Titanas

It is with great sadness that i watch the news about Greece’s financial turmoil and all the trouble this little country of nearly 11 million people causes to the rest of the financially interconnected world. It is striking that not even Greeks themselves are willing to agree to commonly address this situation. Greece is standing on a burning platform.

What is really surprising though is that the architects of this platform along with their opponents are the ones who claim they can fix the problem right away, by changing only a single variable in the system: the leading party or the current government.

Nokia was standing on a burning platform, according to newly appointed CEO, Stephen Elop. The new leader announced the death of Symbian and MeeGo while declaring Windows Phone as the primary platform for new high end smartphones. At the same time, R&D costs went down, departments were phased out and new tools were brought in to support the new ecosystem and attract developers for the Windows Phone SDK. It was a bold move but the mothership announced a plan and executed parts of it with first results available in just 8 months: the new Nokia Lumia 800 and Nokia Lumia 710.

Nokia as a public company decided, for better or for worse markets and history will judge, to change a hell lot of things. There is a new management team with a new strategy, new developer tools and new developers to build and support the ecosystem to be built upon, until then, a hostile platform, Windows Phone.

Greece is standing on a burning platform but unlike the Finns, Greek people (shareholders) choose to stick with the current management team and their opponents (government and other parties), believe on a failing OS (culture), use legacy tools (lawmakers) and legacy SDKs (journalists) to satisfy current market needs with UI changes and bug fixes while completely ignoring market trends and developer needs (investors). Legacy tools and legacy SDKs only support an ecosystem until it collapses under its own weight or is forcibly phased out..

Greece, your platform is burning.

Starting or running a startup means a lot of things, living on a tight budget is one of them. Reading the The Startup Diet from the Parse.ly guys and they were able to get their food cost down to $4/person/day brought memories from my trip to San Francisco in late May 2009.

The sun was shining in San Francisco but it felt a bit chilly. The micro climate in SF is an amazing phenomenon but rather ranting about the weather i wanted to eat; i was starving. Tim Ferriss explained it’s all about the amount of exposure in direct sun light. This is how cold or warm San Francisco feels when having brunch which by the way cost only 6 bucks. Six dollars for full organic food or approximately €4.3 according to Google. Unfortunately the photo doesn’t help to understand the size of the portion but basically it was a 3/4 full kind of paper Ziploc container. Pretty decent amount of organic food for $6 from an open bar.

Any Greek knows that not only organic food is freakin expensive in Greece but with 4.3 euro you can only buy a coffee and half a sandwich of some sort, assuming the coffee costs 2 euro tops. A 4.3 euro sandwich does the job but it’s not as anything close to organic healthy or healthy enough. That said, you can’t be creative, productive and healthy while eating only sandwiches. The body and the mind knows better than you. Been there, done that and failed miserably.

Being Greek, i know for sure that until a very late period of time we Greek sons consider food as de facto. Having someone cooking for you (hello Greek mom) is not the issue here. Recipes are available online for free. The real issue is that no one, i mean no one, ever taught Greek boys and girls how to manage and balance their budget for a reasonably healthy life style (cooking included).

Starting or running a startup is crazy stuff but only for people alive, standing on their own feet and being able to manage and balance will, stamina and costs for covering even the most basic needs such as food. Greeks never learned to master any of these. Neither the Greek startups will.

No guts

You need to have guts and balls to run a country. Period. Unfortunately, the state is doing anything at its power to punish lawful citizens and praise everybody else. Try to raise a kid by yelling when he does great in school and congratulate him when he breaks a vase and you’ll create a selfish moronic monster in no time.

Extra taxes

Heavy taxes especially in electronics and telecommunications is a recipe for failure. 19% VAT accounts to almost 1/5 of the price. 23% VAT accounts to almost 1/4 of the price. This is all happening in 2010 the year no one can think life without e-retailers like Amazon.com, a tipping point in history where shopping decisions are made with a click and in between half a dollar price range.

Media and politics

Taxing media is making certain people feel uncomfortable. Collecting those taxes is about to make things ugly. To do so you need to have guts and balls but we already know the answer to that. What happens next is the introduction of new and stricter laws about those uncollected taxes which very conveniently turn into a media manipulation tool with a backdoor: upcoming elections and the need for public brainwash.

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