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CS 2

Page history last edited by Zhou 16 years, 4 months ago

 

Quan Zhou

Case Study- Excite

 

                        Joe Kraus is the founder of Excite or Architext along with his long-time business partner Graham Spencer with other four friends in Stanford University. They were all undergraduates, Kraus was a Political Science major but he is very interested about tech so he decided to start up a business with his five friends who were all Computer Science major and they are capable, willing and a friend of Kraus to put up a business with him and build a company.

 

                        Kraus experiences helped him to find the perfect idea for him. He worked in many businesses because of his parents and to avoid them from buying him a job, Kraus contacted a high school friend who is good in making designs. For that summer they made $25,000 selling T-shirts with their own designs. He always wants to earn money so he was very interested on having a job until he discovered to have his own company with his friends. They started Excited, an internet portal and offer a variety of services, including search, web-based email, instant messaging, stock quotes, a customizable homepage and a popular public engine.

 

                        They became incorporated when they are in garage phase because they have to in order to accept the $100,000 from InfoWorld. As a company, there are competitors to worry about like Verity, PLS, Open Text, etc. For them to realize that there were too young to understand that existing companies’ biggest problem is legacy. And these are important lessons from Excite, to hire people slowly and more carefully. Another is being cheap and also to get the legs of the business underneath before you run terribly fast.

 

 

 

 

Case Study – Apple Computer

 

            Steve Wozniak is an American computer engineer and the co-founder of Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.), with Steve Jobs. His inventions and machines are credited with contributing greatly to the personal computer revolution of the 1970s. Wozniak created the Apple I and Apple II computers in the mid-1970s. The Apple II gained a sizable amount of popularity, eventually becoming one of the best selling personal computers of the 1970s and early 1980s.

            Even though Steve Wozniak did not finish his college degree, he was able to become a successful person. This was because he never gives up on his work. During his younger years, he competed with himself using paper instead of chips. This was because they lack money to buy those chips. At that time, chips were really expensive.

            I have learned that to be a great engineer, you should learn to be diligent. Learn to check details twice. You should work twice as hard as you can.  Be sure that there are no mistakes because it will really cause a problem.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Case Study- VisCalc

 

                        Dan Bricklin was the principle designer of the VisiCalc spreadsheet program, the first killer application for personal computers together with his friend Bob Frankston, both graduated from Harvard Business School. The first idea that came up to Dan’s mind is that how convenient it could be if they could make spreadsheets on desktop computers and they started up a business developing spreadsheets from every PC. Bricklin think of an idea and he had done a prototype on Harvard’s computer system, he came up with the A-B-C 1-2-3 type of thing, the columns and rows ways of indicating things, the idea of having of a formula on what we call the contents line that tells you what you’re pointing to and moving around where you could move the highlight around from cell to cell and that was the whole thing that we have today. He was thinking a more convenient way of solving problems which he had originally wanted the thing to use a mouse.

 

                        VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet program available for personal computers. It may be the application that can be use for serious business tool. Spreadsheets are frequently used for financial information because of their ability to re-calculate the entire sheet automatically after a change to a single cell. The first user of their newly developed spreadsheets was Al Sneider who was in an accounting firm. As a company, there are also competitors on their way to the top and they were nervous that competitors would come out but it serves as their stepping stone to do other things.

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