In a message dated 3/3/00 11:08:09 AM Eastern Standard Time,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
<< We all have to compete with guys like WebMD, who frankly have much more
money and man-power than any of the groups working on free projects. But I
think we have a better way of doing things, and if we don't all kill each
other or committee everything to death, we have a good chance of being able
to change the world of electronic medicine. >>
Manpower and intellectual capital are not the same thing. A smart person can
outperform a hundred (or more) mediocre ones in generation of good ideas and
good results. Big companies and their non-technical managers often seem to
reject or marginalize (interfere with, micromanage, or otherwise annoy the
heck out of) the very brightest people, due to a perception of them as "too
threatening" to ego or position. This is a good strategic point to
understand, an Achilles' heel of current corporate America, as it were.
For example, as author Bob Lewis points out in his book IS Survival Guide
(Sams Publishing, 1999, p. 247), three decades ago Harold Sackman researched
the performance gap between programmers. He found that the best ones were
able to write programs 16 times faster and debug then 28 times faster than
those created by "average" programmers, and when they were done their
programs were six times more compact and ran five times faster. This is a
huge indicator of the need to seek and keep the very best.
I contend that Linux itself could never have been created by a large company
-- at least, not with today's business ideologies and tyranny of the mediocre.
On committees, in medicine we have a saying. "In a code situation, there ARE
no committees." If you want to sit around and COMPUTATE, use committees. If
you want to do COMPUTING and get results, keep committees to an absolute
minimum.
Scot
