Ayn Rand: Atlas Shrugged
The astounding story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world---and did. Tremendous in scope, breathtaking in its suspense, it is a mystery story, not about the murder of a man's body, but about the murder---and rebirth---of man's spirit.
Steven Johnson: Emergence.
The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software.
Scott A. Shane: Finding Fertile Ground
Identifying Extraordinary Opportunities for New Ventures
Antony Flew: How to Think Straight
An Introduction to Critical Reasoning
Murray N. Rothbard: Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market (Scholars Edition)
William Poundstone: Prisoner's Dilemma
John von Neumann, game theory, and the puzzle of the bomb.
Michael A. Cusumano: The Business of Software.
Makes for in-depth, very informative tech start-up reading about the software industry.
David Deutsch: The Fabric of Reality
A startingly integrated, rational and optimistic world view that combines four strands: quantum physics and the theories of knowledge, computation and evolution.
Ayn Rand: The Fountainhead
The story of an intransigent young architect, his violent battle against conventional standards, and his explosive love affair with a woman who struggles to defeat him.
Since these are base features required by both my two forthcoming products, I have just halved the time taken for these base features per application simply by adding another application... ;)
Both products belong to that strange hybrid application category that is authoring as well as productivity as well as developer tool (but in both cases, also offered to and usable by non-developers alike), so that shared code was the sensible thing to do. It also means that any further innovations (to user interface, usability, or even code-related stuff such as performance or the support of additional standard editors, say) are introduced to all applications utilizing AuthorBase.
A framework is not necessarily a product.
I'll admit it, AuthorBase was once a product idea of mine. Maybe it re-evolves into one, but I didn't go for it because although I saw a need for myself, I found the idea of pitching such a framework to development teams quite scary. That's a different matter with the two products I'm now developing: they, too, address issues that developers or development teams have, but they don't impose a certain architecture on their codebase, they merely offer outside-the-IDE process support to certain "orthogonal" concerns (such as localization) of their jobs.
Trying to sell generalized frameworks such as AuthorBase must be tough, because you are effectively selling a certain approach to application design. For prospective customers, that could be a real gain in time-savings, but there is simply a substantial risk involved: what if the off-the-shelf application design they purchased turns out to be crap? As programmers, how would they know before the market tells them, which would be too late?
In my opinion this is a very real risk that should be taken to heart and addressed by anyone attempting to sell products that essentially revolve around the idea of saving customers time by providing them with a fill-in-the-blanks application design. [1] My framework works for me because I have written it and although in theory generalized enough so as to be reused in third-party applications, my advantage is that as soon as I need an extension, I'll write it; as soon as I encounter a bug, I'll fix it. I know how developers tick: I wouldn't even try to convince them of my architecture by means of mere marketing. Notice the subtlety: they may well be fascinated enough by my upcoming products (or maybe not, who knows?) to enquire what kind of "component library" I have used, and if that occurs I might well wrap AuthorBase up and start selling licenses. But they would have to convince themselves by virtue of seeing and using a live application or two. I would have a hard time pitching something like AuthorBase out of the blue. The products, and for this kind of framework they would have to be very real products (not some kind of Notepad clone), need to be out there first (if only for quality assurance purposes, let alone the fact that these represent very real, time-consuming projects that hopefully will deliver a lot of value to as many individuals and teams as possible)—no amount of marketing lingo will sell developers or program managers a prefabricated application design scaffolding; however, a couple of successful live showcases might well do the trick.
Takeaway: no productization plans for AuthorBase at all, no time investment into it other than what is required by my current product development; but I'm aware that such an opportunity might well present itself, and I will probably not let it pass if that happens.