I saw a live demo of this stuff at a trade show two weeks ago, and it was truly amazing. It put any other coating I've ever seen to shame (such as RainX).
While they had a shirt and a shoe on display, the demo was mainly focused around commercially licensing it as a coating for stuff that you don't really want to clean, such as bedpans and toilet plungers.
> There's a reason most companies don't talk pay with people - if somebody else makes more, it's going to bruise feelings and ruffle feathers and screw up morale.
I don't think thats quite right... The reason most companies don't talk pay with people is because most companies fall into the "pay as little as we can get away with" category. In that category, some people are bound to be getting paid unfairly when compared to others, so its not surprising that feelings would be hurt and feathers would be ruffled if the truth came out. If everyone is paid fairly to begin with (regardless of whether or not pay is usually public), then by definition no-one should get upset if they do find out the pay of others since it would be fair.
The real difficulty is getting everyone to agree with the same idea of "fair." For example, software engineers should be able to fairly evaluate their relative pay against other software engineers doing similar work, but they may have a difficult time fairly evaluating their pay relative to sales people.
We use FogBugz with about 60 users. Its been interesting seeing its growth over the years. The recent Fogbugz 7 release seems to be one of the most significant though with the addition of plugin support enabling a lot more customization.
The $99 fee is basically the same as what it costs to become a developer for the iPhone. The $50 fee for being listed in the official App Catalog is different, and feels like a good alternative to me since they also have the free distribution option. This should help avoid the App Catalog getting over-crowded with a ton of really poor cheap/free apps, and hopefully means the App Catalog will attract developers producing the higher quality applications.
While Palm is definitely skating on some thin ice with their approach, I can't blame them for wanting to use iTunes as their synchronization engine... Probably the majority of the market they are going after already uses iTunes. Why force those customers to install yet another application to handle the synchronization of their music and photos to their phone when they already have one that they are familiar with? Unfortunately, their customers are getting stuck in the middle of this cat and mouse game, but it may help them to get a bunch more early adopters on the platform and allow them to eventually build an better and more reliable solution.
I find it interesting that the majority of the comments on this post seem to focus on "how this article got the rule wrong." Sure, it may be true that the way the author interprets a version of the 80/20 rule may not be the same as as everyone else, but its just an interpretation so relax a bit and see that he does make a interesting point:
Many people go through life putting in "just what it takes" to get the job done and be "good enough" without failing. You can certainly choose to live your life that way, but you will probably end up being stuck with mediocrity. However, if go the extra mile, you may be more likely (but not guaranteed) to achieve greatness in whatever it is that you do.
Maybe I'm also interpreting it differently and over-generalizing, but this seems a lot like what what many startups are doing just by the nature of starting up... many companies are started by founders that weren't happy with competing products currently available in their market, and they feel they can do better. Even though its a lot more effort to do this than just getting by with what is currently available, it can lead to some really exciting new opportunities.
While they had a shirt and a shoe on display, the demo was mainly focused around commercially licensing it as a coating for stuff that you don't really want to clean, such as bedpans and toilet plungers.