I received this message while trying to cancel my MobileMe subscription yesterday. I am using Firefox 3.0.5. This is not the kind of experience that I am used to when dealing with Apple. Unfortunately, every nasty thing that I have heard or read about MobileMe was reinforced by this incident. If it wasn’t bad enough that I couldn’t find a use for the service, it simply isn’t better than other similar offerings out there for what I need, they put a technical glitch between me and my ability to cancel. Ouch!
I am glad that Eddie Cue is in charge of this project now. He proved an awesome (and tough) product manager/strategist when I worked with him and his team at MyPublisher. I am hopeful that he can steer MobileMe in the right direction.
I have been doing a lot of reflection over the last few days. Reflection is great for re-centering yourself in light of new information. Warning! Reflection is intoxicating. You can imagine all of the ways in which you can make things better, and there is no one around to stop you from drifting off into the ridiculous.
It gets dangerous when you convince yourself that you are doing something (which I have, many times). Reflection isn’t action. When I am using it to best advantage, it is an iterative activity. After each iteration, I share the results with someone I trust to give me honest feedback, and then I act on it. This helps me build a feedback loop which tests the quality of the thoughts that come out of my self-examination(s).
I guess I should be apologizing to thanking all of those folks I trust enough to annoy the crap out of with my ramblings.
Thanks.
So much depends on perception, and more people than you would guess are looking to you for a sense of tone, an impression of feeling. It is far easier to deny, negate, or destroy something than it is to accept, encourage, or build (the latter all take much more effort). I am going to try to be intentionally positive. To reject the obvious negative interpretation and work relentlessly to build rather than tear down. This is my one and only New Year’s resolution.
It is easy to think about this, but much harder to do it. Maybe I can try and track this to see how I am doing? Eric suggested Joe’s Goals. I guess the question is: “What do I track?” How many points do I get for encouraging someone to do something good? Or helping someone decide to build something new rather than tear down something old?
Suggestions welcome.
There is something about winter that makes it hard for me to get out and take photos (maybe it’s the ice and snow on the roads?) That combined with my break from school has made me lazy. In an attempt to thaw my creative juices this weekend, I stepped outside to see if there was some inspiration close by. Turns out there is a lot of cool [sic] stuff around the house during the winter.
I am one who gets easily mired in the negativity of others, and so I fight constantly to stop myself from becoming jaded. Jillian and I took a hike recently, and at the end, we were treated to one of those moments of breathtaking beauty that are so rare but so easily achievable if only you know where to look. It is so easy to ignore good things when there is so much bad stuff in the world, but foolish hope and optimism have always been the cornerstone of human development.
…It’s hard to stay mad, when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst… And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life
- American Beauty
There is a great article from Wired that describes Ray Ozzie as the “microprocessor” of the development engine at Microsoft:
The company must transform itself from a manufacturer that dumps out a big product every couple of years to a customer-obsessed enterprise devoted to continually producing, updating, and supporting a full panoply of services. In his speech, Ozzie puts it this way: “When packaged software ships, services go live. What was our end is now the beginning. The gold disk”—from which all retail copies of a new piece of software are made—”is now the grand opening.”
This means two things:
- The products matter more than ever. When you compete in this space you lower the switching costs, and people are less likely to hesitate to vote against you with their dollars.
- Microsoft has to undo years of overconfidence and employee training in the way things get done. There must be zero tolerance for old processes that lead to stupid and frustrating decisions in their software.
I wish them luck, but I suspect that #2 will be an 50 ton anchor that may take them long enough to shed as to make them a strong second or third instead of first.
A friend recently sent me a great pitch video that Steve Jobs gave while he was at NeXT. The video is a fascinating piece of marketing history, especially because the endeavor turned out to be such a failure. While I realize that this is a pitch, pitches, like any other kind of story, have the effect of convincing the audience and the people telling it. He totally overestimated the need for usability at that point, in 1991, in the development of the workstation/pc market. In addition, he projected his tastes onto a market that, to this day, has an almost supernatural aversion to being cool.
I am struck by the difference, between this pitch and the iPod pitch, or even the Mac pitch from Nerds. He wasn’t framing the NeXT station’s differences from the point of view of benefits as perceived by the customer. Instead, he uses future tense language about how NeXT will be better and people will want what it does. Although he doesn’t seem to completely realize it, he makes the key insight that there was an audience out there that would appreciate an functionally and artistically elevated approach to an otherwise humdrum product category. His thinking was great, it was just his target that was wrong.
He needed a group of people to whom he could teach taste and elegance, and it turns out that consumers and the iPod let him do that. The best part about the iPod, aside from design, was that it changed the way people perceived the digital music player market. The positioning stroke of genius was the statement that the iPod held 5000 songs and let you take all of your music anywhere you went. It was the customer’s problem stated in the words they would use, and providing a solution to an immediate and tangible issue that they faced. Add to that the awesome experience of using the device (especially compared to competition), and you have something remarkable: a story that customers can tell each other, and an exclusive club of cool that has a badge that you carry around with you.
Most striking, for me, is the realization that Jobs, or someone, needs to be a pitch man, a maven of taste, to make Apple successful. He needs to radiate an understanding of cool. It is important because his goal is to get people to accept his definition of cool, and he knows it. He is totally right to leave the technical and user interaction innovations to someone else and be the man that can convince people that they want to be as cool as John Mayer.
There are many times when repeating things is necessary and helpful. That is certainly the case with a strong QA/testing/feedback process in software development. The key is getting feedback early and then often. In my most recent project at Fog Creek, we took a product from concept to release in 6 weeks. It was a substantial amount of work. It adds some great new functionality, but my best guess is that it took us fifteen to twenty percent longer then it “should have.”
The problem was simply that our rock star QA analyst was away on vacation at [what we failed to recognize as] a pivot point in the development cycle. It happened just as we finished the first pass of Fog Creek Copilot OneClick’s functionality, before any of the chrome was applied. The people around to give us feedback had a strong technical understanding of the product and the problem that it was solving. As a result, we spent a full week without serious first-time user feedback.
It is a distinct advantage, that QA analysts aren’t programmers (usually). It’s awesome that FC attracted a few that put themselves in the shoes of lead users in a way that is very hard once you are deeply involved in the architecture of the software. Without their feedback, we made decisions about features and interaction design, as well as assumptions about the readiness of the software for delivery to market, that were wrong.
We could have solved this problem without Alison (QA analyst extraordinaire) if we had recognized it. Steve Krug has a great methodology for dealing with this exact issue, through quick and cheap usability testing, but we didn’t think it was dangerous to delay the collection of feedback just a few days. Its not that we had to undo all of the decisions that were made in that intervening week, but some made it harder to incorporate the necessary changes that came out of Ali’s testing. Even hallway usability testing failed us, to some extent, because we had explained too much about the product and the process to our colleagues. Without credible non-tech-centric feedback, our blind spots grew, but our awareness of them receded. More importantly, we lost momentum because we started to feel like it was done even though we were only really at the halfway point, in terms of time.
The day Ali returned from vacation and started filing bugs, our productivity went right back up, our sense of urgency returned, and our blind spots started shrinking. 2 weeks later, we were cleaning the dust out of the corners and putting the final touches on the product. It’s comforting to know that this is a problem that can be hedged by proactively improving our process. Next time around, we will be sure to have either QA or user feedback built-in to the “initial pass complete” phase of our development cycle.
