Why do large companies more successfully acquire instead of innovate? They certainly have the talent, the money and the existing market share to launch startups with ease, yet they don't do it very well. What's clearly missing is something in their DNA, but also something in the numbers. As big companies look at growing internally or via a shopping spree, it's important to consider the underlying motivations and math.

Isn't business a lot like Monty Python's search for the Holy Grail? Think about it. We have Arthur as the celebrity CEO, searching for best talent to fill his leadership team. Then the next thing they do is embark on the quest for the elusive strategic objective, I mean, the Holy Grail.

On the quest, they bring in a consultant, Tim the Enchanter, encounter some nasty competition (the French), decentralize and then re-centralize, and eventually get rounded up for fiscal irresponsibility. Isn't the scene where they determine the woman is witch by weighing her with a duck a lot like the way we make decisions in corporations? We'll rationalize anything to justify what we want to do. What about the guards in Swamp Castle who can't quite understand what they are supposed to guard?

Haven't you had conversations and emails just like that?

This document describes the REST API and resources provided by JIRA. The REST APIs are for developers who want to integrate JIRA into their application and for administrators who want to script interactions with the JIRA server.

JIRA's REST APIs provide access to resources (data entities) via URI paths. To use a REST API, your application will make an HTTP request and parse the response. Currently, the only supported reponse format is JSON. Your methods will be the standard HTTP methods like GET, PUT, POST and DELETE (see API descriptions below for which methods are available for each resource).

What's CPAN Minus (or "cpanm" if you prefer the caps-challenged version) for? Installing CPAN modules, period. It can get, unpack, build, and install Perl modules from CPAN -- but it can't do any of the other stuff the CPAN shell can do. It's meant to require zero configuration, and it runs as a standalone application.

Chargify handles every aspect of recurring billing for your Web 2.0 or SaaS company so there’s no need to build a custom billing application. In addition to processing one-time and recurring transactions, Chargify handles free trial periods, one-time fees, promotions, refunds, email receipts and even dunning (reminders for failed credit card payments). Powerful reporting tools provide information to help you make sound decisions about your company’s future. Level 1 PCI compliance ensures your customers’ billing information is always secure.

Jelly is a scripting and templating language from Apache's Jakarta project. It is similar to Ant, in that scripts are XML, and each tag maps to a Java class, but has a more sophisticated internal pipeline model for tag interaction, much like JSP taglibs. See the Jelly website for more details.

JIRA comes with a number of Jelly tags implementing core operations in JIRA. This provides a scriptable interface to JIRA. There are many possible uses for JIRA Jelly tags, the most common being importing data into JIRA from other systems, and automating common administrative tasks (see the examples below).

Given our development processes we found the average productivity of a single Django developer to be equivalent to the output generated by two C# ASP.NET developers. Given equal-sized teams, Django allowed our developers to be twice as productive as our ASP.NET team.

I suspect these results may actually reflect a lower bound of the productivity differences. It should be noted that about half of the Team Python developers, while fluent in Python, had not used Django before. They quickly learned Django, but it is possible this fluency disparity may have caused an unintended bias in results–handicapping overall Django velocity.

The more employees your company has, the less productive each of these employees are.

It is a generalization, of course, but a useful one and one that is confirmed by most people who have worked for growing organizations.

As the company grows, so does the internal processes and the layers of bureaucracy, and the time spent on communications grows rapidly.

It is, however, useful to look at the actual numbers.

How much does productivity decrease as the organization grows?

The answers are frankly frighting.

There's a big difference between being self-employed and being a business owner.

Being self-employed feels like freedom until you realize that if you take time off, your business crumbles.

To be a true business owner, make sure you could leave for a year, and when you came back, your business would be doing better than when you left.

This software never crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats : the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors.