Category Archives: Marketing

OK, I admit it, I was wrong. My OS Choice.

Business, Computers, concepts, Marketing, , , ,

As most of you know my main business is Emerald Computers, a computer company, where I sell computers and give advise.  Many people look to me as their computer expert.

Well for the first year of Vista being out I was negative on it, right when vista came out I was in my Ubuntu phase.  I was trying to use linux as much as I could to see if it really could replace everything that I did.  Because of this I did not personally use Vista, I used it on the computers I was fixing but not on my main computer.

After 6 months of trying Ubuntu I decided that, for me, a power user there were too many things that just did not work yet.  There were MANY things that were much better, than the Microsoft world, but lack of support for my games, QuickBooks, Photoshop and yahoo chat with webcam were the things I could no longer live without.  I went back to XP, and I was happy.  Well in late April XP crashed on me for the 3rd time.  I needed to reload so I decided to take a gamble and install vista.  I figured my computer is VERY fast so even if vista is crappy slow it will still not be that bad.  I have used vista on about 50 or so customers computers, and mostly disliked it due to the fact that most things were moved around.

Well vista loaded, it did it faster than XP, and almost all of my hardware was detected.  It was great.  Next I loaded my software, and I load a lot of things, I have checklist of about 30 things that I load on every new computer.  Almost everything I had worked right away, the ones that did not were fixed by upgrading to the newest version.  Even when you are an Administrator you don’t have real administrator rights, this is just like Ubuntu.  In Ubuntu you just put sudo in front of anything you want to run as an admin.  In Vista you do sort of the same, you just right click on it and click on “Run as Administrator”.  It was a very easy.  As a computer geek there were about 20-30 things I changed to make it easier to use, such as network settings, sharing settings, and all the programs I run.

So now I have been using it for a month, I wanted to wait a month before I wrote this blog so that I had a more expert opinion.  I run Vista SP1 Ultimate.  I have found it to be better than XP in almost every area, and in the areas it is not better it is exactly the same as XP.  I was surprised how many small programs are basically exactly the same as XP was.  I thought they would rework everything, but there are major things the left the same, even though the XP version was bad (Such as how fonts are loaded,

Now many people have said that Vista is slower.  I have seen many customers that have 4-5 year old computers and they load vista and YES it is slower.  My computer is 3 years old but it was a top of the line computer when it was built and it is still faster than 90% of the computers our company makes, it is a 4.9 on Vistas performance scale of 1-5.  So on my computer it runs great, it is MUCH faster than XP, and almost as fast as Ubuntu.

So if you have at least 1GB of ram and a Dual Core CPU Vista is great for you.  If you have a single core CPU or 512MB of RAM stick with XP.  Basically if your computer is over 2 years old and you want vista just get a new computer.  I can help you with that if you leave a comment, I can tell you want you need for your usage model.

So my OS of choice is now Vista.  It runs all the stuff I need and is fast.  There are many good ideas and features in Ubuntu that Vista could easily put in.  I don’t agree with some of the philosophy behind Vista, about making closed source drivers, and pushing towards trusted computing, for this reason I hope Ubuntu will soon be able to run, with ease, all of the things I need, and then I hope it starts to gain popularity.  Until then I will use Vista, or the next thing that MS creates.

The 7m7y contest.

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One thing that I have been looking at is a mentorship program, offered by a guy who is a millionaire many times over. His name is Adrian J Cartwood. He has the mindset that I want to have.  He is looking for 7 people to teach how to be a millionaire. He is writing a book and is using this as more material. I applied, here is my profile on the page, with typos and all. From there you can find out much more about the program, and you can also apply.  It looks really exciting, I hope I am selected.

How to pick a MLM company, and what to stay away from.

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There is a huge range of different MLM companies out there in the world. Some are small, some are huge. Some sell a product some have services. They all have a good sales pitch, and they all promise success. But how do you go through all of these and find the ones that you can be successful at? How are companies different from each other? What should you look for in a good MLM Company? How do you do all of this while not being taken?

Well there is a very wide variety of MLM companies out there. At this time there are about 5000 MLMs with a sales force of over 5000 people. There are 100 or so really successful ones out there. For this blog I will keep it all concept, in the next blog I will name names and rate companies that I know of.

To me one of the FIRST things that I look for is the ROI, this means how many sales do I need to make to get my money back and start making profit. I also look at the cost of maintaining the membership, the value of the product, the support of the team.

One of my main tests of any MLM that I look at is the source of the money. Most good MLMs out make all of their money off of selling a product or service. They have to have a good product because this is where the money is made. But at the same time there are MLMs that focus on recruiting, and almost all of the money being made is from a huge ($300+) fee that new recruits must pay. Almost all of this money is paid to the upline. In many of these companies almost all of the money is being made from the recruiting fees. If you think about this, it is not sustainable. And I feel that this is unethical, you are promising people a dream, and taking their money, and the only way they can get to their dream is to take more money from their friends and family. And most of that money goes upline. In these companies history, and the math, shows us that about 1% of the people win big, 5% of the people win, 5% more break even and the rest LOSE MONEY.

When I tell someone that they can make it, and they can have success I want to mean it. I am NOT going to put my name on it if the chips are stacked against my friends. The first MLM I was in was, and still is, the largest MLM in the world. They had great motivational meetings, but almost everyone there was loosing money. On top of that they were spending a ton of time, and hurting many relationships by trying to force people to consume their products. You became good friends with the other people in the company, and you would have pressure to use the products, even though they were vastly overpriced, you also would be pressured to buy “tools”, overpriced educational materials. With all of this going on they had weekly meetings, monthly all day meetings and a few times a year they had 3-4 day conventions. All of these meetings had various costs, and you were told to come early and stay late. Even people who recruited 10-20 people into this company did not make money, if you counted the amount they were overpaying on their products. Almost everyone there was loosing money, but they were sold a dream, and they would hear from people who made the dream. Some would try for years never reaching success. Other would get 50 or so friends and family to join in, who were all loosing money so that they could make a decent income.

Other companies that I have seen have a product where you make very little on, some as little as $1 a month for each customer, but these same companies have fees over $500 to join, and these fees are almost totally paid to the upline. I was presented a company last week where, as far as I could figure, over 80% of the money made in the program was ONLY from these recruiting fees. You can always tell these companies because they have a large fee to join and once you are in they tell you to focus on getting other people to join so that you can pay back your fee. Of course this all is great for the person on top, but for me, I can’t ethically build a company like that where for me to have success I have to hurt other people. Yes they have a chance to make it, but that chance is slim, and for them to have success they also must hurt others financially. Personally I like to stay away from ANY company that pays for recruits. I want it to be easy for people to sign up.

There is a semi new evolution of this concept. This is where, instead of a large recruitment fee there is a smaller monthly fee. Some companies even go so far as to charge a monthly fee for you to have a website so that you can sign up other people. And they have yet another fee to be allowed to sell their products. They call it a technology fee. I am in the computer industry also and I know to make a dedicated server with a self replicating software on it costs about $50 a month to maintain, and such a server could host tens of thousands of associates. So if they are charging $40 a month PER USER that is a huge profit. $30 or so of this money was paid to the field and the rest was kept with the company. I talked to a lady there, who was making great money, she had recruited over 1100 people. I ask her if more than 100 people have broken even and her answer was “ I think it about 100” That means that over 1000 people paid $350 to sign up, and $40 a month for months on end and did not make any money. The even worse part was that they sold a product that was very bad. I was in a meeting with the leaders of this company, as they presented it to me and some other people looking at the company. At the end we asked them if they have ever even used the product they are selling, and to our surprise and horror not even ONE of these leaders had ever used the service that they sell. It was crazy. Their response to the objection that many of us had to the monthly fee was that “If you personally find 6 other people to pay the fee each month yours will be waived”. To me this was a horrible answer. I told all of my friends in this company to quit, and they did. (I tend to have that result, the last three people who were new in a company that was bad and presented the idea to me I showed them logically how it was bad, and the next day they were quitting and getting their money back.) A pyramid scheme is a company has NO product at all and all the money is made from the new people paying the people who have been in longer. This company has almost no product of value.

Believe it or not there are many even worse companies. One company charges 1000 to join, and you have to then pass up the first few people that you get, with the full 1000 going to your upline, then you start to find more people to sign up and you get the full 1000 from them and also from the first two people that they sign up. So what is the product, you will laugh at this. The product is a $20 a month website that allows you to sell the $1000 memberships. If you stop paying the $20 a month you then lose your chance to make money off of other people. The guy who thought up this whole plan has over 100,000 people now paying him $20 per month. All this running on servers that I bet cost him a few hundred per month at the most. What a smart, devious idea.

Now that you know what is bad, I don’t want to give the impression that all companies are bad, far from it, many companies have great products, and a great plan for paying people back. Later this week I will release the blog about that. That being said not every company is right for every person. Some companies focus more on selling products, and other focus on team building. Some sell services; some have just one product, while others sell 1000’s of products. Some are online while others are almost totally offline. Find a product, and a management style that fits you. Don’t just take any opportunity simply because it is presented to you. Find one you will love to represent.

Another key to finding a product is the size of the industry. If you are in an industry that almost everyone needs you will do better than in an industry that has very few people. You also need to look at the profits in that industry. Some industries have huge profit margins while others are very small. The phone industry is huge but the profits paid out to the mlm companies that sell phone service is VERY SMALL simply because competition has forced prices down. Most MLMs sell very low priced items, and these are items that people don’t need that many of. If your company sells something that only makes $10 a month there simply is not much money to work with, you will have to build a huge group to make life changing money.

About 60% of all MLM companies are Health and wellness related. One major reason for this is because health products can be marked up a lot. A $50 product may only cost $5 to make, this gives a lot of room for profit for the company and for the distributors. Another reason that the health products sell in MLM well is because most of them need to have a fairly large explanation for people to use them, and the normal retail channel just does not provide this. Most of these companies have a few core products, or maybe only one that they sell. In general these products do provide some help in our vastly malnourished society, and are fairly profitable to sell. For me personally I have no passion for this, and even if someone uses the product as they should the profit will still probably be under $30 per month for each person you sign up. I know many people who have made it big selling such a product, they have found many people who also found many people and they are making nice 6 figure incomes as a result.

Another major area are companies that sell many products, some they make themselves while others simply get a discount from products made by other companies. Everyone can find something that the company sales that you will like. The problem with most of these companies is that for them to be able to pay the kind of money that people want they have to mark up these products much more than you could find the same products for elsewhere.

One of my great product type is the financial services type. Most everyone needs investment help, a mortgage, insurance, or education. These are items that traditional methods charge huge amounts, these are also items that a large percent of many budgets goes to. One MLM that I was in originated mortgages. The fees charged to the customers was typical of the industry, and yet were still 3000 and more per sale. As you can see, even with a small team it was easy to make money doing this. On your first sale you made more money than all of your first year expenses. In my mind this was a great MLM, the only problem is now there is a credit crunch and it is very hard to get mortgages approved. Most people in this company have quit, and it would not surprise me if the company is gone before the end of 2008.

RULES. People want to join a MLM for the freedom they have to run their own business, but many MLMs have so many rules that they place on their distributors it almost feels like a commission job. Before you join a company look to see what rules you will have to live by. One MLM I know of states in their policy that they “OWN” anyone who signs of for their company and if you mention another business idea to them and they leave the first company you will be punished for theft. Other MLMs, say that you can’t sell their products anyway other than person to person or at their website. This limitation will make it much harder to be successful. Many companies won’t let you discount the products. Most won’t let you be in multiple MLMs at the same time and use your contacts from one to build the other. Most will not let you have your own marketing, your own website for the company and even your own business cards. Before you join a MLM decide what rules you are willing to live by and make sure that the one you are joining allows you to operate in the way you want to.

One last thing to look at is the stability of the company.  Is this a company that had been around for a long time or something that just started.  Most new companies may not survive and they usually don’t have all of the bugs worked out, but you can get in on the ground floor and be at the top.  A company that pays out a ton of money may look good, but if the company can’t make profits you may find one day that they are gone and so is all your hard work.  I also find it VERY hard to deal with a company that is always changing the compensation plan.  I understand as they get bigger you need changes, but I have seen companies that made 8 changes in a year.

Also you need to have a company with an easy to understand compensation plan.  I have been to meetings where the compensation plan is so complex that none of the leaders fully understand it, they simply keep asking you to “Trust the Company” and that the money will all come out right.  If you can’t explain the whole compensation plan in 30 seconds it is just too complex.  This will make it harder to build, and harder to see the direct results of your actions.

So the bottom line, find a company where you can make money, has a product/service you like and a team and system you would like to work with. Do this, then build it big and you will have great success.

I hope this helps. This is the third blog in this series. Please click here for the first one.

I could write 10 more pages on this but I feel that I have hit the most important points already.

What you need to get set up for a successful MLM business

Business, Computers, concepts, Entrepreneurship, Inspiration, Marketing, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

This is the second article in my series on the MLM concept. Here is the first one with links to the rest.

I am going to define success as a business that is large enough to replace your entire normal income and also make a large positive change on your lifestyle. To be successful you first need to have a success mindset. You need to know how to make sales, how to make presentations and you need a team

For this blog I am going to assume that you have all of this in place and it is time to get started. Here is what else you need to get started quickly. These are the tools that I use.

Computer: You MLM is probably online, and you need to keep track of your customers and use your computer for marketing. (If you need a good deal on a computer go to Emerald Computers)
An office: You need a place where you go to work. This can be in your house or outside. It should be easy to bring potential customers there to talk with. I like to have a desktop as my main computer because you can use it longer with less fatigue. A laptop is also very useful.

Ok those are obvious, as should be having a good vehicle and an email account.

Now let me get a bit deeper, on what you need. I will assume that you are building an online business because most MLMs now are mostly online.

First you need your own domain name. You company has a web page and a domain name, but they control that. You need your own, something that is good for what you do, easy to spell, easy to remember. You then will get an email address on your domain. Never run a business using the email address from your ISP or one of those free sites like yahoo, msn or gmail, it really looks bad to many people. I use GoDaddy for my domains, it is cheap, had good support and works well.

Next you will want software to track your contacts. We use a program called ACT. With this program you enter in all the information about the people you are contacting. It them allows you to keep notes about them, update the info when you are on the phone, and most importantly it reminds you of the times you need to follow-up with these people. I also use a Palm Pilot to take all of this info and make it mobile, so that I can access and update it on the road.

Next you will want an auto-responder to manage your emails. What this does is track all of your contacts that wanted to be added to your various mailing lists. You also can preset automatic mailings, and send mass broadcasts to your prospects. There is much more you can do with it. I use a company called GetResponse and for the $150 a year I pay I get unlimited usage and it is well worth it.

Next you need your own website, you can make a simple site that you control. You should have a site for your prospects to visit. Another for your customers to visit and yet another for your team to visit. You need to learn about making a squeeze page, a way to extract data from your customer to feed to your auto-responder. I use a company called PrecisionWeb for my hosting. They offer much more than others for a great price. Check out the main Capital Active site for a great example of a basic page.

Next you should join networking websites like linkedin, Myspace, YouTube and make sites here for your business. You also can find many people who may be interested in your products.

Next it helps to have a blog, it is great way to establish yourself as an expert, as well as get a following of people finding out about you. It also really helps get you on top of the search engine results. I use wordpress because they are free, easy to use, fast and give you a ton links.

I found a lady who seems to have done everything PERFECT. I don’t know her, I just found her site from her blog today. She has her own great domain wealthcreatorsinc.com, and a nice blog. But you may not notice the two most important things she did, she made her page a squeeze page, where you must give her your information to go on. And second she DID NOT mention the name of her MLM this keeps you courious and willing to go on, and it lets her advertise without worrying about the rules of her company.

Next you need to create business cards with YOUR business name on it. I would suggest NOT to use business cards with the name of your MLM on it, they limit your advertising, and they are less flexible when you are marketing. Now carry many of these cards with you wherever you go. I hand out over 80 cards per week on average. More important than getting your card out is getting the cards of other people. I usually flip them over and write on the back details of what we talked about so I can remember.

I also often print up fliers with an upcoming event on it, as well as info about my website. Using this you can get a few more people a month to join your team.

You now need professional clothes. Depending on where you live you will have a different dress code. For Arizona pants and a nice button up shirt is good for most meetings. For the east coast you should wear a suit most of the time. No matter what, you need to have a suit for special events.

When I leave my house, I always have my Palm Pilot, my wallet with at least 20 business cards, my keys, my cell phone, an ink pen, a comb for my hair and usually I have my green laser pointer because it comes in handy all the time.

Well I hope this helps you be more successful.

The value of financial education is huge.

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It is said you never really know what you don’t know. It is not until you learn something that you really understand the value of the thing you just learned. Some things are very valuable and other have little value. For example if you get a little education on real estate investing and how it REALLY works, (Not always what you see on the TV) it will rock your world.

On the other hand I went to a 4 year university and at the end of it all I felt that I could have learned much more on my own. I am still glad I went for the social side of it all. Too many people spend their whole life in the rat race, it is like a giant treadmill, you only earn enough to get current on your bills, and if you ever make more you tend to spend more.

There are many bloggers, most much more popular than I am, that tell the masses how to save their meager earnings, and how to find deals so that they can spend less. But you really can only save so much. Even if you could save 50% of your earnings you still would take years to really get ahead. What they miss usually is that it is MUCH easier to increase your earnings than reduce spending. It takes a different kind of education, a type that most people do now learn. One nugget of info can change your life. It is much easier to live below your means if you increase you means. You do need to control costs, but spend more time increasing income than controlling costs and you will be ahead in the long run.

There is another blog, by a successful guy who gets this, I highly suggest you read his blog. It is called 7Million7Years. He recently wrote a blog about home equity, and that you should not put all your net worth into it. Read it here

Are you ready to learn how to take your investing, and your thoughts to the next level, well the next step is get educated. Read books by Robert Kiyosaki, Donald Trump, Douglas Andrew and Ric Edelman. I have found them to have the best books on real financial advise. Most of the others really give the WRONG advise. I don’t know what they are thinking sometimes.

If you are interested in real estate investing (Which you should be) my company, Capital Active, sponsors events where we teach people, for FREE, how to get started and how to be successful right from the start. If you are interested in an upcoming event sign up here.

Thanks and have a great day, leave a comment please.

They are watching you, and keeping track of your wrongs (Unless you pay!)

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What if an organization existed that kept a database on everyone. They would listen to whatever the general public says about other people, and they would record that information and save it in a database. Anyone can go and complain about anyone they like. The more people you meet the higher the chance you will have that someone will have a problem with you. Now what if they made that database available online, for anyone to search and look things up. Then they went a step farther and they would advertise on TV and on the radio the existence of their database, telling you that before you have a relationship with this other person you could look up what other people had to say about this person. They would also encourage you to report any complaints you have about others. You would be considered guilty of whatever action people have complained against you until you prove that you are innocent.

Of course they would not keep this database, and advertise for free, they would need to make money some how, so what if they let people become members of their organization, and a member would be allowed to ‘dispute’ anything in their own personal record and have it removed very easily. To be far they would have to establish a process for non members to dispute things, but of course these disputes would be given much lower priority. Also a member would be given a badge that they could show off the fact they were a paying member. If members paid a bit of extra money they even would be allowed to post this fact on their web page. The organization would advertise that you can only trust people that are members, even though membership is fairly meaningless, it only means you paid them off.

If such a thing existed would you be upset? Would you be outraged? Would you demand that the government do something about it? Would you see it as blackmail?

Well guess what, this organization DOES exist. It is called the Better Business Bureau and that have been doing exactly what I have described for almost 100 years. They pretend that they are there to protect people, that they keep detailed records on businesses but I have seen it first hand, that as soon as you pay them to become a member everything bad goes away with ease, and it is very hard to deal with them if you are not a member.

Also you have no idea what percent of people are unhappy with the company. Who is worse the small business with 10 customers and 5 of them complain or the large company with 10,000 customers where 50 complain? Well according to the BBB the larger one is worse. There are always crazy people who you can never resolve a problem with, we all know them, and companies are punished for having them as customers, even if only .1% of their customers have a bad experience they could have a horrible rating. The company across the way with 10% of their customer having problems pays the BBB off and gets away free. This is a horrable system.

So what can you do about this unfair, blackmail organization? As a customer do not trust them, do not use the BBB to handle your dispute, do not look up your vendors in their database and when you see someone who is saying they are a member, feel sorry for the delusion they live in. If you own a business or have influence in one please don’t become a member, do not give them money, and respond to complaints filed with them.

I am not mad at them, I have no problem with them personally, I just feel that such an organization should not be allowed to exist in our modern society. Maybe if they made some changes, and provided more information, including positive information it would be more useful, and also made it easier to dispute claims against you. But as of now there are many much better and more accurate information sources for those looking to find out about those they plan to do business with. Here are some examples of companies that many people consider to be horrible, but they have perfect ratings with the BBB because they pay, even though there are a huge number of complaints about them. Just read what some people had to say about these companies.
Frys Electronics: Vegas Midway auto team: Phoenix Best Buy (over 12000 complaints) ( I just love how most of the complains on these members are “Administratively closed” something only members can have done.)

Back to basics, going door to door.

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Back to basics, going door to door.

 

We have decided that we need a few more customers.  One of the most effective way we have found to get customers is very old fashioned, low tech but it works.  Tomorrow we are going to visit some nice office buildings, ones that contain businesses that match our target market, ones with 10-20 users.  We are going to start out by going to a mixer for our local chamber of commerce.  These businesses are large enough to generate volume for our company but small enough that they don’t have their own IT departments.  Tomorrow will be a long day, last time we did this we got one large customer that accounted for half of our sales last month. 

 

Sometimes you just gotta get back to basics sometimes in this modern age.  We are used to our websites, our blogs, our IM’s, our text messaging and all out other high tech stuff but sometimes the best thing to do is get out and see people face to face.  Need to boost sales, try getting back to basics, and meet someone in person.

Emerald Computers, a short history from a business POV

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I started a computer company in 1998, and thought I knew it all but I quickly learned so much more. I moved that store a few doors down and this time designed in the way I wanted all future stores to be like. I created systems for doing everything. Then I set out on opening more stores. By then it was 2004 and the market for computers was crashing, the wars by the big companies erased all the profits in the industry. By 2005 we were back to one store. By the end of 2007 we decided that the retail storefront was not the way to go. We moved to a much lower rent area, and just serve corporate and online customers, the ones with the best profits. The wars are over and the profits are back in the computer industry, and with our reduced cost, decade of experience we are ready to explode. All we need now is a capital infusion to get us to the next level. Even if we only get .5% of the US market that is still huge.

Now we are looking for investors.  People who can see the vision and are willing to go there with us.  They will, of course, share in our success.

The key to commercial success for Linux

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You use a computer, and read blogs so you probably know a bit about computer and you probably know about Linux. Linux is great, robust and free OS. It runs almost all web servers and websites. Including google, wordpress and billions of others. Linux is very secure, robust, fast and hack proof. It makes great servers because servers are ran by experts. Without Linux the web would not exist as we know it.

Well for over a decade now they have been trying to make it popular for your desktop computer that you use every day as well. One of the best parts about Linux is that anyone with knowledge is free to change and customize it exactly how they see fit, and they have. Almost everything in Linux has at least 3 different programs that do the same thing, but they do it in different ways. People then pick and choose the different parts of Linux and combine them into a complete Operating System. They call this a distribution or distro. There are now 100’s of up to date distros, all with different ways of doing things and different followings. This has helped Linux in the past but in the world of mass merchandising it also has hurt Linux.

The problem is that when a company writes software to work on Linux they must assume things about how the computer is set up. Because there are 100’s of different ways to do this, and only a few million Linux users, they simply don’t bother. Companies that make drivers and hardware also don’t bother. The Linux people thus have to do all of it themselves. And, if they do it for one distro of Linux it probably will not work on many others. So the game makers, and the people who make the huge programs we need to function usually don’t bother making a Linux version. There is no Photoshop, QuickBooks, MSN or Yahoo chat with webcam, or robust video editing software in Linux because these are very complex and would usually be distro specific, and the userbase does not justify the cost.

The strength of Microsoft Windows was the fact that it was closed and controlled. People could not change the OS, all the rules from computer to computer were exactly the same. Because of this people could code for just ONE OS, that they knew would be supported and work for at least a decade. This is exactly what they did, 1000’s of companies started writing. Hardware makers could design one driver to work with the OS and everything was easy, because it was a standard platform, that was predictable. Windows was not the coolest, and it sure was not the most secure or robust, and they charged a huge price for it, but all of this was worth it because it was STANDARD. Nothing is more important than something being standard when it comes to business, and all the geeks need to learn this. McDonalds does not made the best burgers, but I have ate them in 5 different nations and they are all the same. When it is the same it is predictable, and you need that to get investors and make money flow. This is the main reason the Linux world still has less than 1% of desktop computers.

So now what? Well in a dream world someone with great power and clout would take all the best parts of Linux, get a ton of people behind him and release the ultimate distro of Linux. He would promise to not change it for at least 6 months and also promise that anything written for it will work for years on the newer versions. By creating a standard and unifying the Linux world programmers would start making software work on Linux and soon it would gain marketshare. It will be better and be free than windows, and soon takeover the world from the grasp of Microsoft.

Someone else, a tech billionaire named Mark Shuttleworth thought EXACTLY the same way, and he used his power and clout to do it. He calls it Ubuntu. He only release every 6 months, and he has static versions that are supported for two years or more. He then went much farther, he made a community around it. They have great free tech support with forums and chat. As well has many other great features and designs.  My good friend Matthew Helmke is one of the leading Ubuntu experts and forum leaders and inspired me to try it out.

This OS has the chance to become huge. For over a year now Linux has been the top distro, and it growing faster than the rest of the Linux world put together. The standard it presents has already encouraged many companies to start writing software for Linux. Many large games are not tested on Ubuntu. If you use Linux, switch to Ubuntu, for the sake of the Linux world. Raising a unified standard is the only hope that Linux has at commercial success.

I hope this explanation of a very tech thing from a business perspective educated both the techs and the business people who usually don’t understand each other.

I will offer much more of this sort of knowledge in the future so be sure to subscribe to this blog!.

Jason Dragon.

Find someone who can connect the dots for you to shortcut to success.

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So the connecting the dots blog seemed to be popular. (Read that first if you have not done so) As I said in the article, I like to help people become successful. The other day I was chatting online to a 20 year old guy, located in the Philippines. He wanted to become a successful business person, but had no education about business and was working a low level, normal job. He had a web site that he started but there was nothing on it really. His goal was to become an online business phone book for his city, a city where no such thing existed. He then would charge people for premium listings. This is a sound idea but after 5 months doing it he had only 8 listing, all of them free listings.

To me it was obvious what was needed for him to be successful. I told him to get a paper phone book and call business people and verify that their company exists. Tell them about the website, and ask them if they want a premium listing. Give every verified company a free listing. He could probably add over 100 new listings per day. In a few short weeks he would have the largest listing site in the city, and once he has that he can start to advertise it. Maybe even do a customer review page for each customer. He had everything in place on the tech side, just lacked the business side. I hope that I helped him.

This is an example how, finding someone who has more dots can you can rock your company in just a few minutes. Having these dots is a huge asset. I think that I would be a great small business consultant. Maybe I can do that on the side. I basically have been doing that for businesses in the world of computers.

Jason Dragon