Chris Shaw, owner of SQL Oncall, recently had an issue in his business. Chris provides DBA services on a remote basis to companies that need supplemental help or don't want to hire a DBA. It's a good business and I think Chris works hard to be fair to people. However one of his client's didn't want to pay and he talks about it on his blog.

One of the things I used to hate when I did one-off consulting, was the issues with AR, Accounts Receivables. In other words, getting people to pay you. The AP, Accounts Payable, is also a hassle, but that's on you, and it's easier to handle since you're sending out checks for other stuff, easier to pay bills for me.

However there are always people that don't see the value, or don't think they have gotten great value from your service and don't want to pay. We all experience this, often with doctors who we see for 3 minutes with a $20 co-pay (and a $200 insurance charge) or mechanic that wants $60/hr for all work, whether highly skilled like milling pistons, or low level like changing oil.

When you're a larger company, you can send this stuff to collections, and get paid some of what you're owed. You also have a staff (or a contract with a staff) to hassle people to pay, send out notices, etc. When you're one guy or gal, it's a hassle, it task switches you, you have to keep track of it, and you hate it.

At least I did.

I think Chris handled this well, perhaps better than I would have. Likely if I'd gotten paid, I'd have dropped the customer immediately. Once someone decides not to pay, they likely will do it again, though I'll acknowledge that you would have to see how they explained their thoughts.

I don't think IT people always earn their full bill rate for every hour, but I think that's part of issues with society in general. People don't work at a constant level or rate. However the good ones, the ones worth trusting will alter their billing, reduce hours or change the rates to be sure they've delivered good value not only for themselves, but for you as well.

XBRL is yet another use of XML, this time for financial reporting. It is supposed to be in place for large companies, and like most other requirements, it will eventually migrate down to smaller companies as more tools become available and cheaper. Putting the onus on large companies to implement new standards makes sense since they can better afford it and they often have the most complex reporting, so the standard and process truly gets tested well.

Mark Cuban had a great idea in that it should be used to track the bailout, which I tend to agree with. Make this information public, put it in a standard format like XBRL and then anyone can consume it, build reports, make it easier for the citizens of this country, who are funding this bailout, to understand what is happening.

More and more I am seeing new uses of XML, which are really just subsets of the structure that XML provides. A decade after I first saw XML being pushed at the 1998 Microsoft PDC in Denver, it truly is permeating information technology more and more. I thought it was an amazing idea, much like the ATM protocol in networking, but both of them seemed to have a lot of overhead and I wasn't sure they'd get truly widespread adoption.

I was wrong, at least for XML. ATM is used, but pretty much only by large, backbone telecoms, while XML is everywhere.

I think XML isn't suitable for all applications, but it makes great sense as an interface, especially an expandable one that exchanges data between systems or applications and needs some flexibility. It hasn't been a focus of mine over the years, but more and more I think I should dig more into XML and better understand how it works since it's likely to become integral in some part of most applications in the future.

One of Google's tenets is to "do no evil" as they run their corporation. This article questions their motives as they've changed the agreement for Chrome, their browser.

I don't necessarily think that Google is evil, and in many ways I think they've learned from Microsoft in how to not appear so. They're a corporation, striving for profit and trying to do a better job, but they're going to stumble. Naturally they want to promote their own products, which makes sense, and tie them tightly together.

That's what Microsoft wants as well, though they sometimes go too far in preventing alternatives from being adopted.

It's a fine line that you walk as a corporation, trying to grow, trying to make a profit, and it's hard sometimes to know if you're skirting the line and perhaps doing something unethical. In my ventures we've tried to be fair, but there are plenty of people that have disagreed with our decisions.

Personally I think this is where capitalism fails. As entities grow larger, become more popular, they gain power, and it's hard to not take advantage of that power to grow more. I think many times the most successful companies sometimes appear evil because they continue to do what has worked for them. And those practices often shut out or prevent smaller companies from competing, making them appear evil.

There's no shortage of evil companies, however, with plenty of people willing to make decisions and engage in practices they know are illegal or immoral, all to make a few more shekels.