
Work on Stuff that Matters: First Principles - agrinshtein
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/work-on-stuff-that-matters-fir.html
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russell
The article is a revisionist feel-good view of history. He talks about
Microsoft's vision of "a computer on every desk", but the reality was that
Gates always wanted to make money from the the Traf-o-matic days. I am sure
that in the early days O'reilly himself was just as interested in making a
buck as he was in publishing Unix books.

Most entrepreneurs have a non-monetary vision of something great that they
want to build, but they usually have to keep financial viability right up
there in the priorities, otherwise they don't get to play very long.

~~~
gruseom
But the two are not mutually exclusive, and many people need more than just
money motivating them in order to stay in for the long haul.

~~~
russell
I agree. I think most entrepreneurs are motivated more by their vision than by
immediate rewards. My point is that, if you want a successful company, you
need to keep the financial side in focus too. Gates, Jobs, and Ellison had the
business focus from the beginning.

OTOH if the monetary side is of little or no consequence, the Open Source
community is the way to go. Make what you believe in and share it. And the web
allows a sideline to lead to riches depending on how the wind blows.

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stcredzero
The publishers of "Deck" recording software on old MacOS Powermacs used to say
"Consume the minimum, produce the maximum."

I think that's good advice for anyone. It's good advice for any nation in
times like this.

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Goladus
I love that gas station analogy, but I have to say it is a bit hard to
swallow. One might spend 5 minutes at a gas station for every 5 hours on the
road. If I could work 3 weeks a year and make enough to pay for rent and food
for the other 49 I wouldn't care too much about money either.

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boris
Based on the quality of books O'Reilly publishes, it's hard to view him as
worthy of giving this advice.

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rw
Many would say O'Reilly books are good or great. How did you come to your
opinion?

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boris
I own a few. I also own some from Addison Wesley, Prentice Hall, Morgan
Kaufmann, etc. For example, "XML Schema" by van der Vlist is just
incomprehensible (I don't understand how it got passed the editor). Plus the
author is by no means an expert in XML Schema. That's actually the gist of the
problem with O'Reilly books: they are written by non-experts and the editorial
work is poor.

~~~
rw
Your sample size sounds small, given the collection of books O'Reilly has.
Regardless, even idiots can say wise things (perhaps accidentally). So, your
initial complaint amounts to an ad hominem attack. Do you have a problem with
the post, itself?

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boris
You mean, it is ok for a publisher to release poor quality books now and again
as long as the average stays good enough? I feel that people with this kind of
approach are not worthy of giving this kind of advice. So I didn't read the
post itself.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_You mean, it is ok for a publisher to release poor quality books now and
again as long as the average stays good enough?_

Yes. I doubt there is another way.

Do you know how tech book publishing works? It's not fiction publishing --
publishers aren't deluged with a large pool of manuscripts from which they can
pick out the best ones. The financial incentives are very poor: Unless they
target a very broad audience ( _see_ : David Pogue) tech book authors don't
make enough royalty money to reimburse them for their time. So publishers must
approach potential authors in advance, woo them, and sign them to book-
publishing contracts before the books are written. Since they can't offer
enough money, the publishers must approach people who have other incentives --
e.g. existing experts or inventors who want to promote themselves or their
tools. Unfortunately, the skills required to become an expert in something
like XML are not necessarily correlated with the skills required to write a
good book about it. And, of course, it can be hard to identify an expert in
advance. And it's often better to hire a lesser writer, or a lesser expert,
than to have _no_ book on a particular topic in your product line.

Once a book is delivered ( _if_ the book is delivered -- a lot of authors burn
out in the process), the publisher can work with the author to edit it, but
the option of rejecting the manuscript is probably difficult and expensive and
politically nasty. So, once written, I suspect that a tech book tends to be
published. Might as well let the reviewers and the public do the dirty work of
deciding that it's bad. Particularly since there are many subspecialties where
a badly-written book is far better than no book at all.

