Hey everybody,

Still chipping away at StevesLeads.com. I had to take on the web designer duties on that project, so it altered the timeframe a bit. We're still hoping to finish up by the first of the year and the testing period will need to be abbreviated somewhat. Good thing I don't make any mistakes! ;)

Interesting article on MSNBC/NewsWeek. Check it here.

It's written by the Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, and a professor at Berkeley, and puts into writing several important principles Google uses in its operations. Many of them are good points, and seem very enlightened from a management perspective.

I find it interesting that people who are involved with successful companies have no shortage of insight into how they got that way. If you visit your local Borders, you will likely find lots of books with titles like "The Microsoft Way" or "The GE Way." The idea here is that success is something that can be bottled up and sold, and a formula which can be repeated for anyone with $19.99, or $29.99 for the hardcover. I don't mean to be unnecessarily harsh on Mr. Schmidt or any of these other people, since I understand that they are well intentioned and that they do have good stuff to say.

I'm just hungry for the honest stories.

"Well, we lumbered along for 5 or 6 years with no strategic vision, just waiting for a big break to come along. We knew we wanted to control a platform, so we started writing languages for computers we thought would be successful. Most weren't. We ate Ramen and slept on motel floors, but I wasn't too concerned because my family had some money and I knew I wouldn't starve. Then my mom set up a meeting with some guys at IBM, and we sold them a bill of goods on an operating system, but were able to leverage the fact that they were under investigation by the Justice Department for anti-trust violations to get a favorable licensing agreement. At that point other vendors started lining up to make machines compatible with IBM's, and we were in the right place at the right time to take advantage of that. We were able to take our domination of that platform and use it to drive our competitors out of all of the important application spaces. Then we basically sat on our hands for 15 years collecting monopoly rents and releasing incremental updates periodically at ridiculous prices."

Not as flowery as talking about enlightened hiring processes and free soda machines on campus, but certainly more insightful to a would-be entrepreneur looking to make it big. It has all of the elements: the struggle with indecision about what direction to head in when you found the company, the lean times before your big deal comes in, using connections through family and friends to "cut in line" and get in front of the right people, the lucky break, leveraging a situation to your maximum benefit, and protecting the franchise.

This is what business is all about!

I don't see very many articles out there that tell us about these things, probably because telling people how to exploit advantages they have over competitors doesn't sound so nice. People in such elevated positions can afford to write their own history books where the lucky breaks and cut-throat tactics are replaced with inevitability and customer-focused solutions. I understand why this is, but it still feels a little wrong.

To be fair to Mr. Schmidt, his article seems to be aimed more towards the larger companies than the small. Perhaps one day I will be able to read it and see that placing ping-pong tables in my offices and hiring by committee are in fact important.

Personally, I'd like to hear what Scott McNealy thinks of all this. He always has something interesting to say.