Failure To Launch

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. - Thomas Edison

So here we are at post number one, 'Failure To Launch'. This may seem like an odd title for an initial communiqué, as the presence of this very post is indeed indicative of a successful launch. However, the funny thing about failure is that the road to success is often paved with it. Some of the experiences related here have their background in discovering things that work by exploring those that don't. Of course this is most often not the intention when the road is set out upon - after all, who plans to fail?

Before exploring those roads, I guess a little background and a gauge of my vintage is in order. My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20, not much by today's standards, but coming from an Atari 2600 it was a complex machine and at the time I thought Radar Rat Race was where it was at. Soon after, I graduated to playing Choplifter on the Commodore C-64, not via floppy disk mind you, but via cassette tape where waiting thirty minutes for the tape to load would only earn you the reward of filpping it over and waiting some more. I never did enter the Amiga realm, instead moving on to the IBM PC Compatible personal computer via the classic beige box desktop; a screaming 386SX 20Mhz.

While not ahead of it's time like the Amiga, my IBM PC clone machine, and those that followed, did enable experiencing the introduction of the original Sound Blaster with Origin's Wing Commander, and the rise and fall of 3Dfx with Doom and the OpenGL extensions. And who could forget Dune II and the invention of the real time strategy genre, where it always seemed that the enemy's motto was 'Build it, Send it, Watch it die!'. Or Aces of the Pacific on the Gateway 2000 486DX2 66V with an ATI Vesa Local Bus card.

Now, here we are many years later, carrying around pocket computers with thousands of times more memory and processing power than those originally used, and up until recently were just used to play music on. Thankfully, the birth of the 'App' has changed all that and mobile computing will most likely never be the same again. It is here in the mobile space that this particular road begins and while there may be some bumps along the way, it will be the journey you will find chronicled here; from bootstrapping a company using open source tools to discussions of postmortem's after a successful product release. Hopefully, you, the reader will partake in some of it and we'll get to see where the road takes us.