Is Steve Jobs Brilliant and Creative? I think not!

Today somebody sent an email about how Steve Jobs is creative and brilliant. This reminded me of my friend overhearing a conversation from an old lady about how Bill Gates created Internet.

If we really think about Jobs, what do we really know about him? Here was my response to email, you make your own opinion:
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I differ in opinion. I do not know if he is brilliant or creative. We give all credit of iPhone to Jobs but do we know who came up with the idea or business model? I can almost bet that most big companies it is not the CEO who comes up with best ideas.

Also, the multi billion dollar creative idea called "iPhone" has been "out in the open" for 3+ years now, how come nobody can compete even now? If he was so brilliant, how come he failed at Next? How come Mac is not as popular as PC? Calling him creative and brilliant does not explain his failures. So the question is what is he good at and what he is not good at?

Jobs skills are not creativity or brilliance. He has only one skill, he
can create amazingly efficient teams. Starting from 1 person team (Steve W.) to currently massive company called Apple. These teams execute at speeds that other companies cannot. If you read about what he did in Pixar, you can see hints of his strategy. He failed at Next because despite his superb team which resulted in an amazing product, his business vision failed, same story with Mac. He even admitted it during iPhone's early days that Apple has made some mistakes with Mac that they will not make with iPhone.

Team is No 1 factor in success or failure of a company... or so I believe

Give a man a fish OR teach a man to fish

With Bill Gates billions of dollars committed to charity, Warren Buffet's billions donated to charity, Bill Clinton's 4Billion collected for charity each year and billions other collected by redcross, churches and thousands of other organizations, how much money do we collect in total per year for charity and basic human needs? Out of these billions, how many are wasted back on collecting more money?

Most of the organizations I know plan to survive on charity year after year instead of building a sustainable long term model. As I read somewhere, essentially the best way to solve issues is to encourage or incentivize entrepreneurs to solve the issues. Dont we have better chances of solving these issues once political bureaucracy is eased for entrepreneurs to take over?

California shortage of funds, prisoner release and people willing to work for food...

First, I promise I will try to stay in touch more than I have. I will write not only about what is going on with iGifter but also about other thoughts and ideas.

Today I am going to write about my thoughts on charity. A few days ago I was discussing charity with a friend and she said that governments could feed all hungry children, at least in India and China, i.e. if they wanted to. I did some quick rough calculations and found that it is indeed economically feasible.

Today's http://blog.google.org/ and previous news of California releasing a third of its prisoners triggered another thought. While there are no jobs or food in many countries, California is unable to contain its costs despite being one of the most educated and flourished states. USA has consulates all across the world, why can they not do the same with prisons? This would not only cut the costs but also employ many people in countries where they are willing to work for food. Oh and not to mention, if the prisoner escapes, they still do not end up in US.

Yes it would be a political nightmare but an economic possibility.

Members,

We thank you for all your support. We are not only growing but also adding features rapidly. We just enabled another feature to use google groups for discussions and email notifications. Now you will automatically get subscribed to the group when you join iGifter and you can manage the subscription settings yourself. This not only gives flexibility to our members but also frees us from managing email lists.

We are going to focus on organic growth and we need your help to spread the word around for this. We are constantly working on new features and adding new gifts. These two items together will ultimately serve the best for our members.

That is all we have for today. Have a happy thanksgiving.
- Founders
founders@igifter.com

Public launch

Friends,

Today we achieved the most important milestone so far. iGifter is now ready for prime time. It took us a while but the product is fully baked. Here is a short list of improvements we made:
1. Increased scalability to be able to handle millions of users
2. Increased performance for a subsecond response time while searching.
3. Improved smart proxy to detect google search, yahoo search, msn search, AOL search, ask search.
4. Improved website to add member discussion
5. Added a user profile page for members who want to opt out of our emails
6. Added functionality to allow members select their own choice of gifts.
7. Create iGoogle plugin.
8. Many bug fixes

We are working on many new features. You can always suggest new feature suggestions to founders@igifter.com or simply post in User forums. You will hear from us more regularly, in the mean time feel free to get in touch with us anytime you wish!

Sincerely,
- iGifter Founders

iGifter Beta launch ... take 2

Greetings everybody,

Today we are launching iGifter beta once again with new technology. When we launched in January we were only able to support FF2+ and IE7+ partially. After that we were able to make some breakthroughs and decided to rewrite the entire website. We are proud to say that now we support IE6+ and FF1.0 which covers more than 95% of browsers in existence today. We believe other browsers will also work with this technology although they are untested as yet.

We are a very young, bootstrapped company. This means we are also very short on resources and money. This sometimes delays our plans. Please report bugs, fixes, suggestions, feature requests or code.

One of the frequent questions asked to all startups is "How will you make money"? This question is important in many ways, the most important being that it helps distinguish legitimate startups from fake ones. It also helps users, VCs and partners evaluate a company. There are lots of ways we can make money, a few of such ideas include an occasional advertising email to our users and making corporate deals.

While we are at it, let me also say that we are looking for partners that can help both our companies grow and serve our customers. We follow "Don't be evil" policy popularized by Google.

Today is just first day. Wish us best of luck, help us where you can and we hope our services serve you well.

With best regards,
CEO

iGifter Beta launch

Greetings everybody,

Today is a big day for us. We are coming out of stealth mode and launching beta version of our website. Our website and product is fairly stable now, so it is a good time to launch. We want to get out as soon as possible so we can start to get some feedback. You can see details of what it does and how it does in FAQ section. In short it simply captures the search advertising revenue and uses it to award gifts to users. It is safe as the security is managed by your browser. Also we have made sure not to ask for any personal information so that there are no privacy concerns.

We have decided not to do any marketing, at least not yet. We want it to grow with word of mouth advertising. We are also not starting the gift services just yet. Starting reward services only makes sense once we start to generate some regular income. We are estimating the rewards to start in 2 to 4 weeks time.

Keep in mind that this project is for the community. We seek your help in anyway you can. Your feedback, thoughts, comments, help etc, anything you have to offer is valuable to us. We are also following Google's policy "Don't be evil". If you find anything that is against this philosophy, do please let us know and we will fix it.

Our best regards,
iGifter Founders