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...

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.

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...

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...

Over the past several months we've been hiring a lot of people.  So this weekend I decided to put together a little orientation power point that our HR people can eventually use to help introduce new people to the company. One of the things I wanted to put in there (and did) was our overall philosophy. "The Stardock Way" if you will. I've posted about it before but I've modified it as I've learned more on business and life in general. Here's the 10 rules we use to guide ourselves by: ...

Some people have argued that JoeUser makes money from ad revenue. Of course, the real question isn't whether it makes money but rather it nets money. Here's what it "made" in February: JoeUser 163,337  93  0.1%   $15.66 That's 164,337 impressions for the google ad. 93 click thrus. .1% conversion rate for $15.66. Now, I don't think anyone needs to be an IT manager to know what the net revenue is. But that's fine.  The site doesn...

I am talentless. It's true.  I have no natural talents.  I have interests though. Lots of them. And that's part of my problem.  My obsessive compulsive nature tends to allow me to focus on becoming decent at a lot of things but never attain any masterhood.  Not that I could anyway because -- like I said -- I have no natural talents and to become a master at anything, you really need to have a talent in that area. Just looking around where I work I see it all the time. ...

A friend of mine and I have debated about companies using H1B visas to get skilled technical people into the US. Stardock uses H1B visas a lot.  But only 65,000 of them are given out by the US government.  Politicians, who typically have no understanding of business, think that these tight limits will encourage companies to look harder for Americans to fill positions.  That's incredibly naive.  The reality is that companies who find talented people overseas that they can't...

The Detroit News just had an article on how the United States, and Michigan in particular, is starting to fall behind in terms of being able to produce enough qualified people with technical degrees (Physics, Math, Engineering, Computer Science, etc.). When combined with the very restrictive H1B Visas to bring in good candidates from overseas, companies are finding themselves increasingly outsourcing for these key future markets.  We're not talking outsourcing guys to India to work ...

This December will be the 6th year that Stardock has been a Windows ISV.  In December 1999, Object Desktop for Windows was released. And by this December, WindowBlinds 5 will hopefully be ready for release (though no promises, nothing ships until it's ready).  Back in 1999, there were only a handful of us in a tiny office in Livonia.  Now, there's over three-dozen of us in multiple locations.  I think the key to having a successful company in the long-term is to develo...

A long-time friend of mine is facing real difficulties right now over at the site he helped create -- deviantART.com. It's almost a text-book example of business men vs. engineers on the surface.  The idea guys, the founders, the visionaries versus the suits, money men, and biz guys. In these situations, the biz guys almost always win because they are the ones who have put together all the legal paperwork for the company and can make sure they are legally unassailable by founders wh...

From my work I come into contact with all kinds of people.  I've been traveling a lot and have had the opportunity to talk to people who work at other compainies. And one of the types of people that I occasionally run into could be labeled as "frustrated talented guy".  They are often frustrated because they feel they should be promoted, make more money, given more authority, etc. based strictly on their inate talent. But talent really isn't enough, not usually and certainly no...

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...