Demographically, the Democratic party base is largely made up of two groups: The rich and the poor. If only the middle class voted, the Democratic party would become an endangered species. Yet it's Democrats who seem most inclined to raise taxes. Why would they raise taxes if its leaders are so rich? The reason is that there are rich people and then there are rich people.  The rich portion of the Democratic base aren't people earning money in the traditional sense. They inherit it or th...

We don't discriminate against who we work with. We look for the best and brightest from all over the world. JoeUser.com's Blog Navigator is developed in Poland. Our documentation is written in UK. Some of our artwork is from Canada and other parts from Brazil.  And a lot of JoeUser.com's upcoming ASP.NET stuff will probably be done in Italy.  Is this a bad thing? I don't think so. Next month we're going to release a Gold Fish Aquarium Desktop. It's incredibly cool. The fish were de...

Here are 5 items that I would like any future President to consider if they want to actually help the United States economcially -- to create new jobs for Americans. #1 Tort reform. People hear about company A suing company B all the time. Or an individual (or group of individuals) suing some company.  I got personally sued this past year. Want to know why? Because my employer (I'm the CEO but it's a class C corporation) didn't agree to just let some company use our popular icon format w...

I'm pretty jazzed but I think we're getting close to where you'll be able to start posting articles via blog nav pro.  Which is much fatser than going through the web interface.

In business negotiations I work off a fairly straight forward principle: Enlightened self interest. This principle has many other terms that describe it. Win-Win, success has many fathers, to name two. I don't approach negotiations as a zero sum game.  With partners and employees, we try to do everything we can to make sure they benefit from the deal as much as possible as long as we too are benefiting at an acceptable level. Why? Because having other people rooting for your success i...

So I didn't win Michigan's Entrepreneur of the Year award this year. I was a finalist and so I'm told everyone who makes it that far is a "Winner". But the competition always brings into question, what exactly is an entrepreneur? How do you measure different levels of success? For example, is someone who inherited their business an entrpreneur? If so, how do you measure their entrepreneurship? And how do you measure entrpereneurship itself? Is it the number of jobs created? The revenued...

For some reason, it really pisses me off when someone argues that corporations aren't paying enough in taxes. And it really pisses me off when someone argues that there's these large tax shelters or loopholes. For a few days I couldn't figure out exactly why it ticks me off so much. I debate tons of issues on this site and none of them get me mad. Heck, sometimes I take up the opposing point of view just for a good debate. But on taxes, something about them really irritates me. I ha...

* What mistakes cost shareware developers the most money? Shareware authors that are too stingy in their restrictions initially or too easy in restrictions later on.  When you make a program, it needs to be usable enough that the potential customer can see what it does and how well it does it.  Some authors will cripple their program so much in fear that people won’t register it if it’s fully usable. But what happens is doing that causes the user to stop ev...

I founded my company back in 1991 technically.  I was a "DBA" (Doing business as") from my college dorm room. In 1993, I incorporated the company (or technically, my mom actually did the incorporation).  I was still about a year from graduation at that point. It was just me still. It wasn't until 1995 that I got an office and started hiring people to work with.  And I can tell you, my training in Electrical Engineering did not prepare me for being an employer. Based on so...

..Once upon a time I wanted to be an electrical engineer.  I would design the next generation computer CPUs. A job at Intel or Motorolla. But somewhere along the way I ended up writing some game for OS/2. I didn't even know how to program at the time. I bought "Teach Yourself C in 21 days" and a couple OS/2 programming books and wrote a game.  I didn't get actually paid for that game because the publisher ripped me off. Took the money and ran. So fine, I would write software and p...

Whenever I talk to someone looking for a job, I'm amazed at how often they are down on their own abilities.  What they don't realize is that the issue isn't always so much how good they are but rather how awful their competitors for many positions are. Since finding myself on the employing end of the business line, I've been shocked at how often people given every opportunity to succeed will still blow it.  Even when the position requires just showing up on time (or close to it) and...

In my personal life I tend to be quick with a smile and a joke.  I really enjoy trying to make people laugh and put them at ease.  But at work, it's a very different story - most of the time anyway.  When dealing with people in a professional setting one must try to have control of the perception they give off.  Effective business people have to be able to instill confidence and trust in those they interact with.  I don't always succeed in doing this since my natural ten...

Recently there's been an interesting discussion on WinCustomize.com about Stardock and PR. Simply put, Stardock's software is outstanding, but my outpsoken nature creates a lot of detractors for the company. If you think I'm in your face in politics or whatever here on JoeUser.com, you should see me in the "customization community".  I'm very opinionated and vigorously defend our software. Long ago, when Stardock was just a few people, the "customization community" consisted of ju...

American college graduates are making themselves increasingly vulnerable to outsourcing. I'm not the only one who thinks this. A top Intel executive has expressed this concern too . The problem is that American technology workers have a lethal combination upon graduation: A sense of entitlement and a lack of skills.  The sense of entitlement is the from the belief that simply graduating with a degree in engineering, computer science, information technology, etc. somehow should ent...

Quite regularly we get submitted a design document or prototype of some game or software idea or web concept from some ambitious young  person.  The proposal is usually quite vague but they insist it's a revolutionary idea that, once made, will make millions of dollars. They are quite..generous as well in their proposal offering to split the proceeds that their revolutionary product would make 50/50.  Others generously offer to sell us the concept for a reasonable cost.  "...