Notice the giant Download button on the right. That’s really an ad for who-knows-what. To download ClamWin, you want the much-smaller download menu item on the left.

Caveat emptor.

The mind boggles at the mess this could potentially be if they’re dealing with a breakage of something that fundamental. My heart goes out to them. I hope they have (or can create) the right view of their system to make it all good. I haven’t seen any announcement to that effect.

Software engineers hard to find
Shortage of trained IT talent challenges Chicago companies

Good to know in these troubled times.

And to keep in mind:

“One good developer can do the work of three or four guys,”

And this…

… finding qualified job candidates is “the bane of my existence.”

First, it’s very well-written and has an excellent tone. I hope never to fold a business, but if I had to, I hope I’d bow out as gracefully as they are.

Hats off to them for knowing when to quit, and letting us all know with this much advance notice.

We’re not in another dot-com bubble. Without a convincing plan to turn a profit, investors won’t bite. Two million users (astonishingly!) seems not to be good enough.

Technically, it’s an excellent product. I’ve used it for some time and it works great. Shouldn’t that be enough?

Entrepreneurial authors like Guy Kawasaki say that a product based on something you’d want yourself is a better way to go than an anticipated audience. And that’s exactly what they had.

Your competition isn’t far behind. If they’d started a “freemium” service early on, would they have built a loyal customer base that despite the free competition?

I don’t mean this harshly: the CEO couldn’t conjure magic. The engineers couldn’t find a working business model, but neither could he. I suppose I’m biased toward engineers, and CEOs exist because the engineers too often can’t do it without them. But it’s not a slam dunk for anyone.

I’d love to hear their experiences after some time has passed. Would it have been a viable business for a leaner team? What if they’d geared toward a smaller long-term revenue stream from the start?

Of course, if this farewell is really XMarks’ maneuver to get their customers’ attention (and it turns the business around), the CEO has earned his keep right there.

Fare thee well XMarks. You have an excellent product.

Update, 12/18/2010: Xmarks gets acquired by LastPass. Ok, so was the good-bye post a ploy? (And if it was, did I call it or what?!) Either way, I’m glad they’re still around, for everyone’s sake.

Methodology, strategy and work-flow all rolled into one rather informal process. Not specifically for software projects, either.

Fans of the six-year-old operating system set to be pulled off store shelves in June have papered the Internet with blog posts, cartoons and petitions recently. They trumpet its superiority to Windows Vista, Microsoft’s latest PC operating system, whose consumer launch last January was greeted with lukewarm reviews.

No matter how hard Microsoft works to persuade people to embrace Vista, some just can’t be wowed. They complain about Vista’s hefty hardware requirements, its less-than-peppy performance, occasional incompatibility with other programs and devices and frequent, irritating security pop-up windows.
[...]
“You really can’t make 69 percent of your installed base unhappy with you,” he said.
[...]

This troubles me, too. My wife has Vista on her laptop, and I’m amazed at how it makes a brand new processor feel slow. And how often Internet Explorer 7 has problems.

I don’t feel like I missed a thing when I skipped over Windows ME and 2000. I kind of have that same feeling towards Vista.

Maybe I should be happy. After all, it creates more work for us software folks. More work, but less real progress.

Many Windows apps run under Linux via Wine, or ported to Linux via a variety of tools. Is it time to (re)evaluate?

It’s a good time to think about your criteria: What do you need? What would tempt you to switch?

Stepping into Linux can’t be done casually. You may be trading one set of unknowns for another. Steep new learning curves. You can buy support, but how much will you need? How much will you spend in the end?

I’m amazed at how far Linux has come, but I still don’t think it has caught up as a full-featured desktop. And what flavor? Ubuntu? OpenSUSE? Xandros? Red Hat? CentOS?

Here are a few shots of my makeshift office in the New York Subway system. Not the most productive or ergonomically correct environment.

The chair is a life-saver. Under $6 from Target, it collapses into a bag slung across the shoulder.

Here’s a view from the seat. Fifteen feet from the track.

Yes, a very active track…

Having no idea what to expect (except, um, food), I had to check it out.

Free lunch and “no time-share pitch to sit through!”

I learned (among other things) that Google has a decent-sized presence in Chicago, a lot of it engineering. If I understand it correctly, Google’s summer of code comes out of Chicago. (I also took away a nice Google lunch cooler. Thanks!)

It’s always nice rubbing shoulders with the tech community, too: learning what’s going on, talking shop. (I’m guessing 100 people were there.)

It’s going to be really, really big. I don’t think they’re even half way up yet.

Heavy construction is underway on the upper floors. Infrastructure work on the lower.

This picture doesn’t do it justice.

Here’s the view from the skip — the construction elevator on the outside of the building.

There were always two trucks delivering cement, with another standing by.

It’s amazing the amount of work that goes into a building, particularly one this big.

* I know I should say Free Software, but it ruined the meter.