Doing some research for a speech I’m giving soon (see: Ubtunu Live), I ran into the following article: The_Tennessean. It’s by Jeff Cornwall. Jeff is Director of the Belmont University Center for Entrepreneurship.

In his advice (see article), he gives 3 things to ask yourself before rushing of and doing the entrepreneurial thing:

1) Is there a Market?

2) Is there a Margin?

3) Is it for Me?

He calls it the 3 M’s. This is sound business advice indeed. Worrying a little though, as on counts 1 & 2 there is (for Qhuba), no way of telling. On count (3) though - is this for us? the answer is a resounding YES.

You see, here we’re on a mission to free all (non-IT) businesses of IT. Keep the functionality, dump the machines, software, patches, firewalls etc. etc.

So let’s look at questions 1 & 2 then in the light of our mission.

1) Is there a market? Based on Jeff’s guidance that you “You don’t have the time or money to educate ” your customers, the answer must be NO. After all, if there’s a better mousetrap, how will you determine if you need it or not based on the fact that your current one is still functioning?

2) Is there a margin? Well, no rocket science needed to know the margin on hosting apps & hardware is not very high. And for us, we’re just encouraging people to go out and use on-line services, not providing them in any scale ourselves.

So why go ahead then and continue what we’re doing?

We believe that by moving technical details further from the end-users (i.e. companies not having to worry about the specs of apps & infrastructure), the functionality becomes more clear. Think about (the techies under you that is) DNS. Only without having to worry about IP addresses and subnets does the functionality of the address (i.e. a place we can go to) become clear.

Imaging a world where you no longer have to go and search for a mobile phone with specific technology (”I’d like one with blue-tooth and an 2Mpixel camera please”). Go looking for the functionality instead: “I want a phone I can answer without taking it out of my pocket (while I’m skiing), and I want to take photo’s & video’s that are immediately uploaded to my MySpace or Facebook”.

That’s what we want. We want it for ourselves, so we satisfy as least question (3).

Now the remaining question is of course: are (1) & (2) not relevant, or are we doomed to miss the boat?

How did YouTube stack up to these questions do you think?

Finally: I do in my heart believe Jeff is right. For at least 99% of the population. If you’re in the 1% that remains, take my advice and just go for it.