My life has been a search for quiet for as long as I can remember.

I think the fundamental problem with noisy people is not that they're inconsiderate, but that they don't have any train of thought to interrupt, and they thus don't realize the havoc they're wreaking.

When I was living in Providence, working on On Lisp, I told my loud but well-meaning neighbors that I was writing a hard computer book, and that made them be quiet. Ordinary people can understand that you need quiet if you're working on some specific, hard task, like doing math homework. What they don't grasp is that someone would want their mind to work that way all the time, as a matter of course.

This is ONE way to be an entrepreneur, certainly not the only one.

I don't mean to brag, because I'm sure none of you care about my "little dipshit company," but there are people out there who deserve to know that this kind of adrenaline junkie lifestyle as described in the article is not "entrepreneurship" as a whole but just one type of person's interpretation of it.

We, for example, got back a couple weeks ago from a 2-week trip to Arizona. We (biz owners (my husband + I) plus our employee) went to attend a conference in Scottsdale -- not to demand speaking slots or to impress anyone, just to learn, to experience it.

Because, hey, Arizona is gorgeous in October, we had decided to extend our trip and rent a convertible, and a 4-bedroom house in beautiful Sedona, AZ with a private pool and heated spa tub, for a week. We spent 3 days of that as a company retreat, and then the rest was just my husband & I hanging out.

During the 3 days when we were working, we all used the spa every night to stargaze. In the middle of the days, we'd take a break and go hiking. When our employee went home, we just bummed around a day, then we rented a jeep and went off-roading.

This year, my husband and I decided to draw about $160k of profit out of our biz to pay for a mortgage down payment and various fixings for our new (old) house. Then we bought a nice car, in cash. (Honestly I would have preferred to get a loan, but there was a problem with the fact that we hadn't gotten our PA driver's licenses yet. Long boring story. Patched over, as so often, with money.)

Our finances are secure. Our products may be "boring"… but they are growing very nicely and our customers are happy. Our employee can feel secure about her salary. We own 100% of our company… nobody can tell us what to do, except possibly the government, but they don't seem to care. Certainly we don't have to worry about SEC filings.

This weekend, I co-taught a bootcamp as part of my favorite product, 30x500. It's only on a weekend because that's when the majority of my students can attend. I plan to take the next couple days off, just cuz. I can do that whenever, of course… and often do, because I have a chronic illness which is exacerbated by stress. So I keep stress low and live a very chillaxed kind of life.

I expect that, as a 3- or maybe 4-person company, we'll break $1 million in gross yearly revenue in the next 24 mos… probably more like 12-18. All without begging, nagging, scrambling, fundraising, pitch-decking, obsessive emailing, jockeying, etc.

My biggest stress this year is about how to reinvest another six figures into our biz so we pay less taxes (and changing bookkeepers). I don't like paying taxes more than we have to, but honestly I'm not sure what to spend it on after we max out our 401(k)s.

I expect downvotes for this. Probably because it sounds like I'm bragging. Probably because the reason the above article is so popular is because people like it when authors "get real" about the "harsh realities" of running a business. Deep inside, they believe that if it doesn't hurt horribly, it must not be worth it. So this kind of "truth" is appealing, and what I say will be labeled as some kind of crazy outlier, I got lucky, I'm famous, etc, etc., surely nobody could really make this kind of money off time tracking so I must be embroidering the truth, etc.

But if you want to create a business -- as opposed to a drama-filled life -- there truly is a less painful way:

Create a small product for small business which creates value, then charge money for it.

It's stupid simple. It's not easy, but then again, it's not all that hard, either. And it works, over and over and over again.

Yes, our first year building the product income streams while consulting kinda sucked… but it didn't suck at THIS level described by the post author. The main suckitude came from the fact that the more we worked on our real products, the less we wanted to consult… we still never had to travel away from our families, stump, beg, wheedle, or go without money. And we don't have to convince somebody else to buy us, fund us, love us, millions of people to use what we made, to make that short & minor sacrifice pay off.

Sometimes pain is meaningful and necessary. But sometimes it's just pain.

> Would you even consider using the app, in case I'd make a commercial product out of it?

No.

I use Google because of the stuff that happens in the background, that I never see. Their infrastructure, SPAM blocking, Android app, intrusion detection, seamless support for custom domains, filtering and search, etc.

GMail looks like a simple app, but it's actually a herculean effort on behalf of Google, a multi-billion dollar company. There's a reason they have very little competition in that sector.

Have been using a Surface as well as a Win8 desktop for a couple of weeks now, and I have to say this is pretty accurate.

When WinPhone first came out with the Metro UI I was a fan - there's a visual simplicity to it that's very appealing. After you use it for a while though the weaknesses become pretty glaring and hard to accept. It is often very hard to tell what UI elements are interactive and what are purely informational because they are so plain. There's no way to visually discern a non-interactive icon vs. an icon that is also a button.

The lack of shading and UI chrome also means that UIs frequently become jumbled. Sections of UI blur together where on any other platform they would've been separated by a visual line, shading, or something else.

The simplicity in this case has gone too far.

It's also very true that many of the first-party apps have ludicrously low information density, almost as if they expect these devices to be toys. This is in stark contrast to MS's stated goal of shipping something that is more serious, more productive than iPads and Android tablets, which up until now have been seen as leisure devices.

People often accuse Apple of taking style over substance, but Win8 IMO is a far, far more egregious violator.

There's another big issue: the first party apps suffer from some pretty serious performance problems. It doesn't bode well for your platform when your own internal teams can't ship best of breed apps. The People app, for example, takes literally 6 seconds to load your recent notifications on a Surface RT - all the while without displaying any loading indicator. You literally tap the button, wait, figure it's broken, and just as you're about to move on it pops into existence - and of course the performance is so poor that it just magically appears on screen without transition.

The entire OS is littered with sloppiness of this variety - as well as apps where touchability has clearly never been comprehensively addressed. You will move from places with gloriously comfortable touch targets (like the home screen) to apps that have 9pt text links you're expected to hit.

The "search" charm is also poorly thought out. Just take a look at Amazon, eBay, iTunes, and what have yous that have substantial search functionality - Windows expects everyone to cram their search needs into a single freeform text input. In fact, the eBay app on Win8 builds its own search page. Surprise, search is complex, context dependent, and not all apps can pigeon-hole it into your paradigm. Oops.

[edit] Extra rant: I was able to get the Windows Store app completely stuck today on the Surface. I visited an app's detail page, and tapped the Back button to get back to the search results. Nope. Back button would visually indicate interaction but do nothing. Waited, nope. Sloppy bug.

So here's where it gets good. On any other platform (and in old Windows land) I could just go kill it. Except I have no idea how to go about quitting an app on Windows 8. Apple at least has the courtesy of allowing you to kill an app very quickly - if someone knows how to do it in Win8 I'd love to know, because clearly their own first-party apps are not good enough to be trusted to take care of themselves.