It's definitely true, but most important is the last paragraph at the end. The best example is building enterprise vs. consumer applications.
If you'd like a safe way to get rich off a start-up, creating a consulting gig doing something "enterprisey" and then morph it into a start-up. In 5-7 years that could mean wealth. But this also means you'll be coding Java/.NET all of that time and are never going to build the next google.
What you would build is something like the next Siebel: worse than what the open source community provides, but some suit somewhere will justify spending $1 mill on it as a "business decision".
I would advocate against going against the 'Enterprise' route, unless you already have contacts that can feed you your first few clients. Getting contracts at the sorts of companies that buy 'enterprise' systems is much more a matter of being connected than software quality. This should not come as a surprise. Taking a million-dollar wager on an unknown is corporate suicide. A million-dollar contract with an established partner that goes tango-uniform is just a 'bad call'.
You need contacts, but you don't need to market your business (or hope your business becomes viral). You can get contacts by starting off doing consulting work. You'd only need to hire (or have as a co-founder) a business/sales person, you won't need to hire a marketing person.
Nor do you begin with million dollar deals, first customers can be cheaper, just to establish a clientèle base/relationships. The fact you said it's a matter of contacts vs. software quality is a point I forgot to mention: as Ben Stein said, you don't need to be great to do this. You just need to follow directions.
pg makes the same recommendation (go into enterprise) for those who do not think they are smart or driven enough to build consumer web applications.
All very good points. I also think we're using different definitions for the word 'enterprise'. 'Enterprise' software is, to me, a behemoth application constructed by committee, designed to Do Everything All At Once, but which in reality does Very Little. Not all business software is enterprise software.
"pg makes the same recommendation (go into enterprise) for those who do not think they are smart or driven enough to build consumer web applications."
what makes u think that enterprise stuff doesnt need smartness? vmware? oracle?
fwiw, ppl go where the money is and/or where the barrier is low, not where its smarter.
for enterprise barrier is too high to get customers or even your customers are evry limited and you have to spend lots of time building your product unlike in web where there are lots of "platforms" like ror,adsense etc etc.
A bunch of my friends were early VMWare customers (1999/2000). They were almost totally a consumer/small business company then. VMWare Workstation was their first product, and they only got into server virtualization and enterprise solutions after the dot-com recovery, when folks realized "Hey, our servers are sitting idle most of the time, let's put a bunch of additional virtual servers on it."
They've followed the path of many, many other successful disruptive innovations. They come out with something that's innovative & technically hard, release it as a low-margin consumer product, and then gradually move up-margin into enterprise systems as their product gets better & more widely known.
enterprise can benefit greatly from smartness (which is why vmware is such a success story). but more than just a smart idea, enterprise requires perseverance and a longer term commitment (you can't just quickly build a site and see if it floats or sinks in the next n months).
for a consumer application, you have to offer something of immediate value (whether through a technological advance or not) or you have to heavily market it. no matter how long your commitment is to an idea, if it can't be marketed or isn't viral it won't catch on (versus with enterprise, where you are working with few high-value clients until you develop a product to match their needs / you build up a client base).
Ever since Ben Stein got into the business of spewing creationist claptrap in phony "documentaries", my respect for him and willingness to consider his opinions has dropped tremendously.
Nice people can be idiots and assholes can be wise. Sometimes it pays to listen to those you dislike.
It's a shame Ben Stein turns his brain off when his faith is questioned, but if blind belief in the sky elf is enough to turn you off someone's writing you'll miss out on a lot of good stuff.
I don't see 1 thing I would have missed if I never stumbled on this article. This guy is so far from being rich it just pity looking at guys making fun of themselves.
OK, so let's say Yanik has no costs at all -- he gets to take that entire $300,000 and put it right in his own pocket. Maybe lumber and concrete just fall out of the sky for him, and people work for him free because he's such a nice guy who'll help you with his stereo.
But Yanik is selling his time, he's getting $300k for the time it takes him to manage a building's construction. Stein says he's "well on his way to being in the top 1 percent and, after that, the top one-tenth of 1 percent." Absolutely false.
Let's say Yanik can put up not one but three $300k buildings a year, because he's so talented. Great, he'll be a billionaire in just 1,111 years.
The wealthiest 1% of America isn't just a little ahead of the rest of us; as Stein correctly notes they're hugely ahead. It doesn't happen by trying harder at your job but by redefining the work, putting capital to work for you instead of going to work yourself.
bingo. renting your labor has always been the least efficient way to make money. more efficient is renting your land, more efficient than that is renting your capital.
While I do agree that Mr. Stein's consorting with creationist and cheerleading Bush administration policies have lessened my opinion of his powers of judgment, this is not "scientific advice".
In terms of a minimal theoretic definition, ID is used by many professional disciplines today, since all it says is that intelligence can be detected. This comes up in any discipline that deals with human intent, such as forensics and law, signal processing, web search, spam filters, etc.
ID as a scientific methodology merely says we shouldn't arbitrarily limit where we can look for intelligence. The only reason we currently have this limit is because of purposeful cultural transformations (see "Closing of the American Mind") and not because of any rigorous arguments or evidence.
Also, it needs to be said that ID vs evolution is a false dichotomy.
Many brilliant minds throughout history have been mistaken about things which today we take for granted; Einstein effectively waged war against probabilistic quantum theory for his entire academic career. Being passionately wrong about something doesn't make Einstein, or Ben Stein, any less brilliant.
I don't think that Ben Stein is not intelligent; he has shown to be a very smart guy.
What I take issue with is that he appears to be intellectually dishonest (n.b. the whole debacle with his pro-creationist movie).
I take issue with your comparison of Einstein to Ben Stein though; Einstein took issue with Quantum Mechanics because of lack of proof. Ben Stein's position appears to occur incongruous to the face of proof.
All analogies have limits; I'm not saying that they were mistaken for the same reason, merely that smart people can (and often do) support dumb ideas. This doesn't make their good ideas any less good.
Creationism is almost by definition dishonest, as it a thinly veiled attempt to replace science with dogma, and so any pursuit in support of creationism-as-science is guaranteed to be intellectually bankrupt. That said, in the modern world, being deeply religious often comes with a great deal of cognitive dissonance, and it is not uncommon for people, like Ben Stein, to genuinely believe that what they are doing is not only correct, but honest and good, no matter how much their efforts fly in the face of logic, common sense, or good taste.
Doesn't mean that said people are fundamentally dishonest; just that their view of the world doesn't entirely coincide with reality.
I share your sentiment. I like what Ben Stein says and he is definitely a very intelligent guy, but it's getting harder and harder to take him seriously in recent times.
If you'd like a safe way to get rich off a start-up, creating a consulting gig doing something "enterprisey" and then morph it into a start-up. In 5-7 years that could mean wealth. But this also means you'll be coding Java/.NET all of that time and are never going to build the next google.
What you would build is something like the next Siebel: worse than what the open source community provides, but some suit somewhere will justify spending $1 mill on it as a "business decision".