Often, the first step in consulting is to interview, and be interviewed by, the client to see if a best fit exists. During a recent interview with a potential client, I spoke of some of my lesser known exploits and, after a while, the interviewer smiled and said, "You initiate things on your own … you do not wait to be told to do things. I like that." I found it interesting that he was the first person in a long time to pick up on what I believe is a desirable trait in an employee.

Back in about 1989, I was a Product Manager for the Ultrix-32 operating system from Digital Equipment Corporation. The company was distributing Ultrix-32, a bare-bones Unix system, on three TK50 tape cartridges. The TK50 was at that time a Digital proprietary streaming tape cartridge called "Digital Linear Tape" that held approximately 95MB of data. Each cartridge cost about US$ 100 to purchase and manufacture, so the entire distribution cost about US$ 300 to make, and we sold the distribution for US$  1,200.

At that time, CD-ROMs were starting to make their way into the computer industry. In those days, if you wanted to master a CD-ROM in a hurry (a week turnaround time), it cost about US$ 100,000 to do the master, then US$ 5 each for the first 1,000 CDs, and the costs went down rapidly after that.

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