I’ve been following the very popular 37signals blog for the last few years and I must admit - these guys have influenced my views on what business information should be shared and what should remain undisclosed. When you browse through their posts, you get this feeling, that there is not much, if anything, that these guys wouldn’t actually share with the public. It’s like they weren’t concerned about things like competition at all. (Which is probably true BTW.)

If you follow their blog more closely, you’ll know who they hire, why and what his weaknesses are. You’ll learn how their server farm is built, and how they measure the performance of their applications. Finally, you will find out about how many client accounts they have. You’ll even see them on vacation, sort of…

To me, 37signals has clearly been the example of how communication, openness, and the willingness to share your know-how rather than disclose it can elevate your business. A quick look through Google search shows, that the amount buzz they were able to generate is simply astounding. In fact, I don’t think I know any other business with employee count of 3 or 4 (now a few more) that got more coverage in the new media..

We create audience. A lot of companies will have customers and the really lucky ones will have fans, but the really fortunate companies will have audience.

Jason Fried, 37signals’ owner doesn’t seem to believe in traditional marketing. He claims, that advertising in almost any form is simply too expensive for most small businesses, that only incredibly creative and incredibly rich people can afford to constantly reach reach new people. Instead, he believes in sharing:

Think about ways you can educate the people who might ultimately one day become your customers.

Share everything you possibly can and don’t be afraid, like most businesses are way to paranoid. Businesses are terrified of sharing, because they think their competitors are going to take this information and use it against them.

37signals is a small company that blogs, publishes books & e-books, has their show on justin.tv, does workshops where they show how their business was built. Jason also often speaks in conferences…

Business though, always think that somebody is going to steal their ideas […] and and the end of the day, it’s always execution anyway. All these ideas are out there, all these ideas are free, if you know how to do something, somebody else who knows how to do it as well, so you might be the one who shares it as well.

And if that wasn’t enough, here is an eyes-opening speech on the topic from the owner of the company:
http://www.businessinnovationfactory.com/iss/innovators/jason-fried

Compelled by an office friend, Mac user, who boats about the speed of his Internet browser almost every other day, I finally did a short research on browser performance. And I have to admit it was quite shocking find out, even for a heavy Internet user like me, that the speed difference between the fastest (Safari) and the most commonly used browser (Firefox) may be as high as 4x.

According to CNET UK, this is the performance comparison of the most common browsers:

The test doesn’t include FX 3.5 which was just released and is noticably faster than its precedessor, but I wouldn’t expect any change in the Top 3.

It’s also good to realize, that while an average web server hardly ever crunches the average, dynamic web site in more than 1-2 seconds, it may still take over 3 times this much to display that web page on your computer. Even with so much computing power on the client end these days!

One thing is sure - the majority of the web relies on JavaScript, and this doesn’t seem to change. So those browser makers who have re-engineered their JS engines will get the edge. Times when we had to wait half a minute to load up a page have passed years ago, but the funny part is, that it’s often not the Internet being the bottleneck now, it’s our own personal computer…