Working in the aerospace industry for a number of years, I've seen and created all types of crazy spreadsheets to design aircraft and ensure they are safe to fly.
The good thing about the engineering industry though is that all those spreadsheets get checked by someone more senior than you.
The problem is though, thanks to the increased usage of finite element analysis and more detailed models, the amount of data being pushed around in spreadsheets has grown exponentially.
Far beyond the ability of someone to reasonably check it all.
You're still way up the pointy end of the business though. You are directly involved in acquiring customers.
I think the OP was making the contrast more with people who try and reduce the companies admin overhead slightly by automating parts of the accounting system.
That type of thing is easy for a company to put off and involves getting through cultural change and threatening people's turf to implement. A harder path.
Yeah, should have been more specific. If they result in the company getting more sales done with the available time/resources then they add to revenue.
The company could of course treat it as "doing more with less" and therefore use it for cost cutting instead. Depends on the situation.
Wish you guys the best of luck! As someone who has worked on and thought about location based gaming like this for a long time but failed to launch I'm really hoping you guys pull it off. We even called our prototype "Turf" :)
Location based gaming throws up a lot of challenges and problems that we felt were less than ideal as a gaming experience and instead of just launching something, we over analysed and try to solve them all upfront (without evidence that they are really problems). My only advice is just launch!
It's a good point but there's a huge field of potential software and opportunity out there that we programmers are not the users of. Who should build it then?
Couple of thoughts perhaps on how you could better close a sale.
It wasn't immediately clear to me what exactly I'd do with this. Would I create a book for myself with things other people have told me? Would I put my wisdom in a book and give it to someone else?
Lets say I've got my mind around it and I think this is a good idea that I plan to do. You need to convince me pretty quickly that I shouldn't go and look for other online book publishing sites that are cheaper/easier.
"Luckily, who you know is up to you, not luck."