demonstrative

As someone who has felt like they've taken a substantial hit recently in the prejudice stakes, this blog entry was fascinating to read. Here's this guy, in his 20's? CEO of a really, hugely successful Web 2.0 service, who get's called a 'Nigger' by a stranger on the street, has to daily fight people's automatic image of a CEO as a 30 something white guy, and then, after writing a very polite rant, still has people say 'yes I was a little surprised by your age'.

On the other side, his success has lead to a bunch of people posting comments on his site that are blatant suckups, simply because of his status.

How confused can our stereotypes of success, race, age and gender get? 

It constantly amazes me how many professional website developers fail to test their sites on any browser other than IE. I'm a staunch Firefox user, I developed the first site I ever made on firefox, and realised fairly quickly that Microsoft was playing dirty in the standards field, when that site was unreadable on IE. Most heavy users of the web realise the benefits of a faster, more customisable browser and reap the benefits of addons such as the developer tool bar. However, most 'normal' users stick with their default IE out of ease. This leave web developers in a tricky position. The easy answer is to design for IE, the hard is to force Mocirosoft to align with the rest of the world, by pushing web standards. That is where small companies come in.

 
The advantage of being small is the fact that we are lean, fast and have about as little legacy as possible. While bigger organisations are sensing a massive change in the air, yet still sitting chained to enormous liscence fees and proprietry technology, the small guys are shifting quickly, keeping pace with the internet and moving fast enough that bit by bit Microsoft's massive market share is being eroded. We have to look beyond the norm in order to compete, and that constant search for the new and innovative, the drive to keep up with such a fast changing space is what keeps small companies more ionnovative and higher quality than their larger and more stable counterparts. Big companies will keep their customers for now, but the revolution will not come from another big company moving in, it is the masses of small companies chipping away at their market share.

While it is easier in the short term to pretend IE is the only browser in the market, it is hurting all of us, it is a sign of lack of quality and laziness. It is far easier to catch on early and be driving the change, than hurrying to catch up while the rest of the world has moved on.

I'm one of those people who annoy everyone by being young and idealistic, while they are slogging away in 'the real world'. The way psychology sems to work, is that a complete lack of support for your thoughts and ideas either a) makes you believe you are wrong, or b) leads to a total convition that you are right. Weird.

I never thought I'd be a technologist, I saw myself as more of an arty type, until I realised exactly how much technology and art are one and the same and dove head first out of a boring management degree and into the world of self-taught web design/development.

That brings me here, to an inner city suburb of Melbourne, where the three of us in our business have gathered for a week to develop a blossoming partnership, meet some very interesting people, receive some even more interesting offers of captial and opportunities and of course, take advantage of one of the few moments we're all in the same county, to develop our business for the next stage.

We have built an integrated management system for small businesses, designed with global growth in mind, and to cater for the unique challenges facing small businesses. Basically, exactly what we need as a small globally expanding company, and from the looks, what is really missing from the small business space. We've just moved out of an intense development period and into an even more intense time of pulling on customers and resellers, and all of this despite being told many a time to 'leave that dreamland and go and find a nice job in a shop'. Yes it's still early days in our 2 year old business, and we've made plenty of mistakes a long the way, about half of which we could have easily avoided. But those 'failures' are our biggest success to date, we survived them and we are stronger because of them.

Even though the hours are long, the challenges loom high and close, and things don't always go according to plan, I feel like I'm living the dream. Check out our website at http://www.evolutionone.com.