jamess

I've said it before, I'll say it again. The semantic web is a pipedream. It's never, ever going to happen. The whole idiotic scheme hinges on the notion that people are going to spend a whole bunch of extra time adding intelligent metadata to their data. Never. Going. To. Happen.

I find it far more likely that we'll have built a practical AI before the semantic web ever happens, at which point all semantic efforts will be obsolete.

Of course, if there's anything more masturbatory than the semantic web, it's microformats. Hey! You there! Don't link to a vcard object, that's yesterday's deal. Instead, painstakingly reproduce your vcard in XML! Yeah, that's a good idea, isn't it. Lets take a widely supported data format that many people already have, and turn it in to a completely unsupported, poorly specified fantasy format. Then you can maintain two copies of the same data! Endless fun.

It's just a symptom of the general web malaise. Am I crazy or was it once possible for real human beings to write web pages? You know, before you had to remember 90 pages of how CSS worked? The W3C these days seems to be where small minds go to die, and even TBL isn't helping.

Well, the way to become experienced isn't by giving up at the first hurdle that's for sure. If you haven't tried to sell the product, then there's nothing anyone can do to pin a value to what you've created.

What you're trying to do is very difficult to begin with. Very few people will be interested in buying a piece of software without also having the people who built it continue to work on it. Added to that you're trying to foist the burden of marketing a completely untried product too. Purchasers are going to need at least some track record, people using it, revenue earned, that sort of thing. It's a completely unattractive proposition, to say the least.

You really have only two options, either make some effort to push the product in the marketplace and do at least one marketing, sales, feedback, improvement cycle or just forget about selling it, write it off and move on to the next thing you want to do.

If nothing else, writing it off as a commercial product gives you the opportunity to make it open source, and use it as a show piece for your talent.

How much money are you making now? If the answer is nothing then you can pretty much forget about selling your business as a going concern, what you have is a pile of software not a business.

Kiko is a special case, essentially what they did was not build a company but rather an extended exercise in building consultingware. It's very easy to see how to fit a flashy calendar component in to any number of existing businesses (not that I've seen hide nor hair of it since the acquisition... does Kiko still exist in any meaningful form?) but that probably doesn't apply to what ever it is you've built.

The best way to sell your business is to not need to sell your business. If you just continue as you are, building a decent revenue stream then eventually you'll almost certainly start getting offers. Most of the time, though, acquisitions are made as much to acquire the talent as the technology. Not including the people who built a successful product in the deal substantially reduces your value.

Here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/20/microsoft-signs-letter-...

I tend to agree. It was worth having a go at buying the company, but now they've been rebuffed their next best option is simply to clone the interesting bits in house.

It'll take them six months to produce a reasonable facsimile , but then they probably don't have another feature release planned for that amount of time anyway.

Personally, I think the Xobni guys are fools for refusing the offer. If Microsoft are interested in acquiring the technology, then they're almost certainly going to become a competitor now the offer is refused. They could do far worse than selling out for 20 odd million in cash and stock, spending a couple of years working for Microsoft while their stock vests and then going on to the next big thing. Instead they've got themselves an uphill battle in which they are running very barely ahead of a corporate juggernaut.

Well whatever happens, it should be entertaining.

This is exactly what I was thinking today. I've spent the last couple of weeks implementing TLS (This is the second time I've had to do this now, it's endless fun) and this time I'm sort of "cheating", because the platform I'm writing for already has high quality ASN.1, crypto and X.509 libraries and enough of PKCS#1 that I scarely have to lift a finger.

Web programming is horrifically dull scut work to my mind, I'd far sooner be writing the heavy lifting in the back end.

I'm weird, I have a tendency to sing along to the song I'm listening to while I'm working. It gets me through the non-thinking parts of my day.

I listen to a lot of different types of music. In order of popularity, probably reggae, folk rock, bluegrass, punk and then various other miscellaneous odds and ends. I tend to prefer songs with lyrics that are either clever or witty, or both. A particular favourite of mine at the moment is "The Battle" by Lady Sovereign et al. Lyrics like "Eating MCs like Ready Brek" and "I kill you little kids like morning after pill" never fail to make me smile.

Also, allow me to apologise in advance for the trauma caused by placing the image of a middle class white British guy singing reggae in your mind.

Well, not entirely a surprise. I wonder what miker will be doing now?