Thursday, September 4, 2008

Business of Software 2008, day 2

Greetings from the second and final day of "Business of Software 2008, the first ever Joel on Software conference."

Yesterday was a hard act to follow, but today met the challenge. Today's roster:
Some of today's highlight ideas for me (again, with apologies to the speakers for the crude summarization):
  • Nothing is difficult to someone who doesn't know what he's talking about. (Johnson)
  • Creating more artifacts and meetings is no answer. (Johnson)
  • Entrepreneurs are better entrepreneurs when they're not worried about their personal balance sheet. (Jennings)
  • "In the software field, we don't have to deal with the perversions of matter." (Stallman)
  • VCs say 65% of failed new ventures are the result of people problems with founding or management teams. (Wasserman)
  • Websites are successful to the extent they're self-evident as possible. (Krug)
  • Sensible usability testing is absolutely necessary and, better yet, possible and even inexpensive. You can even download a script at Steve's site. (Krug)
  • The huge chasm between #1 and #2 is all about elements of happiness, aesthetics, and culture. (Spolsky)
Steve Johnson and Steve Krug gave truly superb presentations. Steve Krug I knew about beforehand, from his book. Steve Johnson I did not know, but I do now. These are people I'll take courses from someday. And of course, Joel Spolsky... I had seen him speak before, so I knew what to expect. He's one of the best speakers I've ever watched. I've asked him to keynote at Hotsos Symposium 2009. We'll see what he says.

2 comments:

Marco Gralike said...

Joel Spolsky as a speaker on Hotsos...

That would be realy, realy cool

Gabe said...

Creating more artifacts ... is no answer.

Liked that one.

Probably taking things out of context ... but there is a bit of irony in that it was said in a marketing conference.