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SuperMac War Story 10: The Video Spigot « Steve Blank

Steve Blank

A month or two before the QuickTime public announcement in May, the SuperMac hardware engineers (who had a great relationship with the QuickTime team at Apple) started a “ skunk works ” project. So SuperMac engineering also developed video compression software, called Cinepak. The software was idiot proof.

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Customer Development is Not a Focus Group

Steve Blank

As the engineers were busy rearchitecting the original Stanford MIPS chip into a commercial product, one of my jobs was to find out what features customers wanted. On the other hand, the Motorola 68000 microprocessor (used in the Sun and Apollo engineering workstations) and the IBM 360/370 mainframes were big-endian. What a great idea.

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Ardent 2: Get Out of My Building

Steve Blank

Marketing is Heard From Engineering was discussing how sophisticated the graphics portion of our computer should be, debating cost and time-to-market tradeoffs of arcane details such as double-buffering, 24 versus 32-bits of color, alpha channels, etc. The conversation that day would become one of my professional watermarks.

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Out of the Ashes - Something Isn't Quite Right

Steve Blank

The same issues arose time and again: big company management styles versus entrepreneurs wanting to shoot from the hip, founders versus professional managers, engineering versus marketing, marketing versus sales, missed schedule issues, sales missing the plan, running out of money, raising new money. Would you mind sharing them? Now In Print!

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The Intellectual Social Network

Start Up Blog

Palantir – we’ll build arcane analytics software, put the company in California, hire a bunch of new college grad engineers, many of them immigrants, hire no sales reps, and close giant deals with D.C.-based Twitter – it is like email, SMS, or RSS. To make you feel richer, we’ll make them green.

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Mentoring the mentors: Advice and inspiration for startup mentors

siliconflorist.com

Subscribe via RSS population: Blog. Senior Systems Engineer. Front-End Engineer. Distributed Systems Software Engineer. Platform Software Developer. Software Cloud Engineer III. Software Engineer. Senior Ruby Engineer. RELEASE ENGINEER. Silicon Florist. 3 Comments.

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Convertible Equity, A Better Alternative To Convertible Debt?

techcrunch.com

Director, Cloud Infrastructure & Operations Turn Security Solutions Architect Turn Software Engineer, Data Turn Web Developer HelloFax Princ Mobile Software Engineer Advertising.com. Your guide for the best gadget gifts of 2011. Crunchboard. Second generation Razer Blade upgrades innards, lowers price. About & Staff.

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