If you are a Windows user and follow any of the vast number of blogs that specialize in talking about Microsoft and Windows chances are you will have heard about Long Zheng and his istartedsomething.com blog. Long has been blogging for quite sometime about both and has acquired quite the reputation for breaking stories that have to do with Microsoft and its operating system. The great thing about this is that he is still going to school full time while he builds what could end up being a very successful Web business along side his already popular blog.
It all came about nearly six months ago when on what was originally just a whim he created the first version of his Windows UX Taskforce web site. The idea was simple enough – to provide a single place where people could document the problems they were finding with the user interface in Vista. In a very short time the site became very popular with Windows users and apparently caught the eye of Microsoft employees on the Windows team. The site became so popular that Long then revamped it to provide a more robust reporting system for the users of the site as well as recoding the whole backend with an eye to the future.
Recently he changed the name from Windows UX Taskforce to Areo Taskforce and is in the process of redoing the graphics to better resemble the Vista interface colors and style. He is doing this because just recently at the behest of many Mac users he has created the same Taskforce site for Mac users – appropriately enough called Aqua Taskforce. As Long said in the post announcing the new service:
One of the first requests I received after launching the Windows UX Taskforce was “when can you make one for Mac OS X.” This came at a surprise to me because I didn’t know OS X had user experience flaws, but apparently it did and still do. Having said that today I’m proud to launch Aqua Taskforce, a taskforce site for Apple users to submit, vote and comment on OS X user experience quirks.
While it might still be early days for his Aqua Taskforce site it is already beginning to see items being added. Now whether the site will see the same involvement from the Mac OS team at Apple as the Area Taskforce does from Microsoft remains to be seen, but hopefully they will be paying attention.
As Long noted in his announcement post about the Aqua Taskforce site, he has completely revamped the back-end code so that even a single log-on will work for both sites. It also has been re-engineered so that the codebase can support multiple task-force sites with a single log-on as well.
This is were the accidental success could be something that Long Zheng didn’t anticipate. With this re-engineering he has created a backend to a system that will allow him to deploy any new taskforce site in literally minutes. So any company that would find something like this useful could be up and running with their own task-force site minutes after contacting Long.
Literally out of a single idea Long has utilized the power of the Web to provide easy to launch services and built himself what could be a nice profitable business – and he’s still in school. It is amazing how sometimes such a simple idea that would seem to be out of the norm of what we expect a web business to be these days can with some imagination take off.
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