UML Divide? Simply put if you are in a company that is planning on installing or developing a new piece of software internally for your employees, before you pay anyone anything or before you delegate it out to your managers, consider a few things. First what is this actually suppose to do? Don’t be afraid to skip over your middle managers and go right to the guy on the ground floor and see how he works, in many cases software development is left in the hands of the IT guy who is paid to know mostly one thing, IT. So in most cases he has no idea how your other employees function so really embed them or yourself into areas like your customer service desk or your accounting department, etc. Whatever area of your business that this software is suppose to solve and help, go there and work with them for a month or two. Make it a long term commitment for either you or your IT guy to focus on learning their jobs. You may have even done that job as you where going up in the company but over the years things change and you have to be willing to get your hands dirty for your companies sake so that you can really understand the work processes. Relying only on your managers to give you ideas neglects the fact that even they may not be using this system, and as much as you trust them, it will help you in filling in that UML gap better if you give your software developer something more than just a features list for your next software project.

Technological Comfort Zone

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Everyone has a technology comfort zone, as I’m writing this I’m using an online blogging platform called WordPress that is easy to set up and use for anyone and has the most features with the lowest possible price, free. Yet it’s important that we distinguish the difference between what is our technology comfort zone verses our technology limitations and understand those differences otherwise we risk putting ourselves into a position where we are either paying a lot for something or working way to hard when there are easier and better solutions to our problems.

An example can be given when someone at your work uses Excel to build a database of information or a general form verses using a database program like Access, the best tool for the job might be the database but in many circumstances people prefer to use the spreadsheet because they think they understand it better than this other complicated program. Though some may argue that this is a limitation, in fact I believe it to be more of a comfort zone issue than a limit. Comfort can be seen as something that I do because I don’t want to learn or take the time to use this other thing, while limits is something that is physically impossible to do right now because of cost constraints or other variables. I’m not going to create a search engine database that’s better than Google because I’m physically limited by the number of servers I can deploy verses Google’s massive infrastructure. The same thing can be said about switching phones, I’m physically limited with the phone that I have because I cannot afford a smart phone right now verses I can afford one but I don’t want to take the time to learn to use it or get the most out of it.

You see this all over in Corporate society today, you have people who are great at their jobs but think technology should be relegated to the IT department and thus close their minds from any possibility that could make their work flow easier and better as well as help them become more productive. In many cases IT people don’t help either because they lock down most corporate computers and thus prevent people from making creative work flow possible because they are limited by what the technology guys at the company know how to do. Take it from a Computer Scientist, most IT departments don’t know much about technology and are driven mostly by the latest tool released by Microsoft, Oracle or SAP. The reason why these companies make so much money from all of their liscensing agreements is because they love the idea of a technology comfort zone in Corporate America. If you are comfortable using Office and Windows you will have no desire nor need to branch out into other products and thus they have you as a customer for life.

Apple does this well in the Home Computer market by reducing the technological learning curve on all their devices and thus locking people into always wanting to buy the latest Macbook laptop or iPhone/iPad. So why is this even an issue or why right about it? Well in many cases from my experiences what people may think is a technology limitation is in fact a technology comfort zone and they don’t even realize it. The biggest area I find this in is Open Source software or free non licensed software, in many cases even if you tell an individual that there is free software out there that can do the same thing they are paying someone to do, the fact that there may be a small learning curve forces the user to shell out a ton of money that in many cases they simply cannot afford or don’t have the budget for.

I’m sorry but the days of saying I’ll leave that for the IT department to do is over, small companies realize this as more and more employees are learning skill sets and using technology they would have never used or learned about in a large corporation. If you are at your job and you do something constantly or repeatedly, try and think of how you could use technology to do it faster or better, in the end you may think that saving files in a share folder verses using SharePoint or even a free Content Management System like Alfresco might be better and easier for you in the short term, but you are selling yourself short. It’s understandable if you are part of an older generation that just recently learned how to use computers and are somewhat set in your ways, but if you are under 30 and you think that you won’t have to learn these tools and technologies in the long run, you’re deadly mistaken. Your job and your future ability to get a job rely on your willingness to turn what you think is a limitation into a comfort and go beyond it in the long run.