Recently on Vulture Central I read an article by Matt Asay about how Venture Capitalism is both the boon and death of startups, based on some research by the Startup Genome project, and some analytical thinking by Asay.

Now, I won’t say whether or not I agree or disagree, specifically. There’s some interesting thought going on in his article.  Maybe he’s even completely right.  I certainly wouldn’t put any of my own money down on that though.

But I also feel that the conclusion pretty much misses the obvious, that it’s not Venture Capitalism that determines success or failure, but experience.

Frankly, I have absolutely no difficulty in believing that 90% of startups kick the bucket in six months or less. Why? Because not every idea is a good idea. But goodness knows how we all like to think that our brainchild is the best thing since sliced bread. Or we like to think that just because we thought of it, we must have been the first to have thought of it.

The sad truth is, most brilliant new ideas are neither new, nor brilliant.

And that’s not even counting legality, not to mention feasibility, which are often overlooked factors as well.

So yeah, I have absolutely no difficulty whatsoever believing that 90% of all startups are doomed to fail, and to do so quite quickly. Likely about as quickly as it takes to take an idea from a thought bubble into the dangerous realm of Reality, where we all know theories often fail to stand up on their own two feet.

More experienced people will be more likely to be familiar with things that have already been done. Or with concepts that actually have use, have value. More experienced people will also (hopefully) have learned life’s lessons about how to take criticism (constructive or not) and learn from it. How to adapt and change direction, even if it means your pet project’s base concept needs tweaking or a flat-out new destination. Because when you get Venture Capital, you’ve got have the perception of where the project is going, without getting swept up in someone else’s ideas. Likewise, your experience has to give you enough cojones to stand up to the Big Investor to do what’s right for the project even if the investor doesn’t necessarily agree. For your startup to work, you have to be The Expert. And by definition, that takes experience.

And we all know, there’s a big difference between thinking that you know it all, and actually knowing it all. Between having all the answers, and having the wisdom to know that you don’t know.

You can call it flexibility all that you like, but it plain comes down to having experience enough, being wise enough, to know that not every idea is brilliant, not every idea is new, and not every idea starts out fully thought through. For a startup to succeed, it needs an experienced head to first validate the merit of the idea, and then lead that idea through a full product lifecycle.

It’s the difference between a “computer programmer” and a “software engineer”. There’s a world of experience more in knowing how to engineer a product, through a full lifecycle no less, than there is in just scripting some vague idea together as a proof of concept. Experience matters. And experience is not something learned in a class. It’s something learned by doing. I’m not saying that every kid out of college (or still in it) is destined to fail with their brilliant idea-turned-startup. But I am saying that I have absolutely no difficulty believing that 90% failure rate.  Generally speaking, every rule has an exception that proves it.

Or, there’s always blind dumb luck. One can never discount that. Having your baby bought out by a bigger fish because it sounded useful, or competitive, so that you have “success” long before having had the opportunity to fail, that’s the best kind of start-up luck there is for a lot of them.

But I do pretty much agree with Asay’s conclusion, that developers just need to focus on developing. Don’t focus on selling the idea so much that you forget to that it’s the product that you’re supposed to be selling.

Sell the steak, not the sizzle.  In any industry.

And one major trip-up is how all too often the tech industry, and especially the social media hype on ye olde interwebs, focuses on what is shiny and new; completely to the neglect of what is tried and true. A stable business plan isn’t to jump onto the latest marketspeak bandwagon. (Or to try to beat it to the punch.) It isn’t to pretend to innovate. A stable business plan is to meet an actual need, often by refining an existing idea. There’s really not much new under the sun. Don’t re-invent the mousetrap. Just build a better one. And make sure that it’s significantly improved enough, and or cheap enough, that using the old one isn’t worth it.  Facebook is just a Geocities webepage with an easy build interface and a built-in message board.  Things people used to construct manually.  Tweets are just micro-blogged emails.  Something you could set up a server to do if you ever felt like it.  These aren’t new ideas, they’re significant improvements on existing ones.  Something that experience can recognize.

Just like how Venture Capital is always a good thing.  It’s the strings that may come attached from the Venture Capitalist that can be bad.  It’s not having the experience to wisely use that capital, to avoid those strings, to stand up when you need to, and sit down when you don’t, that kills your startup.  Like any tool, the “good” or “bad” of it isn’t in the tool itself.  The gun isn’t evil.  It’s the person using it that’s the problem.  A startup without experience is Russian Roulette.  It may sound harsh, but 90% pretty much speaks for itself, no?  Most revolvers only hold 6 rounds.  Do the math.

I’d also be hesitant to be using the initialism “VC” as an abbreviation for Venture Capital in any discussion about software development, where Microsoft’s Visual C++ is commonly abbreviated as VC. Those literal-minded software engineers just might get confused.

That’s my two cents anyway.  In that generally speaking nothing on this website has ever claimed to be a definitive “expert” guide to anything, make of my opinions what you will.

Apple Macintosh computers have long gone unnoticed in the computer security world.  Mainly because hackers have rarely targeted them.  Why target a system with such a small market share when there’s Windows to exploit?  But lately the Mac is making headway in the war against Windows, and black hats have taken notice.

Bundled in with illegal downloads of things like Apple’s iWork 09 productivity suite and Adobe’s Photoshop CS4 from warez websites have come something new: A Macintosh-specific trojan horse virus.  And not just any virus, but a complex and elegant botnet.  Otherwise known as OSX.Trojan.iServices.A and OSX.Trojan.iServices.B, just iServices.A and iServices.B, or just generally grouped as OSX.Iservice, this botnet trojan is no simple bang-out from your average script kiddie.  It has its own peer-to-peer (p2p) engine, it has startup and encryption services, and it is designed around a highly adaptable structure.  In other words, it’s everything a dangerous virus should be.  And the botnet of zombie-Macs infested with this virus is already launching Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, just like you’d expect from a PC.

“The code indicates that, wherever possible, the author tried to use the most flexible and extendible approach when creating it – and therefore we would not be surprised to see a new, modified variant in the near future,” say virus researchers Mario Ballano Barcena and Alfredo Pesoli.  To which they add, “With malware authors showing an increasing interest in the Mac platform, we believe that more advanced [user interface] spoofing tricks may be seen in the future.”

I’ve been warning about it for a long time.  As Macs regain popularity (especially in light of the world disgruntled with Windows Vista) the “safety” of the Apple Macintosh is a thing of the past.  The only reason Macs traditionally haven’t been riddled with viruses like PCs have is because Macs are a niche market.  But as their market share grows, so too does the big bullseye on them.  We’ve been seeing more viruses hitting Macintoshes lately, and now we’ve seen the first true in-the-field Mac zombie botnet.  Mac security may never be the same again.  The curtain has been pulled, and we’ve found The Wizard to be nothing more than the same hackable software of everyone else.

 Windows Vista Employee Timekeeping:

The first bad idea comes to light as a series of lawsuits against employers.  Their bad idea?  Tying in a time-keeping system for logging hourly employee hours into the startup and shutdown of an employee’s Windows Vista PC.  At first glance the idea sounds reasonable enough.  You identify how many hours an employee has worked by how many hours their computer has been on.  Simple and efficient.  Way better than some error-prone clock and paper stub system, right?

Well.

…Err…

Wrong.

Hence the lawsuits.  Now you’d think Microsoft might be to blame in this one, because everyone loves to blame Microsoft and it is Windows Vista.  And in a way Microsoft is to blame… just not legally.  The problem, you see, is that in some cases Windows Vista is taking over 15 minutes to start up or shut down.  And so employees on this computer-driven clock are sitting there for fifteen minutes at startup before being “clocked in” and likewise again at shutdown before being “clocked out”.  In these really bad cases, that’s a half of an hour a day that the employee is not being payed.  At five days a week that’s two and a half hours of unpayed time.  It adds up fast.  Even the employees who suffer less because they have faster PCs are still accumulating hours and hours of unpaid time over the course of their employment.  And obviously, to them, that stinks.

Clearly the idea of using the computer for timekeeping is in need of some adjustment.

US Army USB Sticks:

So you’re a soldier in the Army.  You don’t always have access to a nice handy network for delivering files.  So you have your handy-dandy military issued USB stick.  It’s a simple solution to data mobility.  Which is great.  Until some schmuck brings in a virus.  Uh oh!

Yeah.

The Agent-BTZ worm, a modification of the SillyFDC worm, has been thrashing the US Army so badly that until they get it nailed down, no one is allowed to use any portable media solution.  No USB sticks!

Once the infection is removed, military issued portable media will be allowed once more.  But all of those naughty naughty soldiers and civilian contractors will have to stop using their own personal devices.

It actually comes as a surprise that the US Army didn’t see this coming.  Or maybe they did but they had no solution.  It seems like Windows autorun feature would be the first hurdle to tackle.  In a high-security environment, it’s kind of bad to just automatically run executable code when you stick a device into a PC on a highly secured network.  Next would be a good idea to do the opposite: Run a security program to scan any device for viruses automatically when it’s plugged into such a computer.  (Or even on any CD/DVD/Blu Ray/etc.)  And then of course, obviously, control the use of non-issued media. There are always rules about such things, but never complete enforcement.

Because keyloggers and remote executables on highly sensitive military servers is “A Bad Thing”.

Apple MacBook DisplayPort:

So you bought a shiny new Apple MacBook, and you’re all happy.  You hook up your old monitor to it (or one you bought on discount, et cetera) using a DisplayPort to DVI or VGA connector and sit down to watch this great video you bought from iTunes to celebrate your new purchase.

Only to have your new computer tell you that you can’t play your protected content on your unprotected screen.

Doh!

Yeah.

Because Apple’s DisplayPort is basically an HDMI port, using a built in copy-protection system like HDMI’s High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP).  Only, because it’s Apple, they made it proprietary and call it DisplayPort Content Protection (DPCP).  It’s basically the same thing.  Before it will play, the media player asks if the media displayer (the monitor or TV) can decode the encrypted signal it’s about to send to it.  If it can’t do so, it doesn’t play.  This keeps pirates from grabbing an unencrypted video mid-stream and recording it.

There’s just one problem.  Apple’s DisplayPort is basically new and basically unused, because it’s proprietary.  So there aren’t many monitors or TVs out there that support it, and certainly buying a new one is expensive.  And Apple, the micro-managing control monster that they are, don’t give you unprotected VGA or DVI ports on MacBooks.  So you can’t connect your monitor or TV up to your MacBook in a way that skips this annoying layer of DPCP copy protection.  You have to do it through the protected DisplayPort in some way.  Meaning, basically, you’re screwed.  So you either have to buy a brand new Apple monitor, or settle for watching the video on your little laptop screen.  (Is there even a TV that will support it?)

You see, this is where PCs have that awkward advantage.  Because PC manufacturers really don’t care.  They’re not there to control your ever move.  In fact, they’re quite “open”.  So even though your PC might have a similar (though much more widely used standard) HDCP copy protection over an HDMI cable connection, it will also have a DVI or VGA port (or even component, s-video, or composite video cable option) where it will let you connect up to any old TV or monitor and play your protected videos.

I don’t think Apple really appreciated the number of MacBook owners that would, you know, actually use iTunes?  Or Apple just didn’t appreciate the number of people that actually wanted to watch their videos on a screen larger than a laptop?

Hmm…

Either way, Apple is not exactly impressing customers with this.

And so long as Apple continues to ship notebooks with only a DisplayPort (no DVI or VGA port) Apple customers will continue to have this problem.

At least until some inspired hack builds a DisplayPort to DVI converter that uses the converter to respond back to the MacBook that all is secure instead of letting the monitor/TV do that.  But that would probably be illegal as it’d circumvent security measures.