I've been reading "The E Myth Revisited", by Michael Gerber. The book is all about entrepreneurs and small companies, and why they usually fail. The following quote is right at its start:
"Businesses start and fail in the United States at an increasingly staggering rate. Every year, over a million people in this country start a business of some sort. Statistics tell us that by the end of the first year at least 40 percent of them will be out of business. Within five years, more than 80 percent of them will have failed. […] And more than 80 percent of the small businesses that survive the the first five years fail in the second five."
Create It is now over 7 years old, and 16 people strong. It makes me proud to be in the small percentage of companies that do make it (although we are still 3 years away from the danger zone). 🙂
Meanwhile, on the technical side, I've been trying out the new BizTalk Services R12 release, which includes (hosted) Workflow support. It's limited in the sense that there are not many activities included, and there's not yet rich and integrated tooling, but it's an interesting start nonetheless. Well worth exploring. And on another track, I've been looking into BizTalk Server R3. The new features do look interesting, although clearly in the "evolution" side of things.
Finally, I've been getting ready for the PDC2008, in October, where it's interesting to note that the topic "Cloud Services" is the one with most sessions. If you want to learn more about this topic, I recommend you subscribe to the Cloud Computing group hosted at Google Groups (but not specifically Google-related or sponsored). Interesting discussions there.
