foliovision

Good article but it doesn't fit in with American thinking. In search of a unicorn. The only very visible company in the United States I can remember following the profitability and measured growth path was 37signals. Even they have occasionally wandered way off course, with multiple products, and neglecting the main product (long discussion). I agree with you. This philosophy of profitable growth makes me interested in Linear as a potential customer. There's less risk of you closing your doors or just selling your smaller users out.

Where did you share the code? You didn't include a link.

Great job with Pushpin. It was the only extension which worked semi-reliably on iOS. Sad that it wasn't viable.

Based on the average diet in North America (fast food, oversized portions, GMO vegetables which look good but are nutrition free, hormone overloaded beef, chlorinated chicken, this is the short list), I would argue the system (North American style capitalism does not nourish the body.

I'd also apply the same thought to North American arts and sports. Singing about hoes and bling, while clutching your testicles or ring fighting hardly feed the soul.

The Olympians should get proper state funding. They do inspire.

Lots of money for bombs for Gaza, bombs for Ukraine, bombs all over the world. Very little motivation it seems to settle foreign policy issues diplomatically. Which would save trillions of dollars (for us) and millions of lives (for them). Lots of money for war.

Talk about hard decisions and belt-tightening is ludicrous until North America changes it's all-war, all-the-time politics.

Breakdancing should never had made it into the Olympics. Breakdancing is art or it's not. It's certainly not sport.

Cf. Rhythmic gymnastics free routine is borderline but there's a whole bunch more set pieces the young women do with balls and hoops which are sport. Figure skating is also borderline but does have figures and set moves and a high physical danger factor (you try leaping high, at speed on the ice, or being lifted). Freestyle skiing doesn't belong in the Olympics.

One doesn't start with the marketing. One starts with the great game. This is the one of the biggest issue now in culture – one is taught to promote one's awful films, music novels, games, paintings. Instead the creators should teach themselves how to make great, or at least good, art first.

Then the division of labour was to find the editor or the producer to take your work to the next level.

Between them Reddit and Macrumors have almost all the useful public information for macOS users, music producers, video creators, colourists. Handing Google the keys to Reddit will be trouble. I'm not quite sure what kind of trouble, but deep trouble.

The SEO spamslaught which will start now will be part of the issue, Google will also work to make visible on Reddit what they like and make invisible what they don't like. Money talks and Reddit was already big on censorship. A more independent public space is what we need, not a more moderated and beholden prison yard.

If you're not on Mark's newsletter, Weekly Axis Of Easy, you owe it to yourself to subscribe. It's funny, to the point, covers most of the really important tech news with a focus on infrastructure and privacy and is pretty much a commercial-free zone. Microsoft Certified and NSA coneheads might not like it much (but hey Edward S. was an NSA conehead for a long time so there's some smart and good people even there).

Home office: I like it for myself but many of our staff would hate it. I also like to have in person meetings at least a couple of times/week with major collaborators where we can site together and look at a screen together and have eye contact and read more subtle signals.

Exactly. Based on their track record, IBM clearly knew what was going to happen and even anticipated the extra income as the project spiralled around the drain.

IBM has failed to build these state level systems successfully around the world (Canada, Australia, Pennsylvania, Slovenia, New Zealand). IBM should know how to go about building them right or IBM should not be in this business.

The first $200 million of cost overruns I'm willing to pin on the Government of Canada. The subsequent billion dollars and the failure of the system to work at all is the vendor's fault.

If the Government of Canada is entirely impossible to work with, the vendor should have shut the project down at 200% of budget rather than run it to six times budget and still fail.

A responsible vendor then declines to take the project (smart decision) or executes anyway. We've been in the situation a few times where what started as an attractive project with a reasonable budget turned out to be an underestimate and we barely earned back our salary expenditures on the project.

Those companies did continue to do business with us though and we've normally earned back our losses and more on future projects.

That's what honest vendors do. That's not what IBM did.

Exactly. Based on IBM's track record around the world (I know of IBM payroll projects for Canada, Australia, Pennsylvania which have failed while New Zealand and Slovenia have been mentioned in comments), I'd say failing on low ball government payroll projects and then taking the government to the cleaners is strategic at IBM.

IBM have made billions doing so. Bad publicity is just a good start.

The really interesting point is that if this business plan is shown to be strategic (if I were Canada, Australia or Pennsylvania I'd be looking at full discovery of all email records), IBM would then be vulnerable to civil suit for fraud.

Thanks for the input. Personally my own bugbear in terms of web readability is contrast ratios in "modern" web design. I didn't realise that font-weight could give people such issues. I'll think about changing font-weight soon as good design is about making information more readable and not less.

Freshbooks has built from scratch two SAAS which have handled over $60 billion worth of invoices and expenses for over 10 million users.

I'm suggesting that Mike McDerment could build and lead a team who would successfully build a payroll system for the Government of Canada for far less than a billion dollars.

IBM has not built a working payroll system (despite starting with Oracle's Peoplesoft for that money). I suspect my company (or some of our best competitors) could build a working payroll system for about $50 million based on our success on smaller projects. Our specialty however is in publishing systems and online video. I'm specifically recommending Freshbooks as McDerment has a background in creating accounting and billing systems and scaling them.

Additionally, as a Canadian, McDerment is already familiar with many of the variables to do with Canadian tax and employment legislation and geography. Any foreigner would need three to six months to assimilate Canada specific information.

I also don't suggest that IBM could not have built this payroll system satisfactorily. Based on failed projects in Canada, Australia, Pennsylvania and Slovenia, big promises, poor delivery, unlimited billing and zero liability on government projects appears to be strategic policy (links to each of those projects appear in a new preface to my article). Such behaviour has made Big Blue billions.