Your WordPress Site Not Worth Hacking? Guess again.

Post by Simba Hosting, UK (13 March 2015) 

Self-serving?  Yes, this post by Simba Hosting is a bit predictable for a firm that sells backup software, but it deserves a wider read. Statistics are not readily available, but it seems a reasonable assumption that most WordPress sites are small and have comparatively little traffic. They may also have relatively weak defenses against attacks. Most likely rely upon hosting companies to patch or notify them of needed updates for WordPress, MySQL or PHP. As the Simba author notes, "WordPress runs around a quarter of all web sites on the internet," and the motivation is money. 

A recommended read.

Big Companies Absorb & Destroy Tactics

Flip phone (Credit: Sean Davis | Flickr}

It's great news for entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and early start-up employees. The start-up gets acquired by a much larger firm. Cash spills forth.

Things are often not so great for customers. 

Wikipedia tracks many of them. One I was particularly fond of was Meebo, whose flexible instant messaging application and emerging group collaboration tools were purchased by Google. Another was Zimbra. Zimbra was sold to Yahoo, then to VMWare and then to Telligent, which renamed itself to Zimba. For a time no development happened on the product, though reportedly it was restarted in its latest incarnation.

But perhaps the most galling acquisition was Cisco's purchase of Pure Digital's Flip, the genre-creating portable video camera. Cisco spent half a billion dollars to acquire the firm, and in 2011 killed the product line. Writer Brian Chen at Wired opined that it was killed by market conditions (smartphones), lack of socnet interop and an uninspired high end version. 

There was probably another factor: hunger. Maintaining the entrepreneurial hunger in a large firm is notoriously difficult -- especially after an acquisition resulting in newly minted millionaire-engineers. Fast forward to B-school case study, where the potential company- and product-preserving innovations, absent the creative forces inside the start-up, are no longer visible.

The Blogger's Life: Inside a Forbes Blogger

Forbes Blogger Susannah Breslin (2011)

Forbes is a marquis web property. Being a blogger there would, presumably, be a significant boost for a small business. But before embarking down that road, you might want to see how Forbes manages -- i.e., incentivizes -- its bloggers. Getting web traffic is the central objective at Forbes, and according to this blogger, the magazine set "very, very" ambitious traffic levels for bloggers.

As Ms. Breslin wrote in this 2011 post, should illustrate the changing role of online writing for today's market.

These days, it’s not enough to be a good writer online. You have to be a smart marketer, your own content factory, your own publicist. If you can do it all, you are golden. If you cannot, you are screwed.

Fairness in Funding? Tesla vs. Ford and Nissan

CNN Announcement of USG Grant to Tesla Motors

A tweet highlighted this small business predicament.

RT @timoreilly: Tesla gets $465M DOE loan to build "model S" - Ford got $4.9B and Nissan $1.6B under same program.

It's generally accepted that a different set of rules applies for extremely large firms, yet a core tenet of capitalist Herbert Spencer's Survival of the Fittest suggests a different policy. What about firms smaller than Tesla? Shouldn't better ideas receive the larger share of funding?

Pay More to Get Less Health Care: Rural Small Biz Realities

While much as been written about the financial burden of health benefits for General Motors and Chrysler retirees, less attention has been given to health insurance for small businesses. Howard Berkes' NPR story on the current situation facing many small businesses, especially in rural America, reminds listeners of an April 2009 research finding by the Center for Rural Affairs that being a small business owner or an employee of a small business were the two biggest factors in predicting non-insurance.

For ranchers and farmers, the problem is perhaps worse because they must depend on individual insurance plans (33 percent of them, according to this report). That same study found that 1/3 of this group depend on individual insurance, which is four times the rate for any other group. Further, among those with insurance, high-deductible policies mean that outlays for health costs -- taking premiums and out of pocket costs together -- are also high for agriculture's small business community. And while this story did not deal with health care access or quality, the number of available practitioners and facilities is also lower in rural areas. It could be said that rural America is paying more to get less health care.

The NPR story is accompanied by an excellent fast-facts table. Perhaps the most significant fact suggests that problem is a larger one than most people think. Fully 25 percent of the U.S. population is defined as rural.

Head Count as Value Metric: IBM's Understated Impact

IBM Watson Portal in 2015

The value of a company can be measured in several ways. Market capitalization is one, but that metric often misses the economic impact of a firm. As General Motors and Chrysler enter bankruptcy reorganizations, shedding thousands of jobs in the process, some comment that in other sectors, U.S. industry remains strong. This may be true when market cap is considered, but the head count for Google vs. General Motors shows the weakness in a metric that only looks are market value. Even after the BK, GM is expected by some to keep 23,000 salaried workers, where as Google today only has 20,000 employees. As Pingdom (May 2009) noted, at 400,000 workers, "IBM has more employees than Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Cisco, Apple, Amazon and Google all put together."

Contrast this with profit per head count, which says little about a firm's indirect contribution to employment, or to the societies where those workers spend, raise children and diffuse IBM's corporate culture into local customs and practices. Consider the possible impact that IBM's current game-based Tivoli promotion might have in places where games may be seen as a leisure time activity for decadent Western teens.

Size Matters: Inefficiencies of Scale

NPR Analysis about Foreclosure Rates in 2009

As discussed in the context of U.S. mortgage loan servicers, bigger firms proved less able to adapt to the new way of operating after the collapse of credit markets and inflated real estate values.

In one analysis of inefficiencies of scale in physician practices, it was shown that efficiencies of scope are possible, but efficiencies of scale did not result.

Scale efficiencies should be contrasted with scale elasticity.

Investopedia refers to scale inefficiencies as "Diseconomies of Scale," clarified in a Wikipedia entry.

Inefficiencies of scale affect government, IT, media -- all shapes and sizes of organizations. Supply chain considerations may drive size up, but quality objectives may at times exert an opposite effect.