Joel Spolsky discusses the a mad experiment in undifferntiated work - work that isn't his core competency and that somebody could have done better and probably for a reasonable or lwoer cost.

Quoted: How Hard Could It Be?: Unfocused and Unabashed, Entrepreneurial Skills Article - A side project threatens to get totally out of control and I think,

The month's subscriber (not newsstand edition) has an article profiling 37signals. This is the link to the online version.

Quoted: 37signals isn't shy about dispensing one thing without charge: advice to small-business owners. On the company blog, Signal vs. Noise, Fried shares what he's learned about the art of streamlined teamwork with more than 65,000 readers. First, kill all your meetings; they waste employees' time. "Interruption is the biggest enemy of productivity," he says. "We stay away from each other as much as we can to get more stuff done." Use asynchronous communication and software instead to exchange information, ideas and solutions. Next, dump half your projects to focus on the core of your business. Too much time and effort are wasted on second-tier objectives. Third, let your employees decide when and where to work so they can be both efficient and happy. As long as their fingers are near a keyboard, they could as easily be in Caldwell, Idaho, as in Chicago.

You can now read the entire "Getting Real" book from the folks at 37signals online for free. This is my favorite book on building webapps.

The cranky product manager is a pretty funny blog where a product manager gets to unleash her alter-ego upon her foes.

An awesome post on the economics of great developers vs, good developers vs. poor developers.

Businessweek has done a very detailed story on Amazon's big new business as a web services provider.

Quoted: Yes, Amazon founder and Chief Executive Jeffrey P. Bezos, the onetime Internet poster boy who quickly became a post-dot-com pinata, is back with yet another new idea. Many people continue to wonder if the world's largest online store will ever fulfill its original promise to revolutionize retailing. But now Bezos is plotting another new direction for his 12-year-old company, which he will lay out on Nov. 8 at San Francisco's Web 2.0 Conference, the annual gathering of the digerati creme. Judging from an advance look he gave BusinessWeek on one recent gray day at Amazon's Seattle headquarters, it's so far from Amazon's retail core that you may well wonder if he has finally slipped off the deep end.

I really like the direction Amazon.com has been taking in the last couple of years with their major initiatives in the Web Services space. This article has Jeff Bezos discussing these new services at the Emerging Technology Conference.

Quoted: By making a handful of Web services applications open to outsiders, Amazon.com is building additional sources of revenue while creating computing models for the future, the CEO said at MIT's ongoing Emerging Technologies Conference.

This is a better and much more detailed article on the Google strategy to enter the enterprise market. I've excerpted one of the interesting bits below.

Right now, it looks like the largest "Achilles's heel" would be that the Google apps work only when a user is online. You need to export to Word, Excel, etc. to work on something locally. It's only a matter of time, however, before web constraint becomes a moot problem. Web penetration continues its advance and will acheive ominpresence for the vast majority of us within the next several years.

Couple the web presence argument with the fact that I can work locally on all of my docs using free Open Source apps like OpenOffice and we're already talking about free solutions available today which will do the work that more than 90% of us actually need it to.

The article points to Microsoft's weakness being in collaboration. I have to say I think that Microsoft has software that has tons of collabrative features that nobody knows how to use or which force bad choices (such as forcing a browser) on people. At work, we use Sharepoint for sharing a lot of docs. It works pretty well and thank heavens we have someone in the office (MIke), who knows the product really well and can show us all of the features that are in there as we need to use them.

As a Firefox user, Sharepoint's collaborative functions don't work (they require activex in ie). I had to download an extension for it to work there. On my mac, the extension is not available - so that just sucks.

I think Microsoft should spend some time crafting some new interfaces for the existing products. Put different faces on it for different markets and solve particular use cases really well. How hard would it be for them to cobble together a little Sharepoint, Outlook, and Project into one of the most kick-ass pieces of Program Management out there? You could get people buying more of the product they already own if you enable all of it online in some nice interfaces! Think 37signals and you have enough fun software to build for many millions of end-users.

Quoted: Google's plans include prompting people who send Microsoft Office documents using Gmail to translate those files into Google's formats for editing on Google.com, presumably in a forum where ad space is up for sale. Gmail messages that include attached files currently prompt users with links to download the documents or view them on the Web.

A great 37signal blog post on the act of writing, both in the literary sense and in the software sense.

Quoted: Whether we’re authoring software or prose, rewriting is key. Rewriting is when you turn good into great. It’s true for books, blog posts, marketing copy, interfaces, code, etc. For all of them, we grind it out. We get something down, share it, get feedback, revise, and then do it over again. We get where we’re going via lots of wrong turns.