Not true. Personally, I pay for my music. You know why? Partly to reward the artist, but most importantly because it's easier. I can go onto Amazon, hit a few buttons, pay a few pounds and I've got a new album on my iPod including cover art within minutes. That works for me.

I got the urge to watch Die Hard and realised that I didn't have it recently. To buy it from iTunes would have cost me £8 (double the DVD price), would have been locked into things that play iTunes and I'd either have to watch it on my PC or move my PC next to my TV. Even if the movie was free, piracy would have been a better option (as it happens I just changed my mind).

I think that desktop growth is slowing because desktop's aren't improving at the rate they were. I used to upgrade almost every year because the difference from the user experience perspective was huge. Using something like MS Word was noticeably faster on a P166 with 32mb of ram over a P75 with 16mb of ram.

Now, I did replace my laptop recently, but the previous one was over 4 years old. My desktop PC is 3 years old. My parent's laptop is 5 years old.

I don't invest in any company where the people in charge doesn't have an "emotional" interest in the company. That means that either you founded the company, or have worked for the company for decades and come up through the ranks. I've yet to see a company where a faceless, parachuted-in CEO came into a business and dramatically improved it, and the reason is that they have never been entrepreneurs, nor do they have any understanding of the company. At best they keep it ticking along.

I know a large corporate where the message from the top is that nothing can be done that doesn't have a payoff within 12 months. I suspect that's entirely about annual reporting, and the effect on the CEO bonus, but the medium/long-term effect of such a decision is that it becomes a death spiral. You don't do sensible things that have a return over a reasonable term, so you don't get the extra income, so you lose money.

I know another company that just goes crazy for the outsourcing. They hired a shitty company in India, completely farking hopeless. They fucked up the system big time. So, they went out and hired a company in Poland. These guys were good, and reasonably priced. I wish that wasn't so because they could undercut people like me, but that is the truth. The Poles did a great job fixing the site, getting it running smoothly. So what did the company do once it got to this point? Oh yeah, they dropped the Polish company because they found a cheaper company in Bangalore. Guess what happened next...

What I wish a lot of managers would grasp is how vital IT is, and how much it's like the arteries of the business, and to stop treating it with all the seriousness of the people who print their business cards or sort out the company party. And yes, one reason I like working for small businesses is that they actually give a shit about IT working because they OWN the business. They're not going to fuck off a few years later with a golden parachute to another company.

Actually, they aren't. Velcro was invented in Switzerland. The transistor was invented by AT&T to improve the reliability in telephone exchanges, computers were mostly developed by people in civilian life.

And while there's always going to be spin-offs from military research, it's a fallacy to assume that spending money on the military or money on war is going to make you richer. What's made the US richer for the past century was that they were far more pro-free market than the rest of the world.

I wish I was joking about this, but the support for open source software that is freely provided is typically better than that provided by vendors of enterprise software. Not just "better because it's free", but actually better.

With major open source projects (like Subversion, Tortoise, Wordpress, CakePHP), I've never had a bug that wasn't resolved within a few hours. You hit a forum or Stack Overflow or whatever, post a question, and you have responses within hours. Often it's that I've missed something, or there's some workaround that someone else has discovered, but either way, the problem gets solved.

Exactly. If you want a better heart pacemaker battery, spend money on developing one. It's a lot cheaper.

All sorts of research and technology has spin-offs. Viagra was a happy accident, originally designed as a blood pressure drug. Photosynth (Microsoft's 3D thing) originally came from research into Gutenberg's printing.

MS stuff is like swimming in a pool of golden unicorn tears compared to most "enterprise software". The reason is quite simple: a lot of small companies use MS stuff, and if it was as hideous as most "enterprise" software, people wouldn't buy it or upgrade.

In enterprises, the purchasing decisions are made by people who don't use it day-in-day-out. They look at things like the reporting module, see that's great and buy it. I worked in an organisation that dumped a working in-house change control system for a hideous IBM system.

The 2 key words about a startup are "fail cheap". Spend as little as you can to deliver the business functionality that you need on day 1. Because if the customers don't come, you haven't lost much. If they do come, you'll have plenty of money to rewrite it, or be able to get the funding for it.

Personally, I'm doing a startup in .net because I know .net, and can code faster in it. So, that's a smaller cost. The main downside is hosting charges, but even that has a tiny per-transaction cost difference.

all "enterprise" tools or software that you can buy are overpriced shit. That's not an anti paid-for software comment. Stuff like Visual Studio is great, but is also used in smaller companies.

The most hateful examples are enterprise helpdesk systems. It's like someone designed them that just hated users. Bugzilla's less nasty (and still nasty), but at least it's free.

Yeah, but the difference is that they make it work. They hold the company to the contract, have clauses about non-delivery, that sort of thing. The government will just let stuff die.

Because it's not their money, and they're not spending it upon themselves.

Milton Friedman identified 4 types of spending:

• Spending your money on yourself. You'll get what you perceive is the best value.
• Spending your money on someone else (like a present). You'll be quite careful how much you spend, but perhaps less careful about what it goes on
• Spending other people's money on yourself (you're given a budget to buy a PC). You'll buy the best thing you can, but not care too much about value
• Spending other people's money on someone else (most government spending). You don't care about how much is spent, nor do you care too much about what its spent on

I've done work on government projects and seen money thrown at projects that made absolutely no sense at all. Projects that just fizzled out or never got implemented. It doesn't happen in the competitive private sector. People do a project because it makes/saves money, and then make it work.

That assumes that it is beneficial to their career. My suspicion is that a lot of people, through desperation, are getting scammed into doing crummy, low-grade jobs.

Here's the dilemma: if they're doing serious work, then what sort of company do they have experience in that would take such risks for important work (if you're unpaid, you can walk off site without any notice). If it's not serious work, it's worthless. Either way, it's a bad plan

Secondly, good companies with a future don't do free internships. They plan their investment.

Personally, I run a small business, and I would certainly not want someone unpaid doing work for me. If a project works out as paying sub minimum wage in dev costs then it isn't worth doing.

The difference is that IT isn't just about writing code. It's about understanding the business problems and having the experience of the business type or company that you're working in. You need no knowledge of banking whatsoever to print the business cards or run the canteen for a bank. To write code, you need to understand about banking, and more specifically, the rules of the company you're working in.

This is also why external consultants aren't any cheaper than IT departments. Because IT development and support of customised systems doesn't scale.

I'm not against cloud services, but I've seen users do this sort of thing with 3rd party suppliers or with packages.It all sounds great. Some company supplies something and you don't have pesky IT getting in the way.

But then the business wants to change its process in some way. Does the 3rd party company's software allow that change? No. OK, either you now have to work out some Rube Goldberg process, where your users have to put something into 2 systems, or pay through the nose for that 3rd party company to make a change. And you'll have to wait behind all the priorities to other customers. What I've seen in a few places is that after a few years, they realise they're getting shafted by the 3rd party company, and the reason is that users completely underestimated how many changes they'd need to do.

People running companies need to quit thinking about IT as something that they can just drop in. It's more like the arteries of the business. That doesn't mean you can't use packages or clouds, but it does mean that those things better be easy to integrate, or be flexible in a way that you can change them without being forced to go to a 3rd party supplier. That either means having a web service, or the source code. I've worked on systems where we couldn't get our own data out without paying the company a 5 figure sum for the a CSV dump.