Ricky’s Online Business Blog

I was in an MBA class when the lecturer asked us 1 + 1 = ?

She asked us to raise our hands if we thought it’s 2.  To my surprise, half the class raised their hands.  When asked who thought it’s more than 2, only a few hands were up!

Of course it was not a maths class.  It’s a business class.  I wonder whether the power of synergy has been undermined by many people.  What two people can do together is more than the sum of what they can do individually.

Consider two colleagues who work on separate parts of the same proposal for a client.  Each can come up with his or her own recommendation.  But if they can work together and cross-check each other’s work, they can come up with better proposal for the client than if they produce it individually.

The same goes to individual students who prepare for exam.  Instead of striving on their own, they can group together and discuss issues, questions and case studies, so that the new ideas generated are more than what they can come up with individually.

As for me, I can’t make a baby myself.  Neither can my life partner make it herself.  Nor can we make it individually, no matter how hard we try.  We need to do it together!

I am privileged to have an existing customer happily hosting one of their web sites with me.  Recently the boss told his staff to transfer all their domain names and hosting under me.

However, the other hosting provider, actually their outsource web developer, would not budge.  He claimed the web sites make use of certain ASP.NET components not normally available on other servers.

Fair enough.  I asked for a list of ASP.NET components required.  Perhaps they really need to stay with him.  But after checking the list, those are just standard components supported on most if not all servers.

Finally, the web developer agreed to let customer go, but not without a “transfer fee” charged for the trouble to transfer their web sites and email accounts to the new server (which I would help do for customer free of charge if given all necessary server login details).

However, after some consideration, the customer decided not to pay the “transfer fee”, not because of money, but because of principle.  Maybe.  But I suspect another reason being the fact that their web sites are under the control of the developer.  They have to rely on the web developer to access and update their web sites.

After all, the web developer has been doing a good job maintaining their web sites.  From customer’s point of view, why switch to me if there is not much compelling reason to switch over to me?  But from my point of view, it is another typical case of customer web sites and hosting being hijacked by provider.