Episode 28 | Business of Software Conference Part 2

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Show Notes

• Mike Taber, aka: Stevie “J“
• Atlassian
• Confluence Wiki
• Jira bug tracking
• Microsoft acquires Teamprise
• “Rich vs. King” blog post by Jason Cohen

Transcript

[00:00] Mike: This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 28.

[00:03] [music]

[00:12] Mike: Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or are just thinking about it.  I’m Mike.

[00:19] Rob: And I’m Rob.

[00:20] Mike: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes  we’ve made.  What’s going on this week, Rob?

[00:25] Rob: The highlight of my week so far was reading a blog post today that talked about our podcast.

[00:31] Mike: [laughs]

[00:31] Rob: You know what’s coming, don’t you?

[00:34] Mike: Yes.

[00:34] Rob: It said, you know, Rob has a book, and he’s on his podcast with his co-host Stevie J.  I loved it.  I don’t think it was tongue-in-cheek.  I think he actually…maybe the only one he had listened to was the one where you introduced yourself as Stevie J.

[00:50] So that just killed me to think that someone out there thinks that your name is Stevie J.  Not Steven J. or Steve J., but “Stevie” J.

[00:58] Mike: [laughs]

[00:59] Rob: So that’s the best part.  Yeah, for anyone who didn’t hear, gosh, what was it?  Episode 23, 34?

[01:05] Mike: Something like that.

[01:06] Rob: Yeah, Mike introduced himself as Stevie J., which is short for Steve Jobs.  So, and in other news…the first thing I wanted to talk about this week is Mike and I are looking for your feedback on our new format.  We’ve been doing it for about nine episodes, and we’ve received just a handful of comments.  And based on the number of listeners we have, we feel like there’s a lot more voices out there that we want to hear.  We don’t want to make any drastic changes in any direction with only half a dozen emails and comments.

[01:37] So, if you could email us, questions@startupsfortherestofus.com, or call into our voicemail number, which is 888-801-9690, you can leave us a voicemail.  Either way, just let us know what you think about the format.  You know, obviously we switched after the first 20, and we do a little more casual conversational stuff.  But let us know what you think.  And if you have any suggestions, and certainly if you have questions, because that always helps us provide you with the maximum value from your time.

[02:03] So that was my first topic.  How about you?

[02:05] Mike: In this past week, I’ve actually spent some time doing a little bit of research on software that I heard about when we were at the Business of Software Conference.  It’s always interesting going to conferences like that, because you always see and hear about these companies that you might have heard of before, but you didn’t necessarily know what they did, or what products they had, or literally anything beyond the name of them.

[02:28] So the specific company I’m talking about is Atlassian.  I found out by looking at their website that a lot of their developer tools are free for small companies, which I found very interesting, because you can get up to 10 licenses for a lot of their different software products, such as their bug tracking software and project management software called Jira, their wiki, which is the one that I’m looking into, it’s called Confluence, and several other of their products.

[02:56] And it’s not completely free.  You have to pay them a nominal fee of like $10, which they actually turn around and they donate that entire $10 to charity.  But I thought that was really cool, the way that they really start to try and get the developers involved into the products that they’re building and help startups, to be perfectly honest.

[03:14] I mean people like you and me don’t necessarily have tons of money to shell out for some of the higher end products that are out there, but these are enterprise level products that they’re practically giving away.  I thought it was really cool.

[03:27] Rob: Yeah, it seems like they’ve implemented, essentially, a freemium model with downloadable apps, which is very, I think is pretty rare.  I think most of the time you can get a free trial.  I guess sometimes they do have “Lite” versions of things.  But they’ve actually done it where, like you said, you download it, you get five licenses or 10 licenses for essentially free, right?  It’s  five or 10 bucks.  And then, beyond that I’ll say it’s a bit pricey, right?  Isn’t it $50 or $100 a license for most of them?

[03:54] Mike: Some of them, yeah.  But I mean you don’t pay for it until you get to 10 licenses or 10 users.

[03:58] Rob: Right.  At that point they make an assumption that’s probably pretty valid… that you probably  have money to pay for [laughs] big licenses if you have 10 developers working on it.

[04:07] Mike: Right.  And I’m not sure of the specifics.  I think for open source it was actually free as well.  I’m not positive on that.  I just found the whole model a little bit interesting.  It almost strikes me as being very similar to the Microsoft model, where Microsoft tries to get the smaller companies involved and invested in their tools to show them how good they are, and then after they reach a certain point with the toolset, Microsoft starts asking for money for them.  I think the same thing happens for a lot of Atlassian’s customers.

[04:39] Rob: Right.  And before someone listening to this podcast rushes out and says, “Hey!  Freemium, that works!  It’s a great way to go!”  I think you have to keep in mind that Atlassian, you may never have heard of them, but they are a fairly sizeable company.  What do they have, 80,100, 150 employees?  I mean they’re sizeable…

[04:57] Mike: It’s 225, I believe.

[04:59] Rob: Good grief.  I mean, you wouldn’t call them a large company in the scale of the world, but in terms of the software companies you and I deal with, that’s a substantial force.  So they have, obviously, the money and the resources to be able to deal with having this freemium model.

[05:15] And I know they did run experiments.  At Business of Software, Scott, the CEO, talked about they had experimented with this a couple of years ago because they really wanted to track how much support went up and how many people converted to customers, ultimately.  And if it wasn’t a profitable thing for them, obviously they wouldn’t just continue to do it as a charity offering.

[05:35] And it was profitable, so that’s why they continue to do it.  But I think it’s great they are able to do this kind of thing.  I think it’s a good model.  I think it’s a good model for a larger company, like an Atlassian or, you know, a much larger company like a Microsoft.  But I think if you were five employees and you are kind of a small ISV, I think you’re going to have a tough time pulling this off and doing it well.

[05:56] Mike: Yeah.  To give the listeners an idea of revenues, this company, I believe, last year had $59 or $60 million worth or revenue.  So they are by no means small.  And they have the ability to be able to not only pull this off, but to actually track all the metrics behind it to figure out whether or not it’s actually working for them or not.

[06:15] There are actually two points about that that I wanted to make.  One was I like their Confluence product, and I think it’s a decent product, but it’s all based in Java, so it is an absolute resource pig.  That was the one downfall that I had with that.

[06:30] I tried installing it on my Linux host and it actually crashed a number of times because the JVM just didn’t have enough memory to give it for my Virtual Private Server.  And I just didn’t feel like allocating anymore to it.  I basically just turned it over and installed it on my Windows server instead, because I have two servers that are out on the Internet.  And I use them for different things, but that was the one thing.

[06:53] And the second was the fact that I have a wiki that I use internally.  I think it’s one of those things that most people don’t necessarily think about it, but if you are trying to build a company, it’s a good idea to have a wiki some place.  And that will help you organize your thoughts and your documents and just random things that you put together, you can throw them into a wiki.

[07:14] And I actually have two others.  Both, unfortunately, are internal, because I added a wiki for my consulting company that I was running for a while.  You know, it was completely internal, but now that I’ve started to refocus a lot of my efforts, I’ve tried to make things a lot more Internet accessible, which is why I was looking at Confluence, because it had a lot of enterprise permission sets and scalability around it.

[07:35] Having a wiki really helps your business, just because you have a central repository to put a lot of stuff that isn’t like a code repository.  I mean you can use Subversion for stuff like that, but once you get people who are not developers into your company, they are not going to have any idea what to do with Subversion.

[07:54] Rob: Yeah, I’m still trying to pull myself out of that old habit of using Subversion.  That’s what I’ve used…Well, I use Source Control to store documentation and documents, and essentially what you’re saying.  I’ve done that for years.

[08:07] And once Google Docs came around, I started using it.  But, of course, then you have to have a Google account, you have to invite people.  It’s a little hokey.  And yeah, I’ve totally realized that the wiki is the way to go for this.

[08:18] And there’s actually one built into FogBugz that I’ve used quite a bit on DotNetInvoice with our documentation and deployment processes.  I would advise someone, even if you have a small company, I mean I guess if you are one person, Google Docs is fine.  You can put it up and you have access to it anywhere, although you can’t edit it from an iPad, still.  Grrr.

[08:38]  Mike: [laughs]

[08:39] Rob: But I think you  can download an app to do that.  But as soon as you get to two people, you either both need Gmail accounts or you need to move everything into a wiki.  Personally, I wouldn’t host it myself, but that’s just me.  I would go and do a SaaS offering.

[08:53] Yeah, I’ll agree with you.  I think that’s the best way to do it these days.

[08:56] [music]

[08:59] Rob: Any closing thoughts on the Business of Software?  We have that as a bullet item to discuss.  We kind of recorded Episode 25.5 in the middle BoS, so we really didn’t talk about the last speakers.  So you have any thoughts to wrap that up for the listeners?

[09:17] Mike: One of the things that I found interesting was the different speakers who had sold their companies or had them acquired in some way, shape, or form, or sold parts of them.  So when Eric Sink got up and started talking about how they had sold off a division of Source Gear to Microsoft and kind of described the basic process of it, it seemed to me like it would be a very gut-wrenching experience to sell off something that you kind of worked really, really hard on.

[09:45] I mean, obviously, the division that he had sold off was building some Eclipse plug-ins and more or less tools that were targeted more toward the open source community, but also towards the enterprise world that Microsoft is really just not a part of.

[10:00] And it almost seemed like…I won’t say he sounded sad, because I don’t think that’s really the right word.  But it’s hard to describe what the impression that I got from him was.  And it wasn’t just him.  It was really several of the other speakers.

[10:15] Whenever somebody asked, you know, “Was it a good decision?  Did you make the right choice?”, every single one of them hesitated.  Not one of them said, “Yes, I absolutely made the right choice.”  And I found that very intriguing.  Because I would have thought that, you know, when you are out there and you are building a company, and you’re trying to make it successful, and you get to this pinnacle of success and you’ve sold off the company that you absolutely made the right choice, and you’re happy with the decision, and you’ve decided to sell the product or the company and move on.

[10:44] And it almost seemed to me like there was a lot of hesitation.  People were saying, “Yeah, I made the right decision,” but there were a lot of caveats that they just simply didn’t voice.  I don’t know.  I mean, did you get that impression as well from hearing the talks?

[10:59] Rob: You know, I got more the impression that the acquisition process was really hard.  More that that was really gut-wrenching and people kinda of struggled through that and had a lot of roller coaster ups and downs, and that it lasted six months or more, and that it totally turned their life upside down for that six months, which I can just imagine that that has to be kind of a dark period.

[11:20] I mean Eric Sink communicated that pretty well, actually.  It’s almost like he was depressed while he was talking about it in front of everybody.  I mean it was just a depressing story to hear him say he was taking phone calls in church, and he realized he was just, I don’t know, totally overwhelmed with this.

[11:35] I took away that more than people were indecisive about whether to do it.  I think Eric had to think about it.  I think someone did ask him that and he had to think about it and said that he thought it was the right decision.

[11:47] He had a tough part, too, where he sold the company and like two or three of his developers had to move to Seattle to work for Microsoft, and he had to get their buy-in.  I can just imagine those conversations and how they went.

[11:57] Mike: I think the part that got me the most was the fact that it was such a long process.  I mean I would have not have thought that it was, in some cases, six, eight, 10, 12 months.  I mean that just seems really long for a company that has only been around for a couple years.

[12:11] Rob: I agree.  And then I think Derek Sivers, someone asked him, and I think he actually did say yes pretty quick, that it was the right decision.  Because remember, he got pretty burned out on his company.  He’s talked about this elsewhere, so it’s not like we’re letting any secrets out.  But he was really burned out on it by the end.  So someone said, “Was it the right decision?” and I think he did say yes right away.

[12:33] And then, I don’t think anyone asked Jason Cohen.  He was the other acquisitionee that I can think of.  I would imagine he’d say yes.  I think based on his blog posts, what was it?  It was “Rich or King”?  You know, do you want to be rich or be king?  I think he was pretty much defending his stance of selling his company, so I think he feels like it’s the right decision.

[12:52] And now, all three of those guys essentially are self-sufficient.  I mean, “independently wealthy”.  They could never work again and all live fine for the rest of their lives and take care of their kids’ college and all that stuff.

[13:04] But I think what’s interesting is that none of them are doing that.  Jason Cohen has his blog that he’s working on.  He has WP Engine that he launched.  Certainly Eric Sink is still working at Source Gear fulltime.  And Derek Sivers, he did take a bunch of time off.  I think he’s talking about moving overseas for the time being.  And I think he’s actually going to start a bunch of small companies; kind of micropreneur stuff, actually.

[13:28] It’s just kind of neat to think about that with his free time that’s what he wants to do, you know, and still be an entrepreneur.  I guess all three of them, it’s that internal drive.  The money doesn’t change that.  You know, having all the money that you need, it still doesn’t change what you need to do to feel…

[13:48] Mike: Fulfilled, complete.  That’s  kinda what I was thinking, because it seems to me like if you are building the company to sell it off, what happens when you reach that goal?  There’s gotta be other things that you’ve thought about or other things that you want to do, and the reason you’ve sold the company off was to get the money to do those other things.  And if you don’t have anything else, what good was it to actually get all the money for selling your company?

[14:14] Rob: I agree.  I hate the argument…I hate it when…I’ve done blog posts talking about how you can’t do this for the money, or just because you make more money you’re not going to be happier.  And there’s always going to be some chucklehead who posts and he’s like, “Oh, just show me the money!” No, I’m not like that.

[14:30] And I don’t believe that.  I believe there are very few people, if any, who are driven entrepreneurs who could go and sell their company and then just retire and just kinda leave the public eye and go off to Tahiti and not do anything and actually be happy.  I just don’t see it, man.  I think if you’re driven, this is what you have to do.

[14:50] Mike: And that was actually one of the topics that I wanted to bring up on today’s podcast, was if one of your podcasts did really well, let’s say you sold it off for $5 million.  I mean, what would you do?

[15:00] Rob: That’s such an interesting question.  Actually, I would do something similar to what I’m doing at this point, right?  If you’d asked me this a few years ago when I was doing a lot of consulting, I would have said, you know, I want to get out of consulting, because that was something I didn’t enjoy.  I didn’t enjoy building apps for other people.

[15:16] But today, actually, I’m quite a bit happier with what I’m doing.  I really enjoy owning my own apps.  And I’m pretty interested in them because I have several of them that I’m working on at any one time, so I don’t lose interest.

[15:29] Maybe if I really didn’t have to worry about income month to month, maybe some of the more higher maintenance apps I would get rid of.  I don’t know.  I would still write a lot.  I still really enjoy the writing.  I enjoy the podcasting.  Maybe I’d go out and try a crazy app idea that I haven’t tried.

[15:46] It’s weird.  It’s like money hasn’t kept me from doing that, from building just an app that I consider to be kind of a more risky play.  I guess I have a tough time answering the question.  Maybe it’s something I need to think about!

[15:57] But I hate to act like, “Oh, I’m at a place where I have arrived and I don’t have any wants or desires that $5 million would fulfill.”  But frankly, life is pretty good, and I kinda call my own shots, and I work, for the most part, when I want to, and I go on vacations a lot.  So, I don’t know.  Nothing I would change dramatically at this point.

[16:15] Although, I think if I didn’t have kids or if I wasn’t married, things would be different.  I would travel a lot more and such.  The way life is structured right now, I don’t know that having even a million bucks a year or something, how much that would actually change what I do.  How about you?

[16:29] Mike: Well, I’ve always kept a list of products, ideas, or applications that I thought would make either good business ventures or be interesting to work on.  And there’s definitely  few that I’ve written down that I look at them and I say, “If I had all the money in the world and didn’t have to worry about this as a business idea, I would love to work on that and just work on that and just do nothing else.”

[16:53] But the problem is that some of them are things that…they are not things that take a little bit of time.  I mean they are things that take a couple of years of development time.  And they’re not something that you really get another shot at.  It’s not something, a typical micropreneurial effort or a business application you can put out there, and if it gets some sales you can kinda funnel those sales back into it.  It’s, you basically get one shot with it.

[17:19] So I think that there’s probably some of those that I’d work on a little bit more, because the development cycle for some of those is just so incredibly long that if I had all the money in the world and didn’t have to worry about income, I would probably work on those.  But unfortunately, the way things are, I’m not making a million dollars a year by sitting around.  [laughs]

[17:39] I guess that’s probably what I’d do.  I actually talked to my wife a little bit about it.  I was like, “You know, I’d probably go out and get a PhD.”  It’s something I always wanted a long time ago, and I figured it’d be one of those long term goals for me.  In the short term, I don’t see that happening.  Not that I don’t have the drive or ambition, it’s just that I’m not financially well off enough to just stop working for three or four years and then be able to do that.

[18:02] Rob: What would you get a PhD in?

[18:04] Mike: Probably computer science.

[18:05] Rob: What is that desire ? Like, what do you want to know that you don’t know now?  Or do you just want to say, like, “I have a PhD”?  Or is there knowledge out there that you feel like you don’t have?

[18:13] Mike: Well, along with the PhD goes…In order to get one, you basically have to do a fair amount of research.  And a lot of that research is more or less independent.  You work on your own.  And don’t get me wrong, your advisors work with you as well.

[18:29] But when I went out and did my Master’s degree, I found that my advisors really couldn’t help me.  And I found that interesting and shocking at the same time, because I was working on stuff that, they knew computing in general, and they knew the types of questions and things I should be asking, but the topics and the materials that I was actually doing research on, they had no idea what I was doing.

[18:53] And I just found that it was really interesting to me to be able to work on things that nobody had ever really done before, nobody had ever explored.  And don’t get me wrong, I looked around a little bit and I did find that some other people had done some things similar to what I had done.  But I was actually able to do them in ways that were exponentially more powerful and more efficient.

[19:16] Rob: You enjoy R&D, that’s what you’re saying?

[19:19] Mike: Yeah.

[19:19] Rob: You enjoy kind of inventing or discovering, creating ways to do things?

[19:23] Mike: Yeah.

[19:24] Rob: So that’s where a PhD would kind of fulfill that aspect of you.

[19:26] Mike: But the thing is, if you think about it, if I had all the money in the world, I wouldn’t need a PhD to do the research.  I could just do it.

[19:32] Rob: Right.  But a PhD might provide some structure or guidance to where…I mean it’d be kinda hard to just sit on your own, I think.  You could read blogs…And, I don’t know, I guess having some guidance, at least to start with, from a professor or a mentor would help.

[19:45] Mike: Yeah.  I think it comes down to having a goal at the end of that research.  I mean with my Master’s degree, yeah, I was going through…And to be honest, a lot of that degree, or at least more towards the thesis, was just learning how to do research.  And I thought that was really cool.  It was really interesting to be able to do that.  And it’s helped me a lot in getting me to where I am today, because I can look at something and say, “Well, I can’t justify that number.”  Or I can look at various problems, and I’ve done consulting in the past where somebody says to me, “Well what’s the problem?”  And I say, “Well, I can’t prove that it’s this, but I’m pretty sure that it is.”

[20:20] And it’s interesting to hear it from the other side, because you have somebody who is essentially a trusted advisor who’s telling you, “I can’t prove that this is the problem, but I’m pretty sure that that’s what it is.”  I guess it’s a different sense of being sure.  You know what I mean?

[20:37] Rob: Yeah.

[20:38] Mike: So I think that going through that degree helped me flesh out my research capabilities.  But I think that if I didn’t have a degree to work towards, I wouldn’t really have a goal or something at the end that says, “I’m done.”  I just think that I would probably slough it off if I didn’t actually have a goal that I was working towards.

[20:57] Rob: I agree.  I think it’s easy, even with a bunch of money and a bunch of time, to kind of not do anything productive.  Yeah, it’s so weird, because it’s like if you have all that money and time, then do you need to do anything productive?  But I guess it comes down to what would make you happy.

[21:13] If you got to the end of a year or five year span  and you just kinda kicked it and wasted a bunch of time, would you feel OK with that?  That’s the hard question that’s hard to answer.

[21:21] Mike: Yeah, I can sit there and write research papers and submit them to various conferences and just do conference talks all day long.  But even doing that sort of stuff, unless you have a PhD, it doesn’t look nearly as good when you are doing the submissions, I think.  So I think it would definitely help.  But, like I said, I feel like doing the research…I think it would be fun.

[21:42] [music]

[21:45] Mike: So the other thing that I had to talk about was…I think I mentioned to you in a previous podcast that I bought this ginormous 30 inch monitor.  And I’ve been working with it, and I’ve got XP installed on my machine, and I really need to take the plunge to Windows 7, at least for some of the Windows management.  And I know there’s tools out there that I can do, but my machine is really kind of a mess.  I haven’t repaved it in probably close to three or four years.

[22:10] And it got me thinking about doing hardware upgrades, because I’m thinking to myself, “Well what should I be looking at for hardware upgrades?”  And the thing that struck me as odd is that my processor is not slow.  It’s not like I have 512 megs of RAM and a 1 Gigahertz processor or something like that.  I mean I’ve got a dual core Athlon machine.  It’s got 2.6 Gigahertz.  It’s got 4 gigs of RAM.

[22:33]It’s not a small machine.  I’ve got the Western Digital Velociraptor drive, and then I’ve got a pair of 1.5 Terabyte Seagate drives in there for long-term data storage.  It just got me to thinking, though, do I really need to go all out on hardware upgrades?  I mean when’s the last time you upgraded your computer?  I mean you’re still running a laptop, right?

[22:57] Rob: I am, yeah.  I do everything off my laptop.  When I was doing hardcore .NET development, so I was compiling a lot, I would upgrade every two years, pretty much.  Every summer I would take the plunge and buy the newest and greatest thing I could get.

[23:12] I still code in .NET, but I don’t do it every day all day.  And so I’ve started to let it go to three years.  And I’m even looking…I mean I think three years is in June for me, so that’s another six months or so.  And I wonder if I could push it past that, because really, there’s not much holding me back at this point.

[23:34] I have four gigs of RAM and a 64 bit Windows 7 OS.  And Windows 7, it just runs really, really well.  I mean it runs on like little dinky netbooks.  And so, on this dual core Intel processor I have, I’m questioning whether I need to upgrade.

[23:49] And so I’m wondering that my artificial timeline…what it used to be was my excuse to repave.  In other words, to get a new box with a brand new OS installed.  I would not repave during that two year window.  Now I had to repave.  At my two year window, which was just a couple months ago, I did.  I went from Vista 64 to Windows 7 64 bit, and it’s like a whole new OS.  I mean I’ve talked a lot about it, but it’s like a whole new lease on life for me.  Everything’s faster, I don’t get blue screens, I mean it’s just awesome.

[24:18] But I think if  repave every 18-24 months that I can keep going here for a while.  So I guess I’m in a bit of an experimentation mode, you know, where I could easily see going three years.  To me, pushing four years, that just seems kind of outrageous.  [laughs]  But it shouldn’t be!  I know people who do it.

[24:37] But as a developer/techie/person who spends every working moment on this laptop, it just feels like I should reinvest into myself after a certain period of time, and four years seems like too long.

[24:50] Mike: Well, I have a laptop that I basically gave the thing a completely new lease on life just by throwing an SSD drive into it.  I spent like maybe, I want to say, around $350 on the drive at the time.  I think now it’s down to probably $225 or something like that.

[25:06] But I just put a 120 gig SSD drive in it and the thing boots up faster than my desktop.  I mean it’s ridiculous how fast this thing actually is.  And this thing is dirt old.  I mean this is one of those machines still has the old 1600×1200 resolution that you can’t buy anymore.

[25:23] Rob: Oh, wow.

[25:24] Mike: So I will not be getting rid of it for quite some time.  But it works great.  I mean this thing is actually faster than my desktop at this point.

[25:33] Rob: Yeah, that’s crazy.  So that may be the next upgrade I do.  I didn’t realize the SSD drives were down that cheap for laptop drives.  I mean, I don’t tend to upgrade my laptop hardware very much, you know?

[25:45] Mike: Well, I don’t either.  I almost never upgrade a laptop except to add more RAM.  And with the SSD drives, it’s kind of a no-brainer at this point.  But, you know, I’m looking at my desktop saying, “Well, can I really justify this $2,500 worth of upgrades, or should I just do something minimal to get me up to Windows 7 that is going to be exponentially better than what I have just by, for example, getting an SSD drive?”

[26:10] Rob: Right.  Basically a few hundred bucks, and probably giving yourself another year, at least?

[26:15] Mike: Yeah, not with the SSD drive, I won’t!  [laughs]

[26:18] Rob: You want like a terabyte or something?

[26:20] Mike: No, no, no.  It’s just one of the higher end ones.  So it will probably run me like $400 or $500.  I  think the one I was actually really looking at was $600.  But I think I could get away with $450 and probably not notice that I’m missing some extra performance just because of the difference of what I’ve got now and what I would be getting.

[26:38] Rob: Yeah.  I really do feel like these days things have slowed down in terms of the cost-benefit.  Meaning that, like I said, I used to upgrade every two years, and I totally don’t feel like that’s necessary anymore.  And adding some RAM or a faster hard drive, like you said, is enough to keep you going for a lot longer.  I just think the lifetimes of our machines, unless you’re putting them through serious paces doing some crazy computing stuff, I think for most users, the lifetime of a machine should be several years, and it should be longer than it was five years ago.

[27:07] Mike: Right.  Yeah.

[27:08] Rob: Yeah, I’ll be interested to hear what you do.

[27:11] [music]

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[27:42]  A full transcript of this podcast is available at our website: startupsfortherestofus.com.  We’ll see you next time.