Monthly Archive for September, 2008

The trouble with nostalgia

Published on September 30, 2008 in Management, Photography and Rant. 1 Comment

I have been caught many times by the feeling that things used to be simpler, sweeter, or better. When enveloped by the warm blanket of memory, I recall all of those wonderful little details of the holidays with family, or the rampant productivity in the weeks prior to the launch of a new project. This feeling comes on most strongly when I am faced with a problem or frustration with something that seems all too similar.

The trouble starts with the remembering. The human mind has an incredible ability to fool itself into believing that it is recalling or observing with a very high level of detail. Your eyes are only high resolution at the very center. As a result, your brain has to splice together the images from your rapidly moving eyes into a single coherent, seemingly high resolution, image.

For fun, take a moment and look at one spot about 20 feet away from you. Concentrate on not moving your eyes, and think about how much of what you see is actually in focus. Very little.

If this is the input for our memories, how do we imagine that our memories can serve to help us recall what really happened? Even if you argue that there are all sorts of other sensory and emotional inputs that help to capture a more complete picture, think about your favorite birthday. Great, right? Think hard now; was it all great? Did you get annoyed because someone was 10 minutes late? Did your Mom get you a stupid gift? But, you also got a promotion, raise, and the coolest birthday present ever from your best friend. The emotional quotient for the day is a weighted sum. Not all of the events mattered in the same amount, and so the memory is like our vision experiment, very clear on a few details and everything else is pretty fuzzy.

Where this gets us in trouble is when you try to apply the wisdom of your nostalgic memory to your current problem.

The last time this went really well. What was different? Instead of this we had that. Instead of doing that we did this.

In my experience, success is usually not specifically repeatable. If it were, Microsoft would have major successes beside Office and Windows. They have been applying the specific strategies that they learned about what made those products successful over and over again with arguably limited success. In most cases, if things went well last time, you have already internalized the important parts of that success. The processes, work styles, tools, and attitudes that worked then are now just how you do business. It is so easy to make the mistake of thinking “If I could make right now more like back then, it would auto-magically make things better.” But, you probably have a new problem, and you almost certainly have an imperfect recollection of what made stuff so much better back then.

The solution? Treat your current problem like it is brand new.

Its scary to think of each problem as new because that means you don’t know the answer. But I find myself asking, so what? That only matters because I am afraid to fail. A little fear/uncertainty combined with a new problem are the perfect conditions for an innovation. If you try something new and fail, you have brand spankin’ new information about what didn’t work and a chance to understand the why of it. Not a bad worst-case scenario.

But the juice is worth the squeeze…

Published on September 26, 2008 in Photography and Rant. 0 Comments

There are a lot of people completely cheesed off at Apple right now. Rejecting iPhone applications for seemingly undefinable reasons has been going on for a while, but the latest row is over the fact that some of those rejections have been accompanied by an NDA warning:

THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS MESSAGE IS UNDER NON-DISCLOSURE

Developers and bloggers are up in arms, as they should be, over a system that is clearly designed to disenfranchise the folks who are the App Store’s heart; pumping the icky-green cash-colored blood through the veins of the feverish iPhone apps market.

But guess what? Some guy made a game the netted $250k dollars in a little over 2 months. Holy smokes! Another guy made a virtual coy pond, and I would guess that he has made around $100k. These are low-utility apps. They aren’t solving a real problem for every person that purchases them. This is impulse shopping at its best (you don’t even have to take out your wallet).

This isn’t an established market with lots of rational actors. Its the gold rush all over again, for buyers AND sellers. The rules as to what was acceptable were “bent” back then (read: broken; smashed to pieces), and they will bend now. Until more people are betting their livelihoods on the app store, most people in there now are hobbyists, the majority of developers will grumble a bunch and go right ahead and submit another entry into the free money giveaway that is being sponsored by Apple. If a few people get hurt in the process, well, prospecting is dangerous work.

Interesting but not remarkable

Published on September 22, 2008 in Management and Photography. 0 Comments

On Sunday, I took a walk through a nearby town with my wife and our dog. The main street is littered with dusty antique stores. You pass dozens of them in a matter of minutes and there is really nothing to help you distinguish between them.

Then I came upon this hat. I stopped and stared for about 10 seconds and snapped this photo. The hat was interesting because it was incongruously new looking and colorful. I guess it isn’t surprising that the feeling of “cruftiness” inside the stores spills out into their street displays. The sad part is that I have no clear memory of what the store sold. I wouldn’t know the name if it weren’t in the photograph.

Why not try being remarkable instead of merely interesting?

  1. Hire a high school student to wear the hat and welcome people to the store, or just say hello to people on the street.
  2. Have her give away free lemonade to passersby on hot days.
  3. Have a box of dog treats and fresh cool water for all of the people who bring their dogs. Don’t just leave the bowl there on the sidewalk. Be seen refreshing the water, and personally deliver the treats.

With so many of those antiques stores coming and going, its a wonder that the owners don’t try something a little different.

A culture of creation

Published on September 20, 2008 in Management. 0 Comments

I was asked recently why it seemed as though 37Signals did nothing BUT create interesting products, and quickly at that. Interestingly, my answer came quickly and I suspect it is not far from the truth. 37Signals has made the act of creation a goal, and not just something that you do on the way to achieving your goal. The company is organized to encourage and support the creative process from its core. The company systematically gets out of the way of people being able to pursue an idea and encourages a high level of productivity in all sorts of unusual™ ways (4 day work week, everyone gets a company credit card, they pay for your hobbies). The result is new products/features released frequently, and a feedback loop that gives them the insight necessary to improve and create even newer products and features that solve customer problems.

With so many opportunities out there, it seems as though there are far too many companies taking the classic growth path.

    1. You create a winning product. HOLY CRAP that was hard! Pat yourself on the back.
    2. You listen to your users and slowly add all of the features that they request. People love it! If only you added a toaster oven, 1,000 more people would loooove it.
    3. You hire more people to support/develop the product
    4. You make it more and more mainstream. Change the color scheme! We hear that people like the Windows XP color theme; use that. My great Aunt that lives on a farm can use it now, phew!
    5. You rake in the dough as you watch your market share deteriorate in favor of competitors who are addressing specific market needs that you can’t address.

      The problem for most of the companies like this is that somewhere along the way, they forgot how to make a remarkable product. Think Napster, Yahoo, and a thousand other offerings that started off with fanfare, users at the edges, and quickly moved to the middle. They start “managing” and “maximizing” and avoiding the hard truth that they are slowly losing touch with the ability to identify and exploit a market need. This is the same point at which many of those organizations start to experience management challenges like turnover in key employees and lack of motivation.

      Copilot, as a service, has moved toward the middle. Copilot is still the easiest of any of the services to use, but what it does has been comoditized by a dozen years of technological development. The industry is crowded with huge competitors and everyone is doing the same thing. Feature creep is on the rise. Developers are being hired into the industry by the bucketful. If this product category isn’t already completely ordinary, it is about to be.

      So far, we have avoided the desire to keep adding features to “keep up” with our competitors at the cost of disenfranchising our customers who appreciate the simplicity of our offering. But what still makes it remarkable? The day pass pricing model combined with the ease of use make Copilot the best choice for ad-hoc remote support. But, what do we need to do to double the number of customers? More features? A New product? We’re working on that now, and you can track our progress here: Air Traffic – A blog about Fog Creek Copilot and running a company within a company.

      If you will “never catch up by being the same“, what can you do to jump ahead? Build a culture of creation. Realize that ideas come from unexpected sources at strange times, and be prepared to take small risks often to get concrete feedback on what works and, perhaps more importantly, what doesn’t.

      Here are a couple of the practical things that I am doing now to try to build a personal and collegial culture of creation:

      1. Create a todo list and use it. Software can help here, and I recommend Things. The todo list isn’t a single running list. It is a backlog, a list of next things, and a list of today’s things. Think digestible.
      2. Shorten projects and lengths of activities. Projects no longer than a few weeks (two to four); tasks no longer than a few hours. Think MOMENTUM.
      3. Raise individual accountability by feeding back progress of project participants through clear concise communication. Think Scrum.
      4. Release stuff often. Get it to customers. Even if you are worried that it isn’t perfect. If it solves a real problem, early adopters will help you make it better.

      I will let you know how it goes…

      Terminal

      Published on September 12, 2008 in Photography. 0 Comments

      While traveling in Boston, I happened to pass by South Station. On its own the building is imposing but somewhat unremarkable in the downtown cityscape. What interested me enough about this building was that is quite literally on the border with Boston’s Chinatown. Old culture and the new Boston colliding in the reflection.

      Business of Software

      Published on September 7, 2008 in Photography. 0 Comments

      I returned late last week from the Business of Software conference. The speaker list was a veritable who’s who of experts on the process(es) of creating and managing software/technology companies.

      Seth Godin’s presentation touched on many of his classic themes (being remarkable, making ethical use of the permission that your customers give you to talk to them, get product and marketing to match the culture of your company and customers), but I was taken with the sense that it was a massive therapy session for the audience. Much like a good psycho therapist, Seth stood up there and gave the audience permission to forget all of the standard ways in which businesses have made a name for themselves.

      Forget traditional marketing.

      Forget making a mass market product.

      Forget competing through parity.

      Having recently taken on the responsibility of “managing” the business of Copilot for Fog Creek, I have found myself falling into the trap of trying to do things the way that other companies or my competitors are doing them. We even tried a traditional marketing campaign this summer. The campaign failed in the sense of spending more money that we got back, but it put me in the right frame of mind to hear what Seth, and others at BoS, had to say about growing a software business. More on adwords later, but for now, let it suffice for me to say that there is a right size for things that you plan to sell through search or content network adverts.

      I was shocked at finding myself wanting, or perhaps even needing, permission from someone else to act on my conclusions based on years of experience and my own observations. But there I was, sitting on the proverbial couch with a few hundred other people and nodding my head as Seth said that I should act on those instincts and conclusions, and that my Mom probably did love me after all. It wasn’t the answer to my questions, but it was the invitation I was looking for to throw common wisdom in the trash and try something different, and preferably remarkable.