EE353
Supplemental Reading

Strategy

Barriers to Entry: Joel on Software, 2000, Let Me Go Back!

Excerpt: "...The only strategy in getting people to switch to your product is to eliminate barriers. Imagine that it's 1991. The dominant spreadsheet, with 100% market share, is Lotus 123. You're the product manager for Microsoft Excel. Ask yourself: what are the barriers to switching? What keeps users from becoming Excel customers tomorrow?"

Product Development

Product Development Takes Time: Joel on Software, 2001, Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get used to it!

Excerpt: "...Anyway, getting good software over the course of 10 years assumes that for at least 8 of those years, you're getting good feedback from your customers, and good innovations from your competitors that you can copy, and good ideas from all the people that come to work for you because they believe that your version 1.0 is promising. You have to release early, incomplete versions -- but don't overhype them or advertise them on the Super Bowl, because they're just not that good, no matter how smart you are."

Debugging Your Product: Joel on Software, 2005, Foreward to Painless Product Management

Excerpt: "...on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, if you’re a restaurant, and you want to thrive, you have to carefully debug everything....You have to make sure that there’s always someone waiting to greet guests. This person must learn never to leave the maitre d’ desk to show someone to their table, because otherwise the next person will come in and there will be nobody there to greet them. Instead, someone else needs to show patrons to their tables. And give them their menus, right away. And take their coats and drink orders...You need a procedure so that every water glass is always full...Every time somebody is unhappy, that’s a bug. Write it down. Figure out what you’re going to do about it. Add it to the training manual. Never make the same mistake twice."

Forecasting / Financing

Estimation (Important): 2006, Sanjoy Mahajan: Lies and Damn Lies, the Art of Approximation (Excerpts) OrderofMagnitudeAnalysis

Pay attention, Ph.D. students, this your secret weapon in business management. From the abstract: "...How far can birds (and 747s) fly without eating? Why are raindrops a few millimeters in radius? How high can animals jump? How tall can mountains grow? How cold is the air at the top of Mt Everest? How hot is the interior of the sun? How much energy do gravitational waves carry? How fast do tsunamis travel? Even when these questions have exact answers, they are buried in the solution of complicated, often nonlinear differential equations. But by skillful lying -- the art of approximation -- you can understand these and other phenomena, and can enjoy the physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering of the world around you."

Estimation: The Rule of 72

Excerpt: "In finance, the rule of 72... [refers to the] method for estimating doubling times for exponential growth or halving times for exponential decay"

Marketing

Pricing: Joel on Software, 2004, Camels and Rubber Duckies

Excerpt: "...One of the biggest questions you're going to be asking now is, "How much should I charge for my software?" When you ask the experts they don't seem to know. Pricing is a deep, dark mystery, they tell you. The biggest mistake software companies make is charging too little, so they don't get enough income, and they have to go out of business. An even bigger mistake, yes, even bigger than the biggest mistake, is charging too much, so they don't get enough customers, and they have to go out of business..."

PR: Joel on Software, 2003, Mouth Wide Shut

Excerpt: "When Apple releases a new product, they tend to surprise the heck out of people, even the devoted Apple-watchers who have spent the last few months riffling through garbage dumpsters at One Infinite Loop... Microsoft, on the other hand, can't stop talking about products that are mere glimmers in someone's eye... So, which is right? Should you talk endlessly about your products under development, in hopes of building buzz, or should you hold off until you've got something ready to go?"

Finance