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When the Customers Say "So What?"
As you, dear readers know, I have strong opinions on vestigial features in products. In the same way, I’m a strong believer in dumping and changing features that customers don’t care about: maintaining features that few people use is a night-mare and massive money-suck.
Somewhat counter-intutivly, then, I enjoyed this part of a longer quote from SalesForce.com CEO Marc Benioff:
Once we had the API really working well, then customers really started to hammer me on customization. They would say, ‘Why can’t I change this tab name, why can’t I change this field name, I want to be able to do this, and I want to be able to that.’ Well, [we would say] the problem is that the tab name is through the whole documentation. It’s in the singular, it’s in the plural. It’s not just in one language, it’s in twelve. And then customers would say, ‘Yeah. So what?’
I say it’s somewhat counter-intutive that I’d like that quote because it indicates a high-degree of extra features and customization. Programmers hate those two words. Benioff’s mock-response to the customer says why: whenever you change something, there’s a cascading effect of other stuff you have to change, not least of which is the docs.
Continuity
So, a tiny change of a tab name entails a lot of work. But that’s only because the software vendor wants to maintain continuity in their software: they want all the parts of the software to “make sense” in relation to each other. One part of the software shouldn’t cause another part of the software to seem weird or funny.
Sidebar: Ad Continuity Attacks
As you might be thinking, or have lived through, this point is one of the best ways to waste hours discussing how to implement a feature. Since continuity can be highly judgmental, it’s a good arguing point. See security, usability, and performance for the other best ways to waste lots of time when talking about software.
“How much money does continuity make me?”
The point is, to avoid doing a change in software, we (the software makers) often say, “well, if we do that, it’ll have a cascading effect where this other thing won’t work, the docs won’t make sense, and all manner of other continuity problems will occur.”
While the above is an anecdote, I’d wager that in most cases, enterprise customers wouldn’t care about bad continuity: they’d rather have software that makes them more money than software that has good continuity. This type of thinking is part of what feeds the notion of good enough software.
Of course, things are a little different in consumer software. But then again, which one of Microsoft and Apple has the best continuity in their software?
(And check out the comments for some SalesForce.com backlash.)
The Blogging Enterprise, 2005: Post Roll-up
I know all you folks love blogging about blogging. So here’s some blogging about blogging about blogging: a list of all my posts about the conference I went to today, The Blogging Enterprise:
- Opening Keynote, Steve Rubel
- Kick-Starting The Blogging Enterprise Panel
- Sorting Out RSS Software, Tools & Technology Panel
- Some thoughts about Search/Info CMDB sparked by some lunch conversation.
- PR & Blogs – Anticipating & Managing The Blogstorm
- Blogging To #1 – Positioning Your Company As The Thought Leader
- Blogging Takes Time
- Closing Keynote: Shel Israel
As typographic/semantic note: I used square brackets to surround my own comments and thoughts. Most everything else in the real time notes posts are quotes or summaries of what people said, or an explanation thereof.
Search Behind the Firewall, or, The Potential for the Information CMDB
…or, Lunch at The Blogging Enterprise 2005.
From talking with a table-mate from National Instruments, I came across the
idea that search is, and/or could become, something like a CMDB for
information in the enterprise:
- Search can be the one-stop-shopping place for keeping up with
info as it’s created, updated, and deleted. By caching and indexing
all the information, you can accomplish the second thing… - If you’re looking around for something, you can search for
it. The CMDB analogy being that, with a CMDB, you don’t have to go
visit every single machine in your network to find all the XP boxes
that need SP2 applied, you just ask the CMDB, ’cause it stored all
that profile info. - If “actions”/macros are added to search results, and batches of
search results, you can move towards a good
enough approach to a compliance
oriented architecture.
Search Actions
That last point is where is gets exciting: what would make search
fully like a CMDB/Systems Management app would be if actions were
linked from your search results and you could take batch actions on
search results.
Tag & Bag Information, or, Regulation, Compliance, and CYA
For example, let’s say you need to retrieve all information related
to a patent lawsuit you’re involved in, for example, about JPEG. It
needs to be marked and bundled up to send to your lawyers. With a next
generation search app, you could write-up search queries like “JPEG or
JPG or ‘image file formats’”, etc. Then you could hook up an action
that would create a zip file with PDFs of each search result, to send
to lawyers.
Since it’d all be involved in a lawsuit, you’d want to assign ID’s
to each item so you could track them. So, your system could do
this. Even better, you could get a history of all the changes that
information had gone through, ’cause your search app had cached each
version of the doc, or, as CVS would do, the diffs between each
version. This would be analogous to versioning your configuration in a
CMDB.
RSS
By slapping RSS on top of search (creating RSS feeds from search
results), you can start to do mash-ups of behind-the-firewall
information. The top contenders are the “classic” examples of
distributing newsletter information to employees, thought leadership,
and statuses that you’d otherwise waste time in meetings
gathering.
Ending the Intranet Ice-age
As I’ve noted
before, all the services you take for granted on the internet –
Google, flickr, del.icio.us, bloglines, technorati — don’t exist. The
technology on typical intranets is effectively frozen in the late
90′s. What’s exciting about search behind the firewall is that it can
be the platform/beach head for providing all these features.
The Actions Are Endless
The patent CYA is a pretty simple example. But, you can imagine how
much you could do with your information once you normalize and cache
it into a central search repository: like I’m saying, it’s the
Information CMDB.
Lighting the Dark Information
Another interesting analog between a CMDB and search is that the application helps you get value out of what you already have. Also, it helps you stop loosing value from what you have. In the CMDB world, by imposing the regulations that come with that ITIL-mindset, you make IT more efficient and controlled, the goal being to let your IT group be less fire-fighter focused and more “how can we make money with all this IT” focused.
That
is, large companies have tons of information: silo’ed, “dark,” or
otherwise dead and lost. There’s money to be squeezed outta those stones, and search
is looking like a damn good juicer.
The Blogging Enterprise, 2005: Sorting Out RSS Software, Tools & Technology Panel
People on the panel (stolen from here): Matt Mullenwegg (founder of
WordPress) and Greg
Reinacker (founder of Newsgator) and some newcomers to the RSS
space: Charlie Wood
(Spanning Partners) and Stuart Watson (founder Syndicate IQ),
moderated by Sachi Gaha.
Enterprise Software as NewsGator Understands It
Gregg Reinacker:
“Enterprise software is all about easy deployment, desktop deployment,
no training…. Sort of the obvious things like management and
security.”
RSS is (will be) Plumbing
Charlie Wood: Uses customized RSS things, like a widget that
brings in sales leads. [This is the RSS as the new PointCast
angle: RSS is just the infrastructure/plumping. "The consumers will
never know it" -Stuart Watson.]
Blogging Makes You Suck Less
Matt Mullenwegg: “Blogging is a
trick by all the technologist in the world to stop your web pages from
sucking.” That is, it organizes your content and normalizes it, meaning
it’s easier, and even possible, to mix and mash.
The simplicity can replace the tediousness of larger CMS. This is
Whichard’s Dream of
Enterprise Blogging: no more Vignette.
Do I need a bunch of different feed formats?
Watson: RSS 2.0 seems like the winner. Mentions auto-discovery
stuff.
RSS: The Simple Integration Layer
Charlie Wood: you’ve got all these information silos that don’t mix
together [or do what you want]. So, you can use RSS as an
organizational layer on top of all that, the “dark informational
matter in your company” (dark, as in “dark fiber,” or
unused/hidden.)
Use RSS for information updates: status updates. E.g., “I’ve been
in companies where I spent 7 hours of the 40 hours a week in status
meetings. It was just brutal”: use RSS instead.
This is the biz angle of what Matt was saying above.
What Areas of the Enterprise Are Begging to be RSS’ified
…
Watson suggests creating portals that syndicate info, into the site
using RSS. But Matt says you need to add value to it, not just
syndicate content to get eye-balls. The value can be filters,
commentary.
Matt says tomorrow they’ll have 1/2 billion pings through
ping-o-matic.
Gregg: feeds from internal lead systems. References case from
TriplePoint. Dashboard, Outlook is a Dashboard, employee generated
portals.
What’s the RSS Toolkit Look Like in 2 Years?
Charlie: again with the “RSS is plumbing, it’ll be invisible to
users” angle.
Matt: never-mind the tools, make sure your content is good and
you’re using it for effective collab stuff.
Q & A
Rubel: Are people just going to do whatever MSFT provides?
Gregg: they help create the market for this stuff [the old
Crossing the Chasm angle: you gotta have two
analogs/competitors in the market, the old, and the
not-good-enough]. And gets more RSS out there.
Matt: “Yahoo! Mail has millions of users, but Outlook is still all
right. So I think you guys will be fine.”
Is there Technology to Filter Things Better?
Charlie: human filters are still [and will?] be the best?
“The PR depart. is saying the right thing, but nobody cares.”
“I’m guessing there’s very little business for/from press released
anymore.”
The question here being that people are freaking out about blogs
not being a controlled voice of the company. But, the PR department is
the controlled voice, and it’s ineffective ’cause it’s biz-speak.
[Man, maybe you could write a heuristic to identify PR crap. And
show a rating in bloglines so you could ignore or demote it. I guess Bullfighter
does that, more or less.]
Watson mentions attention.xml.
Gregg: we do press releases and blog about the topic at the same
time. “The PR stuff is a different pick-up [than blogging].”
Shel Israel: “which ones are picking up off the PR vs. the
feeds?”…a promise to answer later.
The Blogging Enterprise, 2005: Kick-Starting The Blogging Enterprise Panel
Legal Stuff from John Slafsky
No law about blogs. So we’re trying to map existing law.
Things to Worry About
Trade secrets, product launches, roadmaps, revenue estimates,
defamation, employment law issues (getting fired for blogging),
copyright and patent law (like posting about Secure RSS), and
Securities regulation issues.
“People should not be blogging about the stock price, personal
matters, launch date of next release of product.”
On Blogging Policies
Probably not great as shields against liability. The blog author(s)
is still at risk[, as with all actions in a legalistic society.]
Todd Watson talk about Legal Issue with IBM Blogging
Engaging the legal freak-outers: they just need an explanation of
what’s happening.
Blogging guidelines.
Used a wiki to have internal conversations about the public
blogging strategy with legal, corp. communications, and the blogging
people.
Notes
[What if turns out your blogging employees aren't very good at
blogging? They don't have domain knowledge, writing skills, or they
don't have the "common sense" needed to know what to and what
not to blog.]
Using Blogs As Product Management Input. [The idea is that you've
flattened the input channels out so that you can drink from the
fire-hose of your customer's comments. Assuming your customers have
enough passion about your stuff to spend time/energy to post.]
Q & A: Are Blogs Here to Stay?
Here to stay until the next things comes along. The business card
of the future. Here to stay. Train’s leaving the stations.
And here’s more detail from Shel.
Re: Why is Scheduling So Hard
(Disclaimer: if you see brown spots blow, that’s because I pulled most of this out of my ass.)
The problem with calendaring is that it’s an enterprise app: it’s not a consumer app. Things like blogs and RSS were (if only to dorks) consumer applications.
To standardize on calendaring — and make it easier to share scheduling cross-organization/system — you’d have to get “millions” of people using the same system/format. This seems to be how blogs and RSS became the de facto standard: people just started using them, and it was too late to do otherwise once Anyone Important started paying attention.
But, since consumers aren’t really interested in calendaring (thus, no mass-market for it), only enterprises are willing to pay for calendaring. And…we all know that enterprise software doesn’t result in universal apps: at best, it’ll work on all the systems behind-the-firewall, and those systems might talk to each other.
For me, Exchange works just fine…as long as I have an app that can suck data from it, and put data back into it. (I hate Entourage on OS X! Why doesn’t it just work with iCal?!) I think the rest of The-People-Who-Pay-The-Bills think the same way: Exchange works, what’s left to innovate?
Commoditize It.
There’s not enough wood behind the payoff-arrow to make calendaring work across different systems, ubiquitous…commoditized. Indeed, I bet MS fights tooth and nail to keep it from becoming commoditized, and companies (The-People-Who-Pay-The-Bills) probably don’t care.
The best response to this is for The Others to commoditize the market just like The Others did to IM. Now-a-days, it doesn’t matter if you have Y!, MSN, ICQ (GAH! IDIOT!), SameTime, whatever: you just install a GAIM client (like Adium), and you can talk on all those networks, seamlessly (except for the horror of setting up an account on ICQ).
That’s what we want with calendaring: we can use whatever app we want and get the full-effect: Exchange, iCal, Sunbird, or some other whacky thing. To do that, some folks just need to start hacking up Exchange interfaces: you work with the incumbent for a long time, bending to it’s will. Then, when enough momentum builds up, you can start making demands on it, and then, you’ve got a de facto standard (the Exchange interface). And then, someone(s) develops a whole new app to that standard.
BLAMMO! First you latch onto the de facto standard, write clients for it, then you replicate the once incumbent technology. That seems like a plan. Then maybe we can all finally be on the same calendar page.
Whichard's Blogging Theorem
I’m always happy to see someone’s company-blogging light bulb off, especially in such detail.
Everyone knows that Brandon likes the weblogs, company-internal and otherwise. After having our internal blogs at BMC for awhile (1, 2), and getting some positive results from them, he came up with what I call Whichard’s Bloggin Theorem:
The number of people who read a weblog matters much less than who reads a weblog.
Put one way, in addition to all the benefits Marion points out, blogs are a supra-effective tool for internal marketing. And if you don’t think that’s important, you must work for the perfect company.
I’m an instant-evangelist for anything I like — booze, blogs, Apple products, etc. — so I tell everyone at work about our internal blogs: not just about them, but that they need to post to them. Many of them have the same reaction: “Yeah, I created an account. But only a couple people seem to post to them.”
The Blackhole
There’s either one of two perceptions: (1.) it’s not worth it posting to the blogs, or, (2.) the blogs are just the toy of a select groups of people. But then, Whichard’s Blogging Theorem comes in, and all bets are off.
There’re several high-level people who read the blogs, all NewsGator’ed up to suck down the RSS feeds every 30-60 minutes. If an idea starts at the bottom, it can instantly get high up into the management stratosphere.
We call this effect “The Blackhole.” You know, there’s all those movies where you can leap countless light years in space by zipping through a blackhole or wormhole (the second would probably be better, but the first is what’s stuck).
Linking to the New
But, back to internal marketing. In hooking up all these types of things at work — wiki, blog, Google mini powered search — I’ve found that the most effective way to advertise it’s presence is to somehow broadcast, essentially, ads into the traditional internal collab-space: email lists, the intranet site, etc.
That’s an obvious rule-of-thumb, but the take-away is that the early majority needs a bridge to new collab-applications. You can’t ask/expect all those people to jump a huge chasm between existing apps and new apps: you’ve gotta connect them together with a few links.
The problem with that, of course, is that different people often control the two ends of the bridge. The new stuff is usually all DIY: someone had a spare server, so they just install a wiki, a blog, or a build/development site. These folks don’t have access to dump links in all those traditional sites.
There seems to be a boot-strapping problem, as ever. Then again, if you’re in this sport, why not test the “theory of just asking,” and fire off an email or phone call?
Re: Google Calendar
Damn, that’s a good insight. I’ve been longing for a calendar that would fit into my “digital lifestyle”: something with RSS feeds, the ability to make entries private/public/ACL controlled (at least like flickr has with me/family/friends/everyone), integration with Exchange (so I could load up all my work stuff), and sync’able to my iPod and other edge devices when they come around. Not all of those are ever together, so I haven’t really done any calendaring stuff beyond my work Exchange calendar. Even RSSCalendar doesn’t jump out at me as what I want.
All that me-blabbering aside, I like the thought of GMail w/Calendaring being a good SMB/Enterprise combo. If you put security all in it, you’d seal the deal. By “security all in it” I mean:
- making so that email sent to other GMail people wasn’t “in the clear” like all Internet email is. This would allow you to knock out the concern that hosting all your corp. email would allow anyone who could sniff email to steal all your IP. So, if everyone in the company uses their email on GMail, you can have the same protection that an internal email server would have (where you don’t have to route emails out through the public Internet).
- SSL up the entire connection to GMail (not just the login) so that people couldn’t sniff out your email while you were connected and reading it.
The other requirement for success would be to offer a free version (supported by TextAds, of course). Google could offer a pay one if they wanted that stripped out ads, added in domain names…whatever. The importance of having a free one is that groups within companies could skunk-works using it without having to go through the whole purchasing and IT gambits to get approval.
Once the groups started using it, everyone saw how damn cool it was, and that it had good ROI, TCO, and all around positive TLA compliance, then the wheels would be sufficiently greased to make it worth your trouble to go through the rigmarole that purchasing and internal IT departments foist on employees who want to pay for and introduce new technologies. It’s easier to officially start using something if you’re already unofficially using it.
And–BAAM!–Google would have another foot in the business-services market.
Coté's 43Things, Coder Hipsters
I thought I’d start-up 43things.com account to see what the deal is. It’s pretty fun to type up your goals — both that you’ve done and haven’t yet done. You should set one up too for fun. And, of course, there’s RSS feeds for everything. Yuh!
I’ve really gotten to like the company’s/group’s weblog: they’re from the same genre of developer that you can lump the flickr, del.icio.us, blogger, etc. coders in, a sort of hip next generation LAMP coder, all with snazy PowerBooks.
It’d be interesting to think and write a post about this new genre of coders. All I can think of at the moment is that they all write consumer/end-user software, allowing them to focus exclusively on making their users lover their software instead of meet Enterprise requirements. I’d bet a dollar that the next handful of wildly successful Enterprise applications will have teams that figure out how to infuse that spirit into their orginization. That’s a good goal itself.
Text Ads Behind the Firewall
“Eric [Schmidt] had a great quote the other day. He said, ‘When we said all of the world’s information, we meant all.’ So that means FORTUNEs from the 1930s, TV content…there’s very little content we’re not interested in.”
Of course, the more material that can be searched means more opportunities for Google to place ads next to those search results.
The above from a Fortune article on Google got me thinking: what about text ads behind-the-firewall, at work? Sure, that’s kind of like Text Ad Taboo now-a-days (business allowing other business inside their walls to make cash), but only seemingly.
At our work, there’s advertising all around:
- The TV in the breakroom always tuned to some news channel…with ads.
- The Coke machines in the breakroom and elsewhere with their big ads for Coke, C2, and whatever else.
- All the logos and company names on products.
- All the advertising we see on web pages when try to search for the impossible.
In short, we’re surrounded by ads at work.
Piggybacking on Intranet RSS and Search
So, adding to the idea of adding RSS feeds to existing middleware products (as Baus summed up my post)…when you get all those RSS feeds, you have “more material” to put Text Ads next to. You just somehow have to figure out a way to allow companies to allow you put Text Ads in there: perhaps sharing in the profits just like I share in the profits of having Google Text Ads on my weblog.
Using Text Ads for Internal Advertising
Indeed, if you applied Text Ads behind the firewall, there’s more, new things you could do:
- Sell ads internally. Different departments, teams, projects, whoever, could buy ads to advertise themselves internally. At large companies, broadcasting that you exist and what you do internally (never mind externally) can be a challenge. I’m not sure you would use real money to sell the ads. Probably something akin to “blue money.” The “KeyMatch” feature of the Google mini seems to do this.
- More effectively get internal announcements and news out. Most intranet sites at large companies have news articles about goings on at the company. But, you have to go to the intranet sites and read the news. Instead, if these news items were laced in as Text Ads, they’d show up next to relevant feeds and searches that employees subscribed to and read. Meaning, that the employees who “should” be reading those news items would have a higher chance of reading them.
The Headhunters are Already There
There are, of course, problems with ads that the Business wouldn’t want employees to see: ads to join unions, ads for headhunters, or other ads that would be perceived as damaging the business.
The problem with that line of thought is that employees (as outlined above) are already saturated with ads, and they’ll just be seeing more of them in the future. In the information-worker business (and, increasingly in any other line of work in America), businesses that filter their employees information flow just end up looking stupid and clueless.
When it comes to the free-flow of information, what’s good for the goose is (probably) good for the gander.
