The Appleseed team is focusing its efforts to help one group of businesses: small companies. How can Appleseed help micro-enterprises understand, utilize, and grow with other companies? It can do this by using the fabric of the Internet as a place to conduct trade and execute business around the world. Most importantly, it can do it so that it is user friendly, hassle-free, and absent of red tape.

Micro-enterprises are companies with 5 or fewer employees, and represent the largest number of businesses in the United States, and around the world. This is who we want to help. We’re not making a tool to manage a website, but rather a solution to manage a company in one place.

Appleseed solves a problem that has not been solved, yet. What is the problem? The problem is how we do business with each other, how we trade, how we interact with each other in business relationships, how we find work, how we get work done, how we get paid for our work, how we pay taxes to the government, how we run our companies, and ultimately how we run the world’s affairs on daily basis. The problem is not a simple problem to solve.

There have been many attempts by others. These attempts have fallen short of a solution which is both simple, and elegant. In our pursuit of an elegant and simple solution, we are building Appleseed as a framework for businesses to operate their companies and conduct trade around the world. There are many ‘frameworks’ in place from the layers of international trade law, to the layers of national commerce law, to the layers of the internet and beyond.

Lofty missions and visions are pursued by many, and shunned by even more who believe that anything that changes the status quo is unnecessary or is unattainable. These naysayers have only opinions. The future is not here today, and reality will eventually ‘bat last.’ Until reality and the facts are presented to everyone in the due course of time, Appleseed will pursue this vision.

These facts are present today:

The playing field

1. The internet provides a level playing field for small companies to get access to customers and clients, if the people are educated understand the resources.
2. Social networking catalyzes yet another of level connectivity which allows small companies to succeed. Business can and should utilize socially networked individuals.
3. The free market economy otherwise known as capitalism is the best form of economic activity known to man.

The players

1. The people are using the Internet for all of their affairs, for personal as well as business matters. They should be able to do more. They should be able to create a career out of their skills by becoming entrepreneurs. It is not a difficult but rather a riddled process to start a company.
2. There are good cloud services targeted towards micro-enterprises and free-lancers to alleviate niche business problems. The difficulty is understanding how to get them to work together and reduce redundant data entry. This is especially true when a company using cloud based services starts to grow.
3. There are good open source products that alleviate similar business problems. The difficulty is understanding how to get them to work with the rest of the enterprise. The ugly truth about open source is that they are all independent projects with only a handful of standards and practices and tend to create new solutions and ‘reinvent the wheel’ rather than creating engines and assembling ‘automobiles.’

The issues

1. Business transactions that are more than mere purchases of goods or payments for services are thought to be too complex for e-Commerce and are relegated to the nether regions of paperwork and people based bureaucracy.
2. Business information is a critical element of a business and currently fragmented across systems both internal and external to the company, especially by cloud based services.
3. The proper management of information, processes, and people can lead to a successful business operation. Managing such information is not a difficult but rather a cumbersome and time consuming process which needs to be optimized for efficiency.

Now that the some of the factors of the environment, players, and problems are outlined, it should be a little clearer to assess how the current status of Appleseed begins to be a solution that it yearns to be.

The first major release of Appleseed is aimed to be a lightweight open source ASP.NET portal that is easy to install, use, and develop internal applications or external integrations. Upon this foundation of simplicity, the rest of the solutions will follow. It will not happen over night, and it will not happen without the help and partnership of the current open source application developers and the numerous cloud based software as a service providers. Most importantly, Appleseed will not be complete without the feedback of users everywhere.