From David of 37signals:
Popular perception holds that companies must always be growing or they’re dying. There’s either up or down, win or lose, success or failure. I think that’s a harmful dichotomy that leads to the death of perfectly viable companies in their quest for constant growth.
Not all companies are meant to have thousands of employees or a billion-dollar market cap. Some companies are meant to be just 10 people or 5 people or just one guy. That’s what their product, niche, or technique is capable of sustaining and there’s absolutely no shame in that. Finding your natural size should be a triumph, not a capitulation.
These are wise words, but then again, 37signals operates a touch ahead of the curve from everyone else. He has a point that good companies have a critical mass point, where they provide something niche that no one else is willing or equipped to provide, and they find meaning in being at that point, generating good revenue, and fulfilling their niche without worrying about numbers going up, only that the books are coming out well.
It’s been said before that companies focusing on pure profitability instead of marketshare as a primary goal will actually gain marketshare faster. I think that meshes well with David’s notion of company size.
I’m fairly certain this is what the Internet was made for.
I spent a good portion of today and this evening mulling over the methods for application deployment and trying to figure out a few things; I think it only relevant and interesting that I share whatever insights I have gleaned from very likely thinking too hard.
For some time, I have resisted the very in vogue notion that the future of computing is “in the cloud,” as it were, though no one is quite sure where the cloud is and I’m pretty certain that no one person owns that cloud. Listen to tech podcasts or read tech news for a short amount of time, and you’ll see that many in the technology punditry business are saying that before long, many computers will be nothing more than dummy terminals. You won’t have Microsoft Office, you won’t have complicated desktop applications, and you certainly won’t have the complex operating systems you have now or store your files locally – everything will be handled through Internet-based communication. Your documents and your files will be stored “in the cloud,” and my impression is that everyone wants a piece of this cloud before it floats away.
It wasn’t until today that I really understood the appeal of this methodology.
Ryan Markel 