Billing Software Quotes

DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.

To most Christians, the Bible is like a software license. Nobody actually reads it. They just scroll to the bottom and click 'I agree'.

I am usually classed as a progressive, a liberal. But it seems to me that what I care most about is preserving a world that bears some resemblance to the past—a world with some ice at the top and bottom and the odd coral reef in between, a world where people are connected to the past and future (and to one another) instead of turned into obsolete software.

And do you know who wrote much of the software that allows you to access the Internet? Bill Joy.

Isn’t it amazing how many people in the world hate you? Most of them you will never even meet, and yet they really don’t like you at all. All the people who write software at Microsoft hate you, and so do most of the people who answer phones at Expedia.

I learned that Bill himself has long appreciated the importance of competencies other than talent. Back in the days when he had a more direct role in hiring software programmers at Microsoft, for instance, he said he’d give applicants a programming task he knew would require hours and hours of tedious troubleshooting. This wasn’t an IQ test, or a test of programming skills. Rather, it was a test of a person’s ability to muscle through, press on, get to the finish line. Bill only hired programmers who finished what they began.

Jobs spent part of every day for six months helping to refine the display. “It was the most complex fun I’ve ever had,” he recalled. “It was like being the one evolving the variations on ‘Sgt. Pepper.’ ” A lot of features that seem simple now were the result of creative brainstorms. For example, the team worried about how to prevent the device from playing music or making a call accidentally when it was jangling in your pocket. Jobs was congenitally averse to having on-off switches, which he deemed “inelegant.” The solution was “Swipe to Open,” the simple and fun on-screen slider that activated the device when it had gone dormant. Another breakthrough was the sensor that figured out when you put the phone to your ear, so that your lobes didn’t accidentally activate some function. And of course the icons came in his favorite shape, the primitive he made Bill Atkinson design into the software of the first Macintosh: rounded rectangles. In session after session, with Jobs immersed in every detail, the team members figured out ways to simplify what other phones made complicated. They added a big bar to guide you in putting calls on hold or making conference calls, found easy ways to navigate through email, and created icons you could scroll through horizontally to get to different apps—all of which were easier because they could be used visually on the screen rather than by using a keyboard built into the hardware.

the world hate you? Most of them you will never even meet, and yet they really don’t like you at all. All the people who write software at Microsoft hate you, and so do most of the people who answer phones at Expedia. The people at TripAdvisor would hate you, too, if they weren’t so fucking stupid. Almost all frontline hotel employees detest you, as do airline employees without exception. All the people who have ever worked for British Telecom, including some who died before you were born, hate you; BT employs

Undoubtedly well-meaning billionaires do it too. For example, an American software billionaire called Bill Gates has apparently donated $10 billion to create new vaccines. If Gates wants to do some good with his money he would surely be better advised to spend it on providing roads, clean water and reliable food supplies for the many oppressed countries where these things are desperately needed. Or he could spend some of his money campaigning against the selfish, imperialist and wicked policies of the American Government

In those olden times you didn't have to be a space scientist to manage the gadget that flicked your TV on and off... Doctors made house calls. Rabbis were guys. Kids were raised by their moms instead of in child-care pens like piglets. Software meant haberdashery. There wasn't a different dentist for gums, molars, fillings and extractions - one nerd managed the lot. If a waiter spilled hot soup on your date, the manager offered to pay her cleaning bill and sent over drinks, and she didn't sue for a kazillion dollars, claiming "loss of enjoyment of life.

There was, of course, one other option. Two years earlier Macworld magazine columnist (and former Apple software evangelist) Guy Kawasaki had published a parody press release joking that Apple was buying NeXT and making Jobs its CEO. In the spoof Mike Markkula asked Jobs, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling UNIX with a sugarcoating, or change the world?” Jobs responded, “Because I’m now a father, I needed a steadier source of income.” The release noted that “because of his experience at Next, he is expected to bring a newfound sense of humility back to Apple.” It also quoted Bill Gates as saying there would now be more innovations from Jobs that Microsoft could copy. Everything in the press release was meant as a joke, of course. But reality has an odd habit of catching up with satire.

A string of ones and zeroes was not a difficult thing for Bill Gates to distribute, once he’d thought of the idea. The hard part was selling it—reassuring customers that they were actually getting something in return for their money. Anyone who has ever bought a piece of software in a store has had the curiously deflating experience of taking the bright shrink-wrapped box home, tearing it open, finding that it’s ninety-five percent air, throwing away all the little cards, party favors, and bits of trash, and loading the disk into the computer. The end result (after you’ve lost the disk) is nothing except some images on a computer screen, and some capabilities that weren’t there before. Sometimes you don’t even have that—you have a string of error messages instead. But your money is definitely gone. Now we are almost accustomed to this, but twenty years ago it was a very dicey business proposition.

has a liberty and a license to do that. The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don’t apply to him. Because of how very sensitive he is, he knows exactly how to efficiently and effectively hurt someone. And he does do that. Every now and then a wise colleague would pull Jobs aside to try to get him to settle down. Lee Clow was a master. “Steve, can I talk to you?” he would quietly say when Jobs had belittled someone publicly. He would go into Jobs’s office and explain how hard everyone was working. “When you humiliate them, it’s more debilitating than stimulating,” he said in one such session. Jobs would apologize and say he understood. But then he would lapse again. “It’s simply who I am,” he would say. One thing that did mellow was his attitude toward Bill Gates. Microsoft had kept its end of the bargain it made in 1997, when it agreed to continue developing great software for the Macintosh. Also, it was becoming less relevant as a competitor, having failed thus far to replicate Apple’s digital hub strategy. Gates and Jobs had very different approaches to products and innovation, but their rivalry had produced in each a surprising self-awareness.

Walking back through the mall to the exit nearest our part of the parking lot, we passed one shop which sold computers, printers, software, and games. It was packed with teenagers, the kind who wear wire rims and know what the new world is about. The clerks were indulgent, letting them program the computers. Two hundred yards away, near the six movie houses, a different kind of teenager shoved quarters into the space-war games, tensing over the triggers, releasing the eerie sounds of extraterrestrial combat. Any kid back in the computer store could have told the combatants that because there is no atmosphere in space, there is absolutely no sound at all. Perfect distribution: the future managers and the future managed ones. Twenty in the computer store, two hundred in the arcade. The future managers have run on past us into the thickets of CP/M, M-Basic, Cobal, Fortran, Z-80, Apples, and Worms. Soon the bosses of the microcomputer revolution will sell us preprogrammed units for each household which will provide entertainment, print out news, purvey mail-order goods, pay bills, balance accounts, keep track of expenses, and compute taxes. But by then the future managers will be over on the far side of the thickets, dealing with bubble memories, machines that design machines, projects so esoteric our pedestrian minds cannot comprehend them. It will be the biggest revolution of all, bigger than the wheel, bigger than Franklin’s kite, bigger than paper towels.

Although thrilled that the era of the personal computer had arrived, he was afraid that he was going to miss the party. Slapping down seventy-five cents, he grabbed the issue and trotted through the slushy snow to the Harvard dorm room of Bill Gates, his high school buddy and fellow computer fanatic from Seattle, who had convinced him to drop out of college and move to Cambridge. “Hey, this thing is happening without us,” Allen declared. Gates began to rock back and forth, as he often did during moments of intensity. When he finished the article, he realized that Allen was right. For the next eight weeks, the two of them embarked on a frenzy of code writing that would change the nature of the computer business.1 Unlike the computer pioneers before him, Gates, who was born in 1955, had not grown up caring much about the hardware. He had never gotten his thrills by building Heathkit radios or soldering circuit boards. A high school physics teacher, annoyed by the arrogance Gates sometimes displayed while jockeying at the school’s timesharing terminal, had once assigned him the project of assembling a Radio Shack electronics kit. When Gates finally turned it in, the teacher recalled, “solder was dripping all over the back” and it didn’t work.2 For Gates, the magic of computers was not in their hardware circuits but in their software code. “We’re not hardware gurus, Paul,” he repeatedly pronounced whenever Allen proposed building a machine. “What we know is software.” Even his slightly older friend Allen, who had built shortwave radios, knew that the future belonged to the coders. “Hardware,” he admitted, “was not our area of expertise.”3 What Gates and Allen set out to do on that December day in 1974 when they first saw the Popular Electronics cover was to create the software for personal computers. More than that, they wanted to shift the balance in the emerging industry so that the hardware would become an interchangeable commodity, while those who created the operating system and application software would capture most of the profits.

Give us an idea of…” Noya Baram rubs her temples. “Oh, well.” Augie begins to stroll around again. “The examples are limitless. Small examples: elevators stop working. Grocery-store scanners. Train and bus passes. Televisions. Phones. Radios. Traffic lights. Credit-card scanners. Home alarm systems. Laptop computers will lose all their software, all files, everything erased. Your computer will be nothing but a keyboard and a blank screen. “Electricity would be severely compromised. Which means refrigerators. In some cases, heat. Water—well, we have already seen the effect on water-purification plants. Clean water in America will quickly become a scarcity. “That means health problems on a massive scale. Who will care for the sick? Hospitals? Will they have the necessary resources to treat you? Surgical operations these days are highly computerized. And they will not have access to any of your prior medical records online. “For that matter, will they treat you at all? Do you have health insurance? Says who? A card in your pocket? They won’t be able to look you up and confirm it. Nor will they be able to seek reimbursement from the insurer. And even if they could get in contact with the insurance company, the insurance company won’t know whether you’re its customer. Does it have handwritten lists of its policyholders? No. It’s all on computers. Computers that have been erased. Will the hospitals work for free? “No websites, of course. No e-commerce. Conveyor belts. Sophisticated machinery inside manufacturing plants. Payroll records. “Planes will be grounded. Even trains may not operate in most places. Cars, at least any built since, oh, 2010 or so, will be affected. “Legal records. Welfare records. Law enforcement databases. The ability of local police to identify criminals, to coordinate with other states and the federal government through databases—no more. “Bank records. You think you have ten thousand dollars in your savings account? Fifty thousand dollars in a retirement account? You think you have a pension that allows you to receive a fixed payment every month?” He shakes his head. “Not if computer files and their backups are erased. Do banks have a large wad of cash, wrapped in a rubber band with your name on it, sitting in a vault somewhere? Of course not. It’s all data.” “Mother of God,” says Chancellor Richter, wiping his face with a handkerchief.

told my people that I wanted only the best, whatever it took, wherever they came from, whatever it cost. We assembled thirty people, the brightest cybersecurity minds we have. A few are on loan, pursuant to strict confidentiality agreements, from the private sector—software companies, telecommunications giants, cybersecurity firms, military contractors. Two are former hackers themselves, one of them currently serving a thirteen-year sentence in a federal penitentiary. Most are from various agencies of the federal government—Homeland Security, CIA, FBI, NSA. Half our team is devoted to threat mitigation—how to limit the damage to our systems and infrastructure after the virus hits. But right now, I’m concerned with the other half, the threat-response team that Devin and Casey are running. They’re devoted to stopping the virus, something they’ve been unable to do for the last two weeks. “Good morning, Mr. President,” says Devin Wittmer. He comes from NSA. After graduating from Berkeley, he started designing cyberdefense software for clients like Apple before the NSA recruited him away. He has developed federal cybersecurity assessment tools to help industries and governments understand their preparedness against cyberattacks. When the major health-care systems in France were hit with a ransomware virus three years ago, we lent them Devin, who was able to locate and disable it. Nobody in America, I’ve been assured, is better at finding holes in cyberdefense systems or at plugging them. “Mr. President,” says Casey Alvarez. Casey is the daughter of Mexican immigrants who settled in Arizona to start a family and built up a fleet of grocery stores in the Southwest along the way. Casey showed no interest in the business, taking quickly to computers and wanting to join law enforcement. When she was a grad student at Penn, she got turned down for a position at the Department of Justice. So Casey got on her computer and managed to do what state and federal authorities had been unable to do for years—she hacked into an underground child-pornography website and disclosed the identities of all the website’s patrons, basically gift-wrapping a federal prosecution for Justice and shutting down an operation that was believed to be the largest purveyor of kiddie porn in the country. DOJ hired her on the spot, and she stayed there until she went to work for the CIA. She’s been most recently deployed in the Middle East with US Central Command, where she intercepts, decodes, and disrupts cybercommunications among terrorist groups. I’ve been assured that these two are, by far, the best we have. And they are about to meet the person who, so far, has been better. There is a hint of reverence in their expressions as I introduce them to Augie. The Sons of Jihad is the all-star team of cyberterrorists, mythical figures in that world. But I sense some competitive fire, too, which will be a good thing.

Bill Gates stated, “DNA is like a software program, only much more complex than anything we’ve ever devised.

A staggering $312 billion per year is spent on the wage bills for programmers debugging their software. To put that in perspective, that’s two times all Eurozone bailouts since 2008! This huge, but realistic, figure comes from research carried out by Cambridge University’s Judge Business School.[9] You have a responsibility to fix bugs faster: to save the global economy. The state of the world is in your hands.

The Henry Ford of the late 20th century was Bill Gates. Just as Ford revolutionised the transportation industry by creating a car that almost anyone could afford and drive, Bill Gates transformed the computer industry by designing software that enabled everybody - not just the specialised technocrats - to be able to use computers, and later making the personal computer a virtual necessity in every office, school and home. This resulted in Bill Gates accruing billions of dollars and becoming the richest man in America.

Back in the early days of the personal computer, IBM was the industry leader. In the early eighties they had just released the personal computer, and it was taking the business world by storm. They were so sure the profit was all in the hardware, and software was just a minor accessory. In their carelessness, they sold the software that ran their computers to an unknown Harvard dropout named Bill Gates, and they learned the hard way, the computer business is driven by applications, not by the hardware.

Although he always talked about technology and Oracle with passion and intensity, he didn’t have the methodical relentlessness that made Bill Gates so formidable and feared. By his own admission, Ellison was not an obsessive grinder like Gates: “I am a sprinter. I rest, I sprint, I rest, I sprint again.

Very few people writing about this new industry in the mainstream press truly understood how personal computers had already begun to revert to institutional machines. This was mainly because it was easier for most journalists of the early 1990s to envision and get personally excited about the potential of educational software, or of managing their personal finances, or organizing their recipes in the “digital” kitchen, or imagining how amateur architects could design funky homes right on their home computers. Who wouldn’t be excited about more power in the hands of people, the computer as an extension of the brain, a “bicycle for the mind,” as Steve put it? This was the story of computing that got all the ink, and it was a story no one unfurled as well as Steve. Bill Gates wasn’t swayed by that romance. He saw it as a naïve fantasy that missed the point of the much more sophisticated things PCs could do for people in the enterprise. A consumer market can be an enormously profitable one—put simply, there are so many more people than businesses that if you sell them the right product you can mint money. But the personal computers of that time still didn’t have enough power at a low enough price to excite the vast majority of consumers, or to change their lives in any meaningful way. The business market, however, was a different beast. The potential volume of sales represented by all those corporate desktops, in all those thousands of companies big and small, became the target of Bill Gates’s strategic brilliance and focus. Those companies paid good prices for the reliability and consistency that Windows PCs could deliver. They welcomed incremental improvement, and Bill knew how to give it to them. Steve paid lip service to it, but his heart wasn’t in it. He thrilled only to the concept of how a dramatically better computer could unlock even more potential for its user.

By the summer of 1988, Bill Gates was the leading representative of a new breed of tycoon: the software superrich. Just as oil created a kind of royalty in the last century, “wildcat” programmers had emerged among the wealthiest self-made men in America. Paul Allen, who had left Microsoft because of illness, was worth megamillions. So were the founders of other leading software companies. At the age of thirty-three, Gates was the youngest billionaire in the United States.

Bill Gates told me after Steve’s death. “You know, if you were going to do hardware and software together, and you’re going to do a few super, super nice designs, and you’re going to do it end-to-end where partnerships aren’t the key thing, where you control that experience totally. He managed a great organization that was purpose-fit to that.” We had been chatting about why so many books had been written promising to reveal how to do business “the Apple way,” or “the Steve Jobs way.” Bill was describing why Steve is a unique managerial case, someone whose model has limited applications. “Maybe you should call your book Don’t Try This at Home,” he said, only half joking. “So many of the people who want to be like Steve have the asshole side down. What they’re missing is the genius part.” One

668. Bill Gates is at the beach when he discovers a bottle in the surf. He pulls out the cork and a Genie appears. The Genie says, “I have been trapped for 100 years. As a reward you can make a wish.” Gates thinks about it as he carries the bottle back to his beach cottage. Once there, he goes to a bookshelf, pulls out an atlas and turns to a map of theMiddle East. This area has seen conflict and suffering for hundreds of years. What I wish for is peace in the Middle East. The Genie replies, “I don’t know I can do a lot, but this? Don’t you have another wish?” Bill Gates thinks and finally says, OK. The whole world hates Microsoft because we have conquered the software market and because Windows still crashes. I wish you would make everybody love us. The Genie says, Let me see that map again.

Don't let the case from 1995 fool you. Early Bill Gates Beige is just a color. Many wonders lurk therein." "Many wonders?" "A fast-as-hell processor. Shit-tons of memory. A hard drive that could crack nuts. And best of all, for our purposes, some very expensive audio editing software that I did not pay for." "Ah. And the rest of this stuff--over here on the bookcase?" "External drives. A CD burner. Extra parts. And that thing on the end that looks like a little hot plate is a mug-warmer my grandmother gave me for Christmas. So that's not part of FrankenHal.

Evolution is one of the most powerful and important ideas ever developed in the history of science. It describes all of life on Earth. It describes any system in which things compete with each other for resources, whether those things are microbes in your body, trees in a rain forest, or even software programs in a computer. It is also the most reasonable creation story that humans have ever found.

Here, instead, the dominance is inside the minds of people who buy software. Microsoft has power because people believe it does. This power is very real. It makes lots of money. Judging from recent legal proceedings in both Washingtons, it would appear that this power and this money have inspired some very peculiar executives to come out and work for Microsoft, and that Bill Gates should have administered saliva tests to some of them before issuing them Microsoft ID cards. But this is not the sort of power that fits any normal definition of the word “monopoly,” and it’s not amenable to a legal fix. The courts may order Microsoft to do things differently. They might even split the company up. But they can’t really do anything about a mindshare monopoly, short of taking every man, woman, and child in the developed world and subjecting them to a lengthy brainwashing procedure.

. Recommendation: One avenue for ensuring that all civilian CCTV equipment is SCORPION STARE compatible by 2006 is to exploit an initiative of the US National Security Agency for our own ends. In a bill ostensibly sponsored by Hollywood and music industry associations (MPAA and RIAA: see also CDBTPA), the NSA is ostensibly attempting to legislate support for Digital Rights Management in all electronic equipment sold to the public. The implementation details are not currently accessible to us, but we believe this is a stalking-horse for requiring chip manufacturers to incorporate on-die FPGAs in the one million gate range, re-configurable in software, initially laid out as DRM circuitry but reprogrammable in support of their nascent War on Un-Americanism. If such integrated FPGAs are mandated, commercial pressures will force Far Eastern vendors to comply with regulation and we will be able to mandate incorporation of SCORPION STARE Level Two into all digital consumer electronic cameras and commercial CCTV equipment under cover of complying with our copyright protection obligations in accordance with the WIPO treaty. A suitable pretext for the rapid phased obsolescence of all Level Zero and Level One cameras can then be engineered by, for example, discrediting witness evidence from older installations in an ongoing criminal investigation. If we pursue this plan, by late 2006 any two adjacent public CCTV terminals—or private camcorders equipped with a digital video link—will be reprogrammable by any authenticated MAGINOT BLUE STARS superuser to permit the operator to turn them into a SCORPION STARE basilisk weapon. We remain convinced that this is the best defensive posture to adopt in order to minimize casualties when the Great Old Ones return from beyond the stars to eat our brains.

As we founded, organized, and managed Intel, we found that all our employees “produce” in some sense—some make chips, others prepare bills, while still others create software designs or advertising copy. We also found that when we approached any work done at Intel with this basic understanding in mind, the principles and discipline of production gave us a systematic way of managing it, much as the language and concepts of finance created a common approach to evaluating and managing investments of any sort.

dominate. Bill Gates did not start out with the business model that made him rich and famous. Initially, after dropping out of Harvard, he and Paul Allen sold their own line of BASIC software for the Altair 8800.7 It was only when the company was about five years old, in 1981, that Gates found out that IBM was seeking an operating system for its proposed personal computer line. He bought an operating system from another company in Seattle, called it MS-DOS, licensed it to IBM, and built Microsoft into a juggernaut. You may not find the right business model on the first cut, so you may have to adapt—before you run out of cash.

After Apollo, Norton, still with TRW, worked on a project to computerize the distribution of hydroelectric power in the Northwest. He was still writing his painfully detailed critiques of other people’s software. As it happened, a high school senior named Bill Gates came to work for him as a programmer. Gates has credited Norton with being among his best software teachers. Norton surely learned more from reading our code than we learned from him. Users of Microsoft software might wish he had learned more.

As I reflect upon some of the exceptional leaders I’ve studied in my research, I’m struck by how Covey’s principles are manifested in many of their stories. Let me focus on one of my favorite cases, Bill Gates. It’s become fashionable in recent years to attribute the outsize success of someone like Bill Gates to luck, to being in the right place at the right time. But if you think about it, this argument falls apart. When Popular Electronics put the Altair computer on its cover, announcing the advent of the first-ever personal computer, Bill Gates teamed up with Paul Allen to launch a software company and write the BASIC programming language for the Altair. Yes, Gates was at just the right moment with programming skills, but so were other people—students in computer science and electrical engineering at schools like Cal Tech, MIT, and Stanford; seasoned engineers at technology companies like IBM, Xerox, and HP; and scientists in government research laboratories. Thousands of people could’ve done what Bill Gates did at that moment, but they didn’t. Gates acted upon the moment. He dropped out of Harvard, moved to Albuquerque (where the Altair was based), and wrote computer code day and night. It was not the luck of being at the right moment in history that separated Bill Gates, but his proactive response to being at the right moment (Habit 1: Be Proactive).

There’s nobody getting rich writing software that I know of.21 In

what about Bill Gates, famous for dropping out of Harvard to start Microsoft? When Gates sold a new software program as a sophomore, he waited an entire year before leaving school. Even then he didn’t drop out, but balanced his risk portfolio by applying for a leave of absence that was formally approved by the university—and by having his parents bankroll him. “Far from being one of the world’s great risk takers,” entrepreneur Rick Smith notes, “Bill Gates might more accurately be thought of as one of the world’s great risk mitigators.

And Moore’s Law gave us bad software: Instead of writing efficient code, programmers just waited until the computers got faster. I’m reminded of Blaise Pascal’s comment three centuries ago. Apologizing for a verbose letters he wrote “I have only made this [letter] longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

Bill Gates took a more aggressive view, purportedly saying, “A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer.

The bank knew exactly what it was looking for and how to go about it. There was consensus on two critical aspects: the system had to be centralized and had to be based on UNIX, even if that meant spending tonnes of money. MicroBanker, a fully integrated online banking automation system, developed by Citicorp Information Technology Industries Ltd (Citil), a Citibank subsidiary, fit the bill, but Citil was not willing to deal with HDFC Bank. A small outfit, Citil thought, would not be able to afford the system. Citil was expanding operations in Africa and Europe and was not too keen to sell the software to a start-up Indian bank. While Citil reluctantly made a presentation on the system, Citibank intervened before a deal could be signed, saying that selling MicroBanker to HDFC Bank could give the Indian bank more muscle as a competitor. Aditya had to call Rajesh Hukku, Citil head, to play ball and he relented. Citil later became i-Flex Solutions Ltd (now Oracle Financial Services Software Ltd).

The overwhelming favorites to dominate the race to become the so-called Information Superhighway were competing proprietary technologies from industry powerhouses such as Oracle and Microsoft. Their stories captured the imagination of the business press. This was not so illogical, since most companies didn’t even run TCP/IP (the software foundation for the Internet)—they ran proprietary networking protocols such as AppleTalk, NetBIOS, and SNA. As late as November 1995, Bill Gates wrote a book titled The Road Ahead, in which he predicted that the Information Superhighway—a network connecting all businesses and consumers in a world of frictionless commerce—would be the logical successor to the Internet and would rule the future. Gates later went back and changed references from the Information Superhighway to the Internet, but that was not his original vision. The implications of this proprietary vision were not good for business or for consumers. In the minds of visionaries like Bill Gates and Larry Ellison, the corporations that owned the Information Superhighway would tax every transaction by charging a “vigorish,” as Microsoft’s then–chief technology officer, Nathan Myhrvold, referred to it. It’s difficult to overstate the momentum that the proprietary Information Superhighway carried. After Mosaic, even Marc and his cofounder, Jim Clark, originally planned a business for video distribution to run on top of the proprietary Information Superhighway, not the Internet. It wasn’t until deep into the planning process that they decided that by improving the browser to make it secure, more functional, and easier to use, they could make the Internet the network of the future. And that became the mission of Netscape—a mission that they would gloriously accomplish.

To prevent the accelerated change and Unknown Results of rapid information flow, most societies dim the timebinding function by setting heavy taboos on speech, writing and other communications. Once these taboos began to break down — after the English and American Bills of Rights became widely copied — information flow increased markedly and the world began quantum-jumping from one reality-tunnel to another with dizzying rapidity. This so alarms conservatives (neophobes) that undoing the Bill of Rights has always played a central role in any conservative program.1

Bill Gates didn’t ask, “How do I build the best software in the world?” He asked, “How can I create the intelligence [the operating system] that will control all computers?” This distinction is one core reason why Microsoft became not just a successful software company but also the dominant force in computing—still controlling nearly 90% of the world’s personal computer market!

Although he always talked about technology and Oracle with passion and intensity, he didn’t have the methodical relentlessness that made Bill Gates so formidable and feared. By his own admission, Ellison was not an obsessive grinder like Gates: “I am a sprinter. I rest, I sprint, I rest, I sprint again.” Ellison had a reputation for being easily bored by the process of running a business and often took time off, leaving the shop to senior colleagues. One of the reasons often trotted out for Oracle’s success in the 1990s was Ellison’s decision to hire Ray Lane, a senior executive credited with bringing order and discipline to the business, allowing Ellison just to do the vision thing and bunk off to sail his boats whenever he felt like it. But Lane had left Oracle nearly eighteen months before after falling out with Ellison. Since then, Ellison had taken full control of the company—how likely was it that he would he stay the course? One reason to be skeptical was that Ellison just seemed to have too many things going on in his life besides Oracle. During the afternoon, we took a break from discussing the future of computing to take a tour of what would be his new home—nearly a decade in the making, and at that time, still nearly three years from completion. In the hills of Woodside, California, framing a five-acre artificial lake, six wooden Japanese houses, perfect replicas of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century originals in Kyoto, were under construction. The site also contained two full-size ornamental bridges, hundreds of boulders trucked in from the high Sierras and arranged according to Zen principles and an equal number of cherry trees jostling for attention next to towering redwoods. Ellison remarked: “If I’m remembered for anything, it’s more likely to be for this than Oracle.”3 In the evening, I noticed in Ellison’s dining room a scale model of what would become his second home: a graceful-looking 450-foot motor-yacht capable of circumnavigating the globe. Already the owner of two mega-yachts, bought secondhand and extensively modified (the 192-foot Ronin based in Sausalito and the 244-foot Katana, which was kept at Antibes in the South of France), Ellison wanted to create the perfect yacht. The key to achieving this had been his successful courtship of a seventy-two-year-old Englishman, Jon Bannenberg, recognized as the greatest designer of very big, privately-owned yachts. With a budget of $200 million—about the same as that for the Japanese imperial village in Woodside—it would be Bannenberg’s masterpiece. Bannenberg had committed himself to “handing over the keys” to Ellison in time for his summer holiday in 2003.

For less than the cost of a standard Windows license, you can download GNU tools and a fresh Linux kernel or good free software which you will enjoy much more.

farther than driving distance away. “Hello, I’m looking to buy a copy of Hellcat Ace.” “Hmm, I don’t think we carry that one—” “What?” he would fume. “What kind of computer store are you? Didn’t you see the review in Antic?” Then he would hang up in a huff, muttering about taking his business elsewhere. A week later he would call again, pretending to be somebody else. And a third time a week after that. He didn’t even have to call from different numbers, since caller ID was still as imaginary as Dick Tracy’s Apple Watch. Finally, on the fourth week, he’d use his professional voice. “Good afternoon, I’m a representative from MicroProse Software, and I’d like to show you our latest game, Hellcat Ace.” Spurred by the imaginary demand, they would invite him in. It seems utterly transparent in today’s marketing-savvy world, but in the era of mom-and-pop computer stores, it worked. Bill may very well have placed a call to every single outlet in the nation at that time, charming them with his energy and enthusiasm.

Simple Fast Funnels may be the new kid on the block when it comes to a complete bumper to bumper CRM system, but it’s a force to be reckoned with! Business owners are switching over right and left and I’m going to outline 10 of the best features of Simple Fast Funnels so you can see what all the buzz is about! Funnel builder: Simple Fast Funnels has easy intuitive software so you can build your own landing pages, funnels, websites, sales pages etc. No developer needed, everything included and simple to use Email Software: Instead of paying hundreds or thousands per month to send emails, this software does it for you! You can have your entire email list automated or send emails on the fly, whatever fits the bill for you, they’ve got you covered and it’s so easy to track your email results so you can modify and make improvements as you go. Online Membership Area: Now, for no additional fees that lot’s of CRM software likes to charge, you can build glorious membership areas for your clients. You can control timing on video releases, give access for certain time periods upset packages… whatever your business looks like, if you can dream it, you can build it in the membership area. Survey and quiz generator: Ramp up your lead capture game to grow your customer list! One of the best ways to get leads is to get your customers talking about themselves. Not only do people love to take surveys and quizzes, but it can help you gather information about your clients to serve them better and grow your sales! SMS Marketing Software: If you’re not messaging your customers, you’re missing out, and if you are messaging your customers you’re probably over paying. Amazing automated intuitive SMS marketing can make your life much easier and allow you to reach your customers in more ways. Being where your customers are more present is always good for business. Simple Fast Funnels helps you get the cheapest SMS rates around and it automatically integrates into the system for your unified messages. Appointment booking: Another expensive thing you used to have to pay for and try to get to work properly with your website AND look decent is also built right in. Now, without leaving Simple Fast Funnels, you’re able to capture the lead, follow up with the lead all over the place, engage with them, build trust, book appointments, schedule calls and even send them automated text reminders. E com Purchases: Directly on your website, you’ll be able to take payments. No more invoices sent from other platforms, everything buttoned up nice and clean. Unified messaging: From now on, whether a client emails, texts, calls etc, it all shows up in one place at your end. This might not seem like a big deal, but it’s a HUGE pain to have to follow customers about and keep track of conversations. Now you see all your communication with customers in a neat little area. Blogs: Blogs these days can really help your marketing efforts across the board, and of course your blogs will be a perfect fit in your simple fast funnel account. Analytics: Data tracking when you’re dealing with features on various platforms is a nightmare. If you capture a lead on a Word press landing page, send it an email software like Keep, mail chimp or whatever, send them to a new website to schedule calls and another to make purchases… How could you possibly expect to get good customer data? Hosting all of your “business” in one location makes tracking flawless. The more customers you have the more data you need to be efficient. Cheers to making it easy. All that software and that’s just the top 10, guys there’s more. Simplefastfunnels.com also lets you have a 2 week free trial. Don’t take anyone word for anything. Go try it for yourself.

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The GST is the new tax system that makes it mandatory for consumers to pay tax on every purchase of goods and services. The government has turned this tax system into a way of collecting small contributions from corporations to run the country.

They gave you, like, an hour of time. That’s all you’d get. But someone figured out that if you put in ‘time equals’ and then a letter, like t equals k, they wouldn’t charge you,” he said, laughing at the memory. “It was a bug in the software. You could put in t equals k and sit there forever.” Just look at the stream of opportunities that came Bill Joy’s way. Because he happened to go to a farsighted school like the University of Michigan,

The company currently controls more than twenty thousand patents, more than all but a few dozen companies in the world. This has led to some grumbling that IV is a “patent troll,” accumulating patents so it can extort money from other companies, via lawsuit if necessary. But there is little hard evidence for such claims. A more realistic assessment is that IV has created the first mass market for intellectual property. Its ringleader is a gregarious man named Nathan, the same Nathan we met earlier, the one who hopes to enfeeble hurricanes by seeding the ocean with skirted truck tires. Yes, that apparatus is an IV invention. Internally it is known as the Salter Sink because it sinks warm surface water and was originally developed by Stephen Salter, a renowned British engineer who has been working for decades to harness the power of ocean waves. By now it should be apparent that Nathan isn’t just some weekend inventor. He is Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer at Microsoft. He co-founded IV in 2000 with Edward Jung, a biophysicist who was Microsoft’s chief software architect. Myhrvold played a variety of roles at Microsoft: futurist, strategist, founder of its research lab, and whisperer-in-chief to Bill Gates. “I don’t know anyone I would say is smarter than Nathan,” Gates once observed.

Since then I have come to see that the best programmer doesn’t add ten times the value. She adds more like a hundred times. Bill Gates, whom I worked with while on the Microsoft board, purportedly went further. He is often quoted as saying: “A great lathe operator commands several times the wages of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth ten thousand times the price of an average software writer.” In the software industry, this is a known principle (although still much debated).

With a fixed amount of money for salaries and a project I needed to complete, I had a choice. I could hire ten to twenty-five average engineers or I could hire one “rock-star” and pay significantly more than what I’d pay the others, if necessary. Since then I have come to see that the best programmer doesn’t add ten times the value. She adds more like a hundred times. Bill Gates, whom I worked with while on the Microsoft board, purportedly went further. He is often quoted as saying: “A great lathe operator commands several times the wages of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth ten thousand times the price of an average software writer.” In the software industry, this is a known principle (although still much debated).

I joined Amazon in 2004 in the early days of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Once I joined, my boss explained the mission. Amazon was going to build enormous data centers and rent compute-power and storage capacity not as applications, but as building blocks that developers and other companies can use to build their apps. This would enable any developer and every company to leverage Amazon’s mastery of web-scale infrastructure. The service would be flexible, able to scale up and down on the fly. If your traffic surged for a few days, the “Elastic Compute Cloud” would simply throw extra computer horsepower at your website. When the surge ended, your virtual data center would shrink back down. You paid only for what you used. You paid a monthly bill, just like you do for your mobile phone and your electricity. The pay-for-what-you-use model was a huge breakthrough—maybe as significant as the technology itself.

At AWS, however, a lot of customers were just ordinary developers. Individual engineers or department managers could spin up a server and storage capacity at AWS just by entering a credit card number. When the company started using that application the IT department didn’t move the code back to their in-house data center. They left it on AWS. As their usage went up, so did their monthly bills. And because of it, developers gained much more influence over how companies bought infrastructure.

Richard Dawkins had hit the nail on the head in his 2006 book, “The God Delusion,” with the assertion that children accept freely the teachings of their parents as fact. My friend Bill Morgan, an apostate who was on the founding staff of Oral Roberts University in the 60s, likened religious indoctrination to installing a program on a child’s mental hard drive. Parents write the code and install the software, but their religious program carries no uninstall solution. As with any computer program, the code can be wiped and replaced, but only by outside means, often requiring painstaking effort, and in many instances, the user has no idea the removal option is even there.

it was the strength of each company’s original business model that made it so hard to move on. What software products could Microsoft possibly develop that would deliver better margins than Windows and Office, even today? None! But the days of extraordinary profit margins for packaged software seem to be over

If healthcare providers want to use CPT codes in health IT software, and they must in order to legally bill third parties for healthcare services, they must license them from the AMA to avoid a legal fight.

¿cómo sabrás que ya está terminada? Usemos como ejemplo la historia de Stoll: Como médico de fuerzas especiales, debo enseñar fisiología básica a mis alumnos, para que conozcan el cuerpo humano. Yo uso siempre un recurso nemotécnico para saber si una historia está lista. Fue creado por Bill Wake, especialista en diseño de software. Wake dice que para que una historia esté lista debe cumplir los criterios INVEST (“Invierte”): Independiente. Debe ser practicable y completable por sí sola. No debe depender inherentemente de ninguna otra. Negociable. Hasta que no esté terminada, debe ser posible reescribirla, llevar integrada la tolerancia a cambios. Valiosa. Tiene que aportar valor a un cliente, usuario o interesado. Estimable. Debe ser posible evaluarla.

BillingParadise has developed a dedicated software for workflow management. A web application that addresses the revenue cycle challenges of single physician practice owner to Hospital CFOs. From tracking denials to Cross-team collaboration to monitor denial workflow and generating reports with just few clicks. We have given a simple demo of denial management process optimization and workflow management module here. This demo will walk you through, how decision makers like you can zero-down on denied claims. Thus increase revenue by improving productivity and cut costs. We offer software as a service package. Call +1 888-571-9069 For more information, contact: BillingParadise 2009 N. Lynn Taylor, TX 76574, United States. Phone: +1 214-783-6295

Business people complained to us that the technologists they worked with cared more about getting the "latest and greatest" software or device than about actually doing their jobs. Geeks responded that the business people had no respect for the technology and what it could do. Suits griped that technologists spoke gobbledygook and could not make themselves clear to mere mortals. Techies shot back that the business people couldn't be bothered to learn even the most basic elements of the systems their companies depended on, and that explaining these concepts to someone determined not to learn them was impossible.

Online Customer Service Software is there to make your clients happy with the administration their getting. Regardless of what you offer or the sort of administration that your give, Online Customer Service Software is required, in light of the fact that there will dependably be clients looking for help. Regardless of whether you have a broad learning base, he or she, would not have the capacity to glance around and locate the essential data, and they should talk with your live work force. Particularly in the event that you are in the internet business, Online Customer Service Software is a flat out must. The genuine inquiry is how you might give client benefit as a feature of your online experience. All things considered, it’s in reality simpler than what you presumably envision. There are a few essential parts of Online Customer Service Software – Live Chat, Order Tracking, Support Tickets, and Phone Support. Live Chat is for sure the best alternative after telephone bolster. The HP Phone Number search colossal thing about Live Chat is that there are no costs related with it, other than paying the help group, however you do that at any rate. This is a genuine favorable position contrasted with telephone bolster where you would need to give clients a sans toll number and pay the bills. With Live Chat, clients can login with only a username and have their inquiries addressed live by a tech individual. Its fortunate is that they can get immediate connects to specific pages that will hold any importance with them and their individual issues. What is more, we should not overlook that with Live Chat, the give tech individual you are paying can benefit in excess of one client at any given moment, by talking with each client in a different window, something that is outlandish with telephone bolster. Online Customer Service Jobs Can Be the Best Work On the off chance that you are offering an item on the web, at that point a noteworthy piece of your Online Customer Service Software ought to be Order Tracking. The vast majority of the request you will get from clients will be concerning the status of their request, if it’s handled or not. With robotized arrange following, you will spare a considerable measure of time and pick up the capacity to deal with the additionally squeezing parts of your business. Bolster Tickets are additionally critical. Once in a while, you will have clients with some more significant issues that your tech work force will be notable handle. In such circumstances, individuals from the help group are prepared to compose a virtual ticket heightening the issue to the given division inside your association that can explain it. For instance, a given customer may be twofold charged, however a client bolster part does not have the rights to process a chargeback, so he or she should compose a ticket to the charging branch of your organization clarifying the issue.

By 2008, storm clouds were gathering over Microsoft. PC shipments, the financial lifeblood of Microsoft, had leveled off. Meanwhile sales of Apple and Google smartphones and tablets were on the rise, producing growing revenues from search and online advertising that Microsoft hadn’t matched. Meanwhile, Amazon had quietly launched Amazon Web Services (AWS), establishing itself for years to come as a leader in the lucrative, rapidly growing cloud services business. The logic behind the advent of the cloud was simple and compelling. The PC Revolution of the 1980s, led by Microsoft, Intel, Apple, and others, had made computing accessible to homes and offices around the world. The 1990s had ushered in the client/server era to meet the needs of millions of users who wanted to share data over networks rather than on floppy disks. But the cost of maintaining servers in an ever-growing sea of data—and the advent of businesses like Amazon, Office 365, Google, and Facebook—simply outpaced the ability for servers to keep up. The emergence of cloud services fundamentally shifted the economics of computing. It standardized and pooled computing resources and automated maintenance tasks once done manually. It allowed for elastic scaling up or down on a self-service, pay-as-you-go basis. Cloud providers invested in enormous data ​centers around the world and then rented them out at a lower cost per user. This was the Cloud Revolution. Amazon was one of the first to cash in with AWS. They figured out early on that the same cloud infrastructure they used to sell books, movies, and other retail items could be rented, like a time-share, to other businesses and startups at a much lower price than it would take for each company to build its own cloud. By June 2008, Amazon already had 180,000 developers building applications and services for their cloud platform. Microsoft did not yet have a commercially viable cloud platform. All of this spelled trouble for Microsoft. Even before the Great Recession of 2008, our stock had begun a downward slide. In a long-planned move, Bill Gates left the company that year to focus on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But others were leaving, too. Among them, Kevin Johnson, president of the Windows and online services business, announced he would leave to become CEO of Juniper Networks. In their letter to shareholders that year, Bill and Steve Ballmer noted that Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes, had been named the company’s new Chief Software Architect (Bill’s old title), reflecting the fact that a new generation of leaders was stepping up in areas like online advertising and search. There was no mention of the cloud in that year’s shareholder letter, but, to his credit, Steve had a game plan and a wider view of the playing field.

Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) have been around in the telecom world since the dawn of the 21st century. However, since their inception, their role has kept on changing. From broadly voice-based service providers to 3G purveyors, MVNOs have evolved in their services with time. Nowadays, in this world of intense competition, the success of MVNO completely depends on their ability to think out of the box. It is their ingenuity in creating customer-driven plans that decides their fate in today’s heavily saturated telecom market. The present-day MVNO subscribers are finicky, moody and disloyal. It is an MVNO’s task to inspire confidence in them, attract them towards their services and ensure that they stay loyal. The Challenge Faced by Different MVNOs Evoking customer trust and then ensuring that it is maintained is probably the toughest challenge faced by an MVNO in telecom. Especially in the competitive world of today that demands a differentiation in service along with an attractive pricing model. Based on their infrastructural capabilities, MVNOs can be divided into: 1. Skinny MVNOs: Equipped with their own voice mail, content applications, SMSC, prepaid and VAS. 2. Thin MVNOs: Apart from the infrastructure above, they also have AUC, EIR, HLR, and IN. 3. Thick MVNOs: Along with infrastructure of a thin MVNO, thick MVNOs also have a VLR and MSC. Regardless of the kind of MVNO that you are running, there are some major challenges that you need to overcome. While a skinny MVNO does not have to worry too much about the infrastructure, he cannot scale his operations as well as a thin or thick MVNO. On the other hand, a thick MVNO may be able to scale his operations well, but he might get too involved in managing the infrastructure with very little time for branding and marketing. The Importance of MVNE/MVNA Partnership for Overcoming Challenges As MVNOs are considerably smaller than a full-fledged MNO (Mobile Network Operator), they need support from MVNEs (Mobile Virtual Network Enablers) to get their job done. A capable MVNE with a comprehensive MVNO software solution like Telgoo5 can provide the following benefits to an MVNO: 1. Better billing – Billing is probably the toughest task for an MVNO to undertake all by itself. Any mistake or inefficiency in billing tasks can have a major bearing on MVNO subscribers. But when you partner with an MVNE like Vcare, you get access to a cutting-edge MVNO billing software solution. With a convergent billing solution by your side, you can create itemized bills with details of all types of services used by your subscribers. 2. Profitable deals with MNOs – Partnership with a competent MVNE/MVNA can help you get better-priced deals with an MNO. This will allow you to deliver the services at a lower rate to your MVNO subscribers while still making a profit. 3. Avoid red tape – Running a successful MVNO operation requires you to get into contracts with different carriers and vendors. By partnering with a competent MVNE like Vcare (who already has fully-licensed platforms and contracts with vendors), you are able to bypass the process of signing new deals, thereby saving considerable time and effort.