Innovation in Software

One of the problems I sometimes have when heading up a developer team is just getting the right kit in the right hands. I have a project now where I need to get an iPhone and a Blackberry 8900 Curve to a developer, but we’re blocked.

I speak to teams occasionally that need to get iPhones to developers but don’t want to take on contracts, nor do they want the devices locked to O2 for ever more (or even in the first place). You can buy them online, but at around £650 for each 32GB 3GS, kitting out at a team of just a few developers can be painfully expensive.

Sometimes I’ll see a team come together that needs a pile of development kit just for a couple of months to see a project through. I’ve even heard of one team buy half a dozen Mac Minis at the start of a project, bill it to the client, and then come the end of the project they had no use for the machines any more. Talk about waste!

The logistics of this stuff is scary. Managing cashflow, sourcing equipment, it all just takes time.

When I see something that is taking a developer away from getting product shipped, I wonder to myself “isn’t there a better way?”. And tonight, I realised when it comes to sourcing hardware and software for development teams, there is. Vagueware could, if people wanted, help.

We can source kit, (including legitimate and factory-fresh unlocked and SIM free iPhones), for considerably less than you can pick the same equipment up for on the high street or eBay. Need 20 machines by Monday? With Photoshop installed on 5 of them? And XCode or Visual Studio ready to roll on the rest? We could do that, quite easily thanks to knowing enough guys on the wholesale side of the hardware business.

In essence, I’m thinking about offering hardware/software bundles for developers – custom packages, tailored for projects – priced at wholesale prices. Even renting out kit if that’s what people need.

I’m just floating this as an idea right now, if the feedback is good, I’ll look into making it happen.

Fellow Mancunian geek Simon Wheatley had a little tweet this morning that made me think about a few things.

Best start thinking of things to make with the remnants of a banking system I guess… when the wind blows, build windmills.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been looking around the scene locally, nationally and further afield and tried to work out what is going to happen next. Here’s my general gut feeling:

1. A lot of firms are going to go bust. During boom times, mediocrity, a lack of professionalism, no real need to sell and develop sales skills, all bound up with something shiny and slightly interesting can actually pay its own way. No longer. A lot of people have lucked out with poor business skills and zero-thought business plans. That is now going to bite them hard. If you’re running a business without a real business plan, cashflow forecast and a way forward in times of recession, you’re in trouble. If you don’t have sales skills, you need to find them.
2. What survives, thrives. Those who work out how to serve needs of users – and more importantly right now, the needs of their own cashflow – will actually grow at paces that will leave many people boggling. This won’t turn into an investment bubble though, because there won’t be much in the way of investment going on for a little while. When the market liquidity improves and money starts to become cheaply accessible again I doubt people will make the same mistake of investing in just an idea – execution is going to be more important than ever before.
3. You don’t need investment to survive – in fact, you never did. You just need sales. Whatever it is you think you’re about to do, it has to be focused on sales. Right now is a bad time to set up a property website. It’s also a bad time to get into loan websites or sites that offer credit card deals. If you have the capital to buy an existing site that does those things, right now might be a cheap time to buy though.

I’m still working out my next moves. I have the opportunity to take on some more public sector work which feels sheltered from the storm for the time being, but I’m also trying to work out what the current “windmills” look like in the software space. Low-cost, high-yield projects are hard to come by so it could take me some time to work it out. Watch this space.

In the last few weeks, as I’ve been firming up ideas for cashflow around Vagueware, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not entirely right to suggest this is about “Open Source Software” (OSS for short) and how it is delivered. Specifically, I need to drop that middle word.

Open Software is more than just source code. It’s about the design, documentation, support, and improvement of the product. It’s about saying “we own this” instead of saying “I own this, but you can use it”. I’m trying to work out ways of being able to make that mean something real, and for there to still be a cash-flow at the end of it all.

The services model is definitely one way forward, but I’ve also been thinking about an idea mentioned a few months ago where I allow sponsorship of features, documentation or other parts of projects at a small level.

It may be that the feature set I come up with for a project is all well and good for 99% of people, but if there was something missing for the other 1%, that group (or individual, even) could put some money in the pot to encourage its development. It might only be $10, but it’s $10 in the pot. Six months later somebody else comes along and decides they really need that feature too, and they add $50. We now have $60 in the pot, and if the feature is something that can be bitten off in less than an hour, it makes economic sense to just get it done. Of course other features might need thousands to make them economic, but allowing for lots of small donation, it’s more likely those features will get funded.

The idea of a code bounty is not new or original, but I’m wondering how best to structure it from day one and whether the bounties should be claimable by Vagueware alone, or whether to open it up to other developers and if by doing so I would be changing what my company is fundamentally about.

I really get a gut feeling that where I’m heading with this is new territory in some way, but that I’ve seen all the components elsewhere. Whenever I think about whether this is going to work – if I’m going to be able to make a living from this – I start getting a sick feeling in my stomach, and that’s how I know it’s worth trying.