How do you add value?

Adding value is about giving someone something they do not have and cannot easily acquire without you.

In the economic sense, our society functions due to specialization, technology, and trade [1].

Specialization allows people to spend their time doing what they are best at. Technology allows one to accomplish much more than they would normally. It does this by allowing one person to bottle up their knowledge into a package and give that package to another person to enable them to do that which they would have no idea how to do themselves. Trade allows people to get the things they require by doing what they do best. This is greatly facilitated by currencies, so you can specialize in cows and still buy a carrot without having to sell an entire cow.

I think the key is not to just find and solve problems, many people can do this. Its finding and solving a special kind of problem. The kind of problem that many people have, and are willing to pay to fix (or not have).

What kinds of problems are people willing to pay to fix? One is the kind they encounter frequently. The more we run into something the more it annoys us. Sometimes we become so accustomed to common problems we don't even realize they exist anymore. This can be seen in software packages where little quirks become standards and are "just the way it works".

If solving this everyday problem makes one's life more convenient and it is affordable, then many people will pay for this solution. For example, if you find a simple way that allows people to clean their house or prepare their meals in half the time it currently takes, you would likely have a valuable solution [2].

Another type of problem people pay to fix is one that effects a major aspect of their life. It may not be encountered all that often but when it does, it really hurts (or annoys). Insurance is a good example of this kind of problem. Having a heart attack can cost you upwards of $50,000 here in the US. Having health insurance allows you to handle this problem in a reasonable way.

A third type of solution people are willing to pay for is one that enables them to accomplish more with the same or less resources. The automobile is a good example of this. Time to travel was cut dramatically and opened up many opportunities that simply never existed before. Robotic vacuums, motors, and computers are also excellent archetypes. Most solutions of this kind involve technology, but sometimes are just a different way of doing things.

How do you add value? Solve peoples problems, and optionally provide them with the means to replicate it again and again.

[1] See Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. This is a very long, but good read. It can be read a chapter or two at a time and is very useful in carefully laying out what I believe to be a very accurate picture of how society actually works.

[2] If you have this solution and it is available for around $19.99 / month please let me know so I can sign up.

I cut my finger on a gum wrapper last Friday. You know those new fancy gum packages that are like cold medicine pills. When I pressed my little icy yum flavored crystal out it cut my finger and now it still hurts. Lame.

Make Things Users Want!

I have been thinking about this for a while now. How do I maximize the value I can provide to this world? By creating things people want! This is obvious, but then it has been my experience that most true things are. What do people want? Well, I have heard rumor of a bumper sticker saying: "death before inconvenience". This seems to ring a bell somewhere.. Why? Because I love convenience. What makes something convenient? Often it involves cutting out the stupid work that doesn't really serve any point. Many times its having some-one or some-thing do what I would normally have to.

Some examples..

Experts: I hire them to do things (like my taxes, or repairing my cars) because it is more convenient than becoming an expert myself.

Automation: Take the repetitive details and make a mechanical or computer device responsible. They get done faster and better, and I don't have to do anything. Now thats convenient!

Philosophy/Religion: Way more convenient to have someone else tell you what to think as long as its agreeable. (or: much easier to read the many great ideas of humanity than come up with them yourself)

I guess in the end, I am a user and I want convenience!

Ok, I have been reading Paul Graham. Man, this guy has some great thoughts laid out in well written essays. Here are a few of my favorite nuggets:

I once claimed that nerds were unpopular in secondary school mainly because they had better things to do than work full-time at being popular.

Man, is that ever a better explanation than nobody likes you! Or how he recommends fighting corruption:

Like all illicit connections, the connection between wealth and power flourishes in secret. Expose all transactions, and you will greatly reduce it. Log everything. That's a strategy that already seems to be working, and it doesn't have the side effect of making your whole country poor.

Its like log4j only for government! Brilliant! Or how about turning the whole immigration issue on its head like this:

American immigration policy keeps out most smart people, and channels the rest into unproductive jobs. It would be easy to do better. Imagine if, instead, you treated immigration like recruiting-- if you made a conscious effort to seek out the smartest people and get them to come to your country.

Recruiting the best and brightest, just like football, only for nerds!

Definitely spend some time reading these essays you will be glad you did!

Annoying Windows Behavior

You cannot create an executable in Visual Studio both inherits its parents standard in/out handles so that it can write to the console if run from a console. If you create a console application, it will inherit from its parent, but it will always create a console window even if not run from a command line.

So, say you would like to create a windows GUI application that you want to be able to pass command line parameters to. This works fine, but imagine you would like to print out a usage message to current console window if parameter is set.

Annoying windows behavior:

You cannot create a shortcut with a relative path to its target. This is annoying in the following situation. Say you want to create a shortcut that sets command arguments for an executable. Then say you would like this directory to be copied to another machine (say from a network drive) and have the shortcut reference the executable in the same directory. There is no way to do this with a shortcut.

Getting your favorite home brew application to run on the corporate servers can always be a chore. This is especially true when your corporate servers are exclusively Windows/IIS and single sign on is a requirement for all internal applications. Getting you app up and running is made even harder when you went out on a limb and wrote it using ruby on rails.

Now you are in a pickle. You now love ruby and rails, but in order to show off your new application you have to run it on the previously mentioned environment. Following is my solution to this very problem.

First get your hands on a ReverseProxy (I used http://www.saltypickle.com/Home/16). Install your application as a windows service using mongrel (http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/) a very fine and easy http/rails server. Set your IIS virtual directory to use only integrated authentication. Next setup (configure or hack) your ReverseProxy to forward request onto your mongrel service, and to add an http header populated with the authenticated users user name. Finally add a before filter guarding any actions you want to limit access to and match the value past in the http header from the ReverseProxy to grant or deny access. Finally, fix any bugs you may encounter (there were a few to get redirects working), and happy days, you are in business!

Details to come...

The office is a funny show. Dwight was trying to move his boggle head of himself with his mind. Jim and Pam watched videos of local cover bands. Great times.