Wow, I never thought I would end up leaving this blog dormant for so long!

Not a bad deal if you were looking at getting into wikis or issue tracking. Even if your company is big, if it’s just going to be your IT staff, or just as a proof-of-concept for documentation, this cannot be beat.

The only catch is that there is only three days left for ISVs to take up this offer. Go check out their stimulus page…

As Scott over at The Recursive ISV said, “…it’s utterly brilliant.”

Similarly to Scott, I too was wanting to develop the desktop portions of my ThoughtFiler project in Delphi 2009 but the price of entry is out of my league at this early stage of development and CodeGear don’t appear to have any equivalent programs running. I daresay this will be a huge mistake for them in the future!

Last week, through FB, I reconnected with an old school Friend, Paul, who is developing some of his ideas at HomepageHome. Unfortunately, he’s not blogging his progress yet

Anyway, I wish him all the best with his upcoming v2.0 launch…

It’s great to see someone being able to pursue their dreams. All the best to Paul & his family!

2007 was the year of making a start. 2008 will be the year of making it real!

To actually be developing now feels good. Better than I expected…

“A big part of which is which is determining your goals. Do you want to run a business with an office, a secretary, 10+ employees? If so that’s a startup. It may just be you in the beginning, but if you envision that environment as your endgame then it’s a startup. A MicroISV is a very different thing. It’s a lifestyle as much as anything else. Are you content making enough money to have a high standard of living, but not enough to have an office of employees? Would you rather run your business than be a manager in it? Are you content sacrificing a higher probability of success for a lower probability of getting rich? If so then you’re starting a MicroISV.”

Most people I have talked to about my business plans assume that my goal is to eventually grow the business to a nice office and numerous staff. They always give me puzzled looks when I explain to them that that is not my goal and I am embarking on this endeavour for both the challenges and the lifestyle.

Especially after today’s major Skype outage, previously mentioned over here.

I’m thinking that today would be a good day for uISVs to use this outage to contemplate where we are too dependent on someone else, and where we need to setup alternative arrangements. And not just for our VOIP needs either, I’m sure we all have other services which we may need to have alternative arrangements in place for too.

I’m sure Gizmo has received quite a few new signups today…

That is sad, as Ian Landsman was referring to recently regarding how different things seem to be among Micro-ISVs…

“I guess this goes to show you that starting a MicroISV is still starting a business. It still takes incredible persistence. The barrier to entry may be lower, but only a small percentage actually make it the entire way.”

Very true. Even more so when you’re bootstrapping! Although, I may not be as far along as I expected by now, I’m still here, the dream is still alive and I am still determined to succeed.

Get up and running with TortoiseSVN and Subversion in 15 minutes

Just what I was looking for! Thanks, Neville.