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July 21, 2005
Wil Shipley on... everything.
Wil Shipley founded Delicious Monster, which makes the damn awesome Delicious Library (a media cataloguing program that has to be played with - preferably with an iSight - to be believed). He’s interviewed on DrunkenBlog, and you should really really read the whole thing. Management, Coding, Depression, Macs, and Extreme Gardening.
A lot of good nuggets in there…
[…] core hours aren’t as important as, say, having a clear vision and motivating your people.
You don’t adopt the mannerisms of big, successful companies when you’re small, because those mannerisms aren’t what made the companies successful.
They’re actually symptoms of what is killing the company, because it’s become too big. It’s like if you meet an really old, really rich guy covered in liver spots and breathing with an oxygen tank, and you say, “I want to be rich, too, so I’m going to start walking with a cane and I’m going to act crotchety and I’m going to get liver disease.”
Depression isn’t like that, though. You don’t “snap out of it.” There’s a chemical missing in your brain, and your whole life is like those dreams where every action you try to take is hindered by a huge pile of invisible wet blankets.
Mac users love their machines; Windows users put up with their machines because they don’t believe there’s anything really better.
It’s depressing, really, because it’s like dealing with victims of abuse: “Seriously, there’s a better world out there, and you deserve it! You don’t have to put up with this! You can leave! Mac will treat you right!” And their response is right out of the textbooks: “Why would I trust Mac? I don’t think anything can be good after this.”
Microsoft has nothing to gain by making life better for small programmers. They have millions of lines of code written to the old, crappy Windows APIs, and they make all their money selling Windows and Office. If they actually enabled small programmers to do cool things, they’d be creating the very furry mammals which would be their eventual downfall.
If there’s one thing I’ve discovered, it’s that there is no stable state in life. There is no getting somewhere and going, “Ah, NOW I’m going to park myself down and just rake in the fat loot.” Change is scary, but it’s also the foundation of life and happiness. We need it. We get bored and lazy without it. Once more, into the breach.
Like I said - go read the whole damn thing.
Posted by jim at July 21, 2005 09:50 AM