I have three personal rules of business.
The first is: -
or as Joseph A. Schumpeter put it
The second is :-
Your products are going to change, your markets are going to change - if you want to survive you are going to depend upon people. Now, I've been through this a number of times with Fotango; from a photo service to a software house and now to utility computing services.
The trick is transformation. You need to maintain one existing business whilst building an entirely new future. It's not an easy challenge, it takes a lot of time and energy.
I'm lucky though to have a wonderful team of skilled, passionate and talented individuals. I'm very proud of them and their achievements.
Zimki is a cool piece of software backed up with good ideas, a strong movement towards utility computing grids and viable new businesses to be created. There is still a lot more to be done, and then we need to build a community around it.
Transformation is not always a smooth process, sometimes there is too much to be done and sometimes that next step is just too high or you are not quite ready yet. At moments like this, you need to take stock, regroup and try another way.
There's no shame in that, it's life, it happens.
It was one of those moments, which led to the recent change to the open sourcing of Zimki.
Obviously we are disappointed to miss our target and some of the reaction has been negative. I do understand this, I understand the frustration and concern. I'm deeply sorry for this.
As I said "we'd rather do it right rather than just right now" of course given the choice "I'd rather do it right and right now" but sometimes that's just not going to happen.
My talk at OSCON will be on the impact of commoditisation in both manufacturing and IT and how open sourcing is driving the acceleration of innovation. I'll have to leave the announcements on Zimki to a later day.
So what's the third rule? Well that one I'll keep to myself. I can't give away all my secrets! That one is worth at least a cup of coffee.
