Irie Tools (Business & Technology)

Please take my advice, do not design your own logo (or if you have already done so, get up right now and find a professional to do it over). Unless of course, you happen to be a graphic design professional (in which case, never mind, there is no need for you to read any further).

We have all heard the advice “concentrate on your core competence and buy everything else”. Well guess what, this is good advice. I ignored this advice when I started Irie Tools, and just went ahead and designed my own logo, even though my core compentence was not graphic design. So why did I do this? Simple, I thought I had two very good reasons.

1. I did not want to risk paying for a logo design and then not liking it.
2. I did not want to go through the effort of finding a professional graphic designer.

I have used my little homebrew logo ever since then. It’s not a terrible logo (at least I don’t think so), it’s just boring and does not represent what Irie Tools is all about (except for including the name). I know I am not the only person who started a business and decided to just “do a thing” and design their own logo (you know who you are).

Today, I realized designing my own logo was a big mistake. So what made me realize this. One look at the new professionally designed Irie Tools logo, and my mistake was obvious.

The New Logo

Recently I decided to redesign the Irie Tools website, and as part of that, I wanted to redesign the logo. I started to do some sketches of what I wanted, thinking that I would do it myself. After about a week I realized that I just could not create the kind of logo I wanted. So I contacted (or tried to contact in some case, because many of them have not yet got back to me) some local graphic/web desigers. I selected IGD Jamaica and brought them my sketches. After a discussion with them I went away, and crossed my fingers, hoping for the best.

Today, I saw the designs for the new logo (IGD Jamaica did a couple designs for me to choose from). I liked all of them, but one design really blew me away. Stay tuned for a look at the new Irie Tools logo (prepare to be impressed).

I have been reading alot of books recently (both business and technology books), as I begin to refocus Irie Tools on web development. My review of one these books is below.

• Catalyst Code: The Strategies Behind the World’s Most Dynamic Companies
• Authors: David S.Evans & Richard Schmalensee
• Publisher: Harvard Business School Press (May 9, 2007)
• Pages: 228

This book describes what it calls ‘two-sided businesses‘, which to quote from the front jacket ‘… generate value by creating simultaneous and mutually beneficial relationships between the different groups of customers they serve’. The book opens with the example of Diners Club which creates value for the following two groups of customers:

1. Restaurants
2. Diners.

In this case, Diners Club allows diners to eat at many restaurants on credit without having to establish a credit relationship with each individual restaurant (assuming the restaurants are willing to offer them credit). The diners benefit from the credit they receive, and the restaurants benefit by getting more diners who spend more and by avoiding the hassle and expense of managing credit relationships with individual diners.

The book is easy to read (no jargon) and provides numerous and familiar examples. It may not astonish you with any earth-shattering insights, but it will make you look at ‘two-sided businesses‘ in a new way.

This book is a must-have if you are involved with or competing against ‘two-sided businesses‘, and will probably be useful to anyone involved with business generally.

Hello again. I am back to share with you some of my plans for the future of Irie Tools.

The future of Irie Tools is all about focus, focus, and focus. Instead of producing a general purpose Pascal programming environment (i.e. Irie Pascal), Irie Tools will focus on web development (both web sites and web development tools). The web development tools are expected to include:

• An open source XHTML engine that will make it easy to generate XHTML pages using any programming language (I think there are ‘better’ ways to do this than ASP.NET and JSP).
• The next major release of Irie Pascal (i.e. version 3.0) which will be enhanced and integrated with the XHTML engine to make it easy to create web sites.

The plan is that the web development tools will support web development on Windows only (at least initially). However the hosting platform (i.e. the platform you would use to host the web sites) will be the Apache web server, running on Windows, FreeBSD, and Linux (Red Hat, other distributions will be added later).

Why did I make the decision to focus? Well, I have been reading alot of business books recently (about product strategy and branding), and they all seem to agree that it is a good thing for a business (especially a small business) to find an area of specialization and focus there.

Why focus on web development? Web development has the advantages of being an important (and growing more important every day) area of software development, but still relatively new (with room for new players and new ways of doing things).

P.S. Of course when the next major release of Irie Pascal becomes available special upgrade prices will be offered to existing customers.