Microsoft Has Started the Clock Ticking on Web Office Apps

By now, you’ve heard Microsoft Office 2010 will include web versions of the Office apps.  Some speculated that Monday’s announcement by Microsoft was what led Google to upstage them with the ChromeOS announcement.  But did ChromeOS really upstage Microsoft, and what will be the impact of a thin client MS Office?

Having been a General in the Office Wars of the 80’s and early 90’s, I can tell you it is about to get ugly for the upstarts and their Webby Office Wannabes.  Zoho, Google Apps, et al have not yet achieved sufficient traction to be anywhere near critical mass players.  They’re not even as far along as the long line of players (including my own Borland with Quattro Pro) that Microsoft dispatched the first time around.  Guys, fair warning: this is the kind of down and dirty competitive fighting that Microsoft does extremely well.  Your days are numbered or at least your growth is capped unless you can find a way around the Redmond Horde, and a lot of folks have tried before you with a lot of resources in the form of dollars and IQ points.

Microsoft will be fighting from their competitive strength.  They own the Office market.  Wannabes have so far failed to even match Office functionality, have many serious incompatibilities (leading to adoption barriers), and have failed to introduce much in the way of innovations short of running in a browser.  Microsoft will shortly eliminate that point of differentiation and at the same time they’ll be adding a whole raft of juicy looking new functionality.  You already weren’t caught up to them on functionality and the bar is about to go higher.  This feature war game is something Microsoft can play all day long, holding your heads underwater until you’re just tired of it.  Even if you one up them on some apps, they have a whole suite and the power of inertia.  Whatever you build, they will deliver their own version of it very shortly thereafter.  It’s an arms race where they bury you much the way Reagan did the old Soviet Union.

The best news is that it’s all good for customers.  It’s all good for us.  At least for as long as it lasts.

This is Microsoft as we haven’t seen them in years.  They are only at their best when they get their backs against the wall.  Bing showed up after years and years of failure against Google and even Yahoo.  Now we’re getting Office 2010.  Real new functionality of interest has been lacking for an extremely long time.  Office 2010 is blowing out all sorts of cool stuff: it runs in a browser, lots of new visual coolness (take that Apple!), and lots of new collaborative functions.  Heck even Scoble is excited.  As he points out, those that declared MS Office dead four years ago turn out to have been very wrong.

So keep it up competitors.  This is good stuff.  You bring out the best in Microsoft.  We know you’re likely to fall on your swords (or theirs) doing it, but it is a valuable service.  Complacent monopolies are a bad thing.  And guess what?  You do have a chance in the war.  It ain’t over and the fat lady hasn’t sung.  But you had sure better get your acts together in a hurry because the sleeping grizzly bear is wide awake and she’s pissed you’re in her territory.

This Twitter Post a Long Time in Coming

I’ve been collecting Twitter stories in my blog reader for several weeks.  There are gillions of them and they’re frankly clogging things up.  But I wanted to be able to go back, read them all in a sitting, and try to get some gestalt back about Twitter.  This is a long post because Twitter is a complex phenomenon, and can’t be understood in 140 character snippets.  Before we get any further, let me say that I use Twitter, and I like Twitter, but there is a lot more going on with Twitter than it seems, and that bears thinking about.

As is often the case, a lot of Twitter is about marketing and human behavior.  Deep-rooted behavior that creates strong forces that propel Twitter forward.  For a long time I have sensed those forces, but couldn’t quite put them into words. 

Probably my closest attempt was a feeling that largely what Twitter has done is to eliminate all the friction.  It is the most amazingly frictionless Social Media the world has yet seen.  Consider some of the many ways in which Twitter has eliminated friction:

-   It’s trivial to join, of course.  But having joined, there is an absolute minimum amount of effort required to “prepare your nest.”  MySpace requires quite a lot of effort.  Facebook took less, and one could argue that is a big advantage for Facebook.

-   There is no business model to get in the way.  There are no ads and no fees to keep up with.  There is spam, but so far it is easily ignored. 

-   You are left alone.  You can completely ignore Twitter, or participate completely sporadically.  You are not bombarded with messages asking you to do various things.  At best, you have messages telling you someone followed you, which are good news messages you can choose to ignore.  Once in a Blue Moon, you may get a direct message on Twitter, but you can ignore that pretty painlessly too. 

-  You don’t have to be William Shakespeare to contribute.   People alternately complain about the limitations of only being able to post 140 characters and the brilliance of forcing people to write poetry to get their point across.  It’s all very Zen.  Yet there is a simpler explanation.  If I am only writing 140 characters, how badly can I screw things up?  If I only have to get on stage and utter one line, I can get through it.  Moreover, it is socially acceptible on Twitter to write the most pedestrian of drivel.  You don’t have to be profound.  Just tell which fast food you ate for lunch.  Even if I can’t possibly write a blog post, I can do this.  I can Tweet!  Hence Fred Wilson calls it, “Blogging in less than a minute.”

-  You can make friends.  It’s easy.  Just go follow people.  Mostly they follow you back.  If you try even a little bit hard to accumulate followers, you can get quite a few.  Don’t know who to follow?  Simple, go find some popular person and just follow everyone they follow.  This works.  I’ve seen it many times.  Twitter will even suggest who to follow (a tactic some argue discourages a vibrant community).  There are endless other ways to game Twitter and get a zillion followers.   It’s much easier than SEO or the kinds of things you have to do to get a following for a blog.  It’s much easier than friending on Facebook.  Note:  I have studiously avoided these games to see what happens if you wait for the world to come to you and because I don’t value followers who follow me just because I followed them first.  I want followers who follow me because they like what I have to say or because I like what they have to say.

-  It meshes extremely well with the Mobile Web.  As a result, it has also become an awesome way to quietly pass notes in class, even at poker games.

-  For certain personality types, Twitter is positively addictive.  It is a cult to the extent that Twitter was recommended for Nobel Peace Price.  OK, I’m no Twitter hater, but come on, that’s just ridiculous.  Techcrunch is closer when they say the cycle for Twitter is curiousity followed either by abandonment or addiction.  The middle ground is missing there.

They got a lot right!  So where is the downside in all that?  

Extracting value.  There is friction around extracting value from Twitter.  It’s easy to start Twitter, but it is hard to continue because of the friction in extracting value.

Before we talk about that friction, we have to ask a fair question:  “Is there real value in Twitter?”

Once upon a time, there was a company that many in Silicon Valley were hot about.  It had top drawer VC’s, and it seemed that everywhere I went, I saw this software running on computers.  It was called PointCast, and it was dead sexy.  It had a technology hook called “Push Technology.”  It had that online webby connectedness.  It had an advertising model.  All this in 1997.  I had a chance to interview to be their VP Of Engineering, but I found the whole value proposition to be troubling.  You see, what PointCast did was to display advertising on a screensaver.  Fascinating to look at.  People love a cool screen saver.  And this one gave news and all sorts of other information interspersed with ads.  But what troubled me is that I could get all that from the Internet whenever I wanted it, and PointCast only delivered it up when I wasn’t using the computer, which triggered the screensaver.

Hello?  Ads served precisely whenever someone wasn’t using the computer?  Am I the only one who thought this was a bit silly?

Well, to make that long detour shorter, they got a $450M offer from Rupert Murdoch, which was a huge valuation at the time, they turned it down, and then the company essentially disappeared about a year later.  I guess there were others who thought it was a bit silly after all.

Is Twitter another PointCast?  Sexy at the moment, but in the end, offering no value, and hence doomed when the hype wears off?

Some feel that way, but I don’t think so.  I have personally gotten real value from Twitter despite that friction.  Twitter is an incredible newswire and real time search.  Remember the old teletypes constantly churning out news?  Remember the old paper ticker tapes for the stock market?  Twitter is all that and a lot more.  It is the fastest way to know a little bit (140 characters, remember!) about anything, and especially brand new things.  Any service that lets you find news you can’t get anywhere else is fundamentally valuable.

If I were at Twitter, I would be focused on increasing the value delivered and reducing the friction around getting that value.  As we crest the growth curve, all those people defecting are going to be problematic.  It will get increasingly expensive to bring enough new participants to offset that churn.  I’m still pondering exactly what I would do, so that will be the subject of other posts, but that would be my top priority.  Adoption friction is gone.  No need to focus further there.  It’s time to focus on reducing Value Extraction Friction.

What, then, is the “Value Extraction Friction” that Twitter faces?

-  People don’t know what Twitter is.  It’s blind men describing an elephant so far.  It is a Rohrshach.  Every writer has a different take.  Like the infamous Supreme Court quote about porn, we don’t know what Twitter is, but we’re sure if you experience it, you will recognize it, and like it.  That is a sure tip off to Value Friction.  There is no good elevator pitch for the value that everyone immediately groks and shares.   The whole microblogging thing doesn’t really tell the story of what Twitter is.  You might get me to try it by calling it “Blogging in less than a minute”, but it won’t take me long to decide, “No, not really.”

-  If you do the obvious thing and latch on to a ton of followers very easily, the signal to noise ratio on Twitter is lousy.  The more followers you have, and having a lot seems to be the thing, the less likely you are to read more than a small fraction of their Tweets.  Popular Twitterati with tens of thousands of follows are basically absentees.  When seeking followers, be careful what you wish for and clear about what you want to get out of Twitter.  OTOH, even celebrities with tons of followers sometimes hear amazing things about themselves first on Twitter.

-  You have to use search to cut through the noise.  Search invalidates the follower aspect of Twitter, though.  Plus search makes you think about what to search for.  It’s hard to search for news by defintion.  If you know what to search for, you already heard about it and want to learn more.

-  Twitter is lousy for conversations.  Admit it.  Without some external app, conversations on Twitter are disjointed and confusing.  There’s no way to stitch a conversation together manually.  The more followers you have, and the more the conversation involves people you don’t follow, the harder it gets.  Twitter is largely a “talk but don’t listen” medium.  Hmmm.  That is strikingly Old School when you think about it.

-  Despite some people feeling Twitter and its Retweets can be a big source of traffic for your blog or other properties, it is no silver bullet.  But it certainly helps.  Perhaps it is more a source of discovery than an ongoing source of traffic.  When it does drive traffic, Twitter traffic is certainly inconsistent.

-  Increasingly, thought leaders are saying though leaders shouldn’t spend their time on Twitter.  Twitter is where the unwashed go to discover what the thought leaders are saying.  It isn’t where thought leaders go to learn anything.  Just ask Robert Scoble or Jeremiah Owyang.  Or Nicholas Carr who says Twitter is turning the mighty into peasants.  

-  Twitter is wide open.  There is no privacy.  This is both a blessing and a curse.  It reduces friction right up until you need to talk about something privately, and then it forces you to go elsewhere.  As Scoble puts it, he craves intimacy at times.  It causes some to actually discourage Tweeting, particularly in the PR space.

-  As the newness wears off, Twitter is increasingly going to be gamed by the spammers.  A huge part of Google’s value is they regularly win this arms race.  It isn’t clear that Twitter has even started to build any arms yet.

-  Twitter is largely about reaching and hearing the Social Media Geeks and Early Adopters.  It still hasn’t crossed the chasm.

Right now, Twitter is stuck in what Seth Godin calls the “Fan Chasm.”  As he puts it:

There are very few products, services or organizations that are simultaneously easily approachable and quite deep. That’s an opportunity for you if you can figure out how to be both, but choosing just one is a more likely scenario. So, which are you?

Twitter is easily approachable, and not at all deep.  That’s not the end of the world.  Twitter has gone far on this much.  But if they can figure out how to do both, or if their ecosystem figures it out for them, then they’ll be the dominant social medium on the web.

Related Twittiography

Some of the more interesting posts on Twitter that accumulated but were not linked above that can now be marked off:

Umair Haque on Twitter via Dion Hinchcliffe:  Haque is one of the Digerati, often challenging others with controversial insights.  I think his post largely points to the frictionlessness of Twitter as I have, but without identifying the problem of Value Extraction Friction.  As I have decried many times elsewhere, it is typically Western, requiring black and white judgements with his 10  <this great Twitter thing> beats <this conventional wisdom>.  He would’ve done better to identify the underlying friction theme and recognize nothing was beating anything.  Rather, it was being given away.

Om Malik on Twitter Hate:  There are no end of Twitter Hate stories.  The statistics on people joining and never using/leaving Twitter are horrendous.  This is simply a reflection of the high Value Friction.  If getting Value was easy for everyone, they would stay.  The low adoption friction means Om is right.  Twitter will bounce back and forth between Love (adoption) and Hate (value).

Brian Solis on Twitter being a broadcast, not a conversational platform.

Om Malik on how most Twitter users are strikingly silent.

Microsoft: Bad User Experience Is Cultural

I just lost an hour of work to Microsoft Word because it clears the clipboard every time you start it up fresh.  It’s been doing it for years.  I knew about it, but I simply forgot.  I was working on a blog post in WordPress, and decided I wouldn’t finish and wanted to transfer it to Word.  I often transfer posts to Word because it gives better spelling and grammar checking.   I would leave the doc on my Windows desktop at home, and finish when I returned.  An additional complication was that I had accidentally published the article prematurely, and so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone.  So I copied it to the clipboard, deleted it from WordPress so it would no longer be published, opened up a new Word document, and…  Shite.  It was lost.  Word cleared the clipboard.  I knew this as soon as I saw Word starting to come up, but there was no way to stop it at that point.

What idiot at Microsoft thought this would be a good idea?  What group of idiots let it continue for years?

I have a dim recollection that this is done for some sort of security reason.  There is a hack or exploit that is thwarted by deleting the clipboard’s contents before the app comes up.  But I don’t use any other app that has this behaviour.  Clearly there are better ways to avoid the security problems, because other apps have found them.  A search of the web will tell you everything from, “Word doesn’t do this, what are you talking about?” to “It only happens if you have Works installed” (I don’t), and on to, “Oh yeah, it’s stupid behavior, but you can install a pop up app that captures the clipboard for you so Word can’t destroy it.”

The great mystery to me is that this isn’t accidental behavior.  It isn’t some newly introduced bug that will be fixed shortly in a patch.  Microsoft thinks this is better, or at the very least, doesn’t care enough about the User Experience to do anything about it.  They have made a conscious and well-reasoned by their lights decision that Word should work this way.  So, probably a couple of times each year, I manage to lose some data because of it. 

That brings me to the cultural question on User Experience.  What sort of a culture would do this kind of thing?  More importantly, what sort of culture is needed to avoid it?

Microsoft is hugely driven by product management.  With a few notable exceptions (Anders H. and C # would be a good one), the PM’s make all the key customer facing decisions.  This dates back a long time ago to someone telling Bill Gates he desperately needed to get some business expertise into the company and not just let the geeks run it.  So he led with product management, and with Steve Ballmer, who came out of Consumer Packaged Goods product management.  Product Managers run the show there.  And that is the fabric of the culture that let’s Microsoft Word delete the clipboard (which is, after all, intended to facilitate integration between apps!), among many many other terrible user experience discussions.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Product Management is extremely valuable.  Product Managers are the only people in most organizations whose full time job it is to listen to customers.  That’s important!

However, that job is different than the job of a product designer.  To use a Hollywood movie metaphor, the Product Manager should be the Producer, not the Director and not the Screenwriter.  The PM will decide, “The market is ready for a good Western, because it has been a while.”  Then the Director and Screenwriter will put together Unforgiven.  They’ll get a very small group of fantastic actors (corresponding to the developers) like Clint Eastwood and Gene Hackman.  Each group has to give the other group’s sufficient “turf” and artistic freedom to be successful.  Can you imagine it working if the Director had to micromanage Eastwood or Hackman too much?  Likewise, if the Producer got to far into the details of the movie, the Director could not succeed.

But there is a school that companies like Microsoft subscribe to that view User Experience as being a function of debits and credits.  If we make this change, will we sell any more copies of Microsoft Word?  There is a big deal on the table, and if we agree to change the product to suit them, even if it is a bad idea for others, we can close that deal today.  That problem does not affect enough users, so we don’t need to worry about it. 

That’s the language of dollars and cents as it applies to product design, according to this school of thought.

Thanks to Techmeme, I came across a nice article about Jonathan Ive, who is one of the key designers at Apple responsible for the iPhone and iPod.  Though they seem to surprise the writer, there are fantastic insights into what it takes to create a culture that delivers great user experience.  Trying to calculate user experience with debits and credits is most decidely not how it is done:

Ive was insistent that the key to Apple’s success was that it was not driven by money – a claim that may raise eyebrows amongst shareholders and customers – but by a complete focus on delivering just a few desirable and useful products.

Total focus.  Total focus on building insanely great products.

So how did the company decide what customers wanted – surely by using focus groups? “We don’t do focus groups,” he said firmly, explaining that they resulted in bland products designed not to offend anyone.

Christopher Frayling reminded us at that point of Henry Ford’s line about what his customers would have demanded if asked – “a faster horse” – and it’s surely true that the point of innovative companies is to come up with products that customers don’t yet know they need.

Focus groups and prioritized customer driven feature lists are not the answer.  They’re too tactical and do not create conceptual integrity.  The involve detailed placement of trees rather than creation of a beautiful and healthy forest.  I touched heavily on this idea recently and on how it is insidious for Enterprise Software.  But it is even more dangerous for consumer products.

But it was the physicality of design work that Jonathan Ive was keen to stress – from the Apple design workshop full of machines, throwing off a lot of noise and dust, to visits to Japanese aluminium craftsmen to learn how that material could be crafted into a laptop casing. Yes, of course he and his team use all the latest computer-aided design tools – but he also likes to knock out a physical prototype and feel the weight of it in his hand.

He told a story about how, as a boy, he’d taken apart an old-fashioned alarm clock, and inside the spare outer casing found a mass of workings, “an entire watch factory”.

I read that as the designers are steeped in personal contact and use with the product.  Personally, I just can’t take a job working on a product unless I relate to it.  I’m an engineer, but a creator of things moreso.  There are lots of kinds of engineers, but the best love to create many things.  My own leisure time activities almost universally involve creating things–blogs, web sites, computer controlled machine tools, music, and a number of other things.  The tactility and physicality of design that Ive talks about reflects an aesthetic sense.  It’s less engineer and more like an architect (one who creates buildings, not code) in terms of the feel.

Until you have a culture with those sorts of values, and that empowers those sorts of people, your products will lack great user experience.  It doesn’t mean you can’t succeed, but don’t kid yourself that your success will be built on great user experience.  It will come from some other source.

Years ago I had a discussion with a Microsoft Product Manager who had come to a company I worked at about this.  He wanted to establish the same culture.  I described for him what I am describing here.   He responded, “Bob, you’re a great product designer, but as a company, we can’t count on being able to find enough Bobs.  So we need to use product managers instead.” 

It is much easier to use product managers to create a repeatable process.  After all, there is much less passion involved.  For many markets, it may not be worth Apple-style design.  People often wonder for Enteprise software whether it matters, for example.  But I don’t buy my PM friend’s argument.  Talent of all kinds is always scarce.  A decision to eschew finding talent for a repeatable process creates mediocrity.

Related Articles

Zoli Erdos always has a humorous but wise take on the issues he blogs about.

Talk about a bad user experience:  Microsoft ad has woman vomiting.  These things would never see the light of day if the user experience cops were effective.  Valuing user experience has to be built in to the culture or it doesn’t happen.

Maybe its just Evolutionary Hardwiring that makes it so easy to get upset with Microsoft.

Ironically, Big On-Prem Enterprise Software is the Most Customer Driven Software There Is

Vinnie Merchandani thinks big Enterprise software involves building a lot of features nobody wants.  He riffs about underutilized features and wishes for a market like the iPhone’s AppStore.   He wishes SaaS vendors to use their real time visibility into what their customers are doing to give them that kind of market-driven visibility into what to build.

Vinnie and I are fellow Enterprise Irregulars, and I really enjoy his perspective most of the time, but he has it all wrong on this one.  Backwards in fact.  Sorry Vinnie!

You see, Big On-Premises Enterprise Software is more customer driven than any other kind of software there is.

“Huh, why is that and what are you talking about, Bob?”

As one person described it to me, for these sorts of companies the Customer is God and Sales is the Church.  Sales people are natural arbitrageurs.  Any time a question comes up they are rapidly computing who to say “no” to.  Is it easier to negotiate with the customer about their request, or is it easier to negotiate with the company?  The bigger the deal and the better the salesperson (and the two go hand in hand, don’t they?), the more likely it is they choose to say “yes” to the customer and “no” to the company.

All that feature bloat in those products is as a result of saying “yes” too many times to customers.  “Yes” was easier than educating them about better ways to do things, or on how while it seems like “yes” is a good answer today, tomorrow they will have enough experience with the software to realize “yes” is no longer important.

Many view the essential function of marketing and sales as finding ways to say “yes” as often as possible, no matter what the cost.  But here is the problem.  Many times “yes” is exactly what wrecked the product.  “Yes” led to the kinds of problems Vinnie wants to escape from.

Look at it this way.  Marketers are fond of saying that since everyone consumes marketing, they all think they are good marketers.  The same is true for products.  Every user wants to tell you how to fix it before they have even explained what the problem is that needs fixing.  There is a whole school of product management that holds that the way to build great products is to constantly survey end users, build great big prioritized lists of what they want, and then give it to them.  That’s how Microsoft builds its products, for example.   But just as everyone who watches movies is not Steven Spielberg, most people who think they have a great idea for how to change a product are probably not helping.

When you approach things that way, you have a lot of trees and no sign of a forest.  Microsoft is known for successful products (unfortunately more in that past than present), but not for great products.  How do companies operate that are known for great products?  Well, consider Apple, which is perhaps the diametric opposite of the democratic product design process.  They annoint a very few philosopher kings who have the vision.  They’re spurred on by the philosopher emperor-in-chief Steve Jobs until they get it right.  Insanely Great Products are the end result.  Apple’s brief fling with moving away from that approach with Soda Pop King John Sculley was a total disaster for them.  On a much smaller scale, 37Signals is a similar model.  They actually take features back out of products if they think they were a bad idea.  That’s something that is very hard to get customers to recommend very often, and they take heat for it.  But they stick to their guns and they are generally quite successful.

Operating that way leads to conceptual integrity.  You get a forest instead of just a bunch of trees.

Companies can’t afford to ignore customers, there has to be a balance.  You need people making product decisions who are enlightened enough to connect the two ends together.  They’re going to ensure a forest gets built, but they will let customers position enough of the trees to keep them happy too.  And, where a tree is being positioned that’s in the way of a vital river needed to bring water to the forest, they will object and stop that tree being planted.  Even if it means losing one customer.  Because it ensures a healthy forest that ultimately leads to more customers in the end.

It’s a tricky process.  If you have a company that either ignores customers too much, or gives in too easily, you’ll have a product that suffers for it.  Visionaries have to be good listeners, and they have to go forth among the customers to understand their needs.  They have to be good at selling their point of view too.  If you can convince a customer to buy into the vision, they’ll quit trying so hard to plant trees in the wrong places.  Steve Jobs does all that in spades.  Is it any wonder he has been so successful?

Social Media Adoption in the Enterprise

Steve Gilmore’s post on the new FriendFeed UI has shaken loose a variety of responses.  Personally, I did not care for the post because it didn’t convey much information.  Rather, it is a breathless and somewhat florid love letter to Twitter:

We’re seeing a new Beatles emerging in this new morning of creativity, a series of devices and software constructs that empower us with both the personal meaning of our lives and the intuitive combinations of serendipity and found material and the sturdiness that only rigorous practice brings.

That was about as pragmatic as informative as the rambling piece got.  One could not take away any sense of what exactly this wondrous new innovation was, only that Gilmore was deeply moved by it.

TechCrunch and Scoble did a better job of saying just what this new FriendFeed did that was so great.  Scoble even went so far as to talk about what wasn’t so great in a second post.  Nick Carr, OTOH, took time out from writing his next book to pen a somewhat similarly obtuse ode to the mighty tweet.

Clearly there is something worth writing about to attract the attention of such Uber Bloggers, but just as clearly, there was something discordant about Gilmore’s note.  What seemed the most odd to me about Gilmore’s post was that it appeared under TechCrunchIT.  That’s right, it was in what is purportedly an IT-directed blog.  Yet it was just about the most un-IT sort of post imaginable.  The post came up in the private chat area of the Enterprise Irregulars not long after it went up, and I remarked after reading it that I had never talked to any Enterprise decision maker that sounded remotely like that post about anything, and hence I didn’t think the post had any value to such a person.  That’s not to say it wasn’t a well written and interesting post, just that it seemed inappropriate to that kind of audience.

Fellow Irregular Susan Scrupski went on to pen a post for RWWeb about the state of Enterprise 2.0 adoption being “Slow and Unsteady”.  Reading Susan’s post, I feel her angst.  She’s talking about the vast gulf between the giddy excitement of Gilmore for Twitter/Friendfeed, and the more usual reaction one sees across the Enterprise.  Susan sounds frustrated that the Enterprise world doesn’t see things a little bit more like Gilmore, though clearly she also sees him as a bit too frothy as well.  Reality is in the middle.

Stepping back from Susan’s post and reflecting, I think the issue we’re struggling with here is stage appropriateness.  I say this specifically with respect to Geoffrey Moore’s concept of the Chasm.  Gilmore and Carr write as pre-chasm early adopters.  They see Big Things ahead as they peer across the seething Niagara Falls that is the Chasm to be crossed for these ideas to become mainstream.  They write less about fact, logic, or (heaven forbid) ROI, and more to provoke.  Love it or hate it, just don’t ignore it because if it isn’t talked about everywhere, it’ll never make it across that Chasm.

The reason I think I find all of that sort of talk to be offputting is because a lot of Social Media has already made it across the Chasm.  That kind of tone, designed to provoke and fire up the emotional side is not necessary.  There are many in the Enterprise using Social tools every single day and loving it.  Likewise there are many Enterprises exposing their customers to Social Media, and those customers are loving it. 

-  Dell’s Ideastorm tirelessly crowdsources new ideas for the business every day.  Their forums tirelessly help Dell’s customers to solve problems they’re having.

-  Starbucks has a similar Ideastorm.

-  Wells Fargo bank lets customers ask service questions via Twitter.

Sure, Dell is a Tech company, but Starbucks isn’t, and Wells Fargo is a bank for crying out loud.  These are some public examples where anyone can see these companies pushing Social Media. 

There are many more such examples of external use by large companies, but the adoption for internal use is even more impressive.  Dion Hinchcliffe writes about how Microsoft Sharepoint is alive and well in one third of large companies.  Enterprise 2.0 true believers will hold their noses and cough to clear their lungs of the noxious odor of something so pedestrian as Sharepoint from a company as un-hip as Microsoft, but it is Social Media and it is being widely used.

Yes, there are still skeptics in large organizations.  But there are quiet forces driving adoption forward relentlessly.  They are doing so for two reasons that can’t be argued with.  First, and most importantly, it works.  Even if the big boss in the corner office won’t endorse it, others will.  It becomes like the argument that the PC can’t spread because managers don’t type–they have secretaries who do that for them.  Second, there are powerful demographic trends at work.  An entire generation and everyone younger grew up using this stuff.   It is no longer a passionate thing, Gilmore notwithstanding.  It is a normal part of day to day life, and they will not operate without it.  Whether that means your employees are driving you, or whether you hope to sell to customers from that younger demographic, you have little choice but to get with it.

I believe the problem with rantings like Steve Gilmore’s is not that Social Media has no value and no adoption, leaving him nothing to talk about but the sizzle.  Rather, it is that in many ways, the Chasm has already been crossed and such evangelism no longer seems appropriate.  Companies are quietly getting value from Social Media.  Their questions are not around whether to do it or not.  Rather, they are around quantifying the value and adopting the Best Practices that will maximize that value.  Frankly, some of them would rather the competition did not get too excited about what they already know works and gives them an advantage.  It’s about that stage immediately after the Chasm is Crossed.  The one where Geoff Moore says its time to make Social Media safe for the masses.

My own company, Helpstream, has done a series of ROI benchmarks that show spectacular results for Social Media in Customer Service.  Independent analysts are writing their own ROI studies as we speak and they will soon publish. 

Right when an idea or category is just across the Chasm is the hardest time.   There is a tug-of-war from either side.   The early adopter/visionaries like Gilmore and Nick Carr will wax even more elegantly with their florid prose.  The pragmatists will talk loudly of ROI.  And the vast unwashed masses will proclaim as loudly as ever that it is all experimentation and unproven.  You can see each element speaking out in this way on the comments associated with the posts I’ve linked to.  They’re all there and out in force.  This is the most polarized moment a new idea faces.  But that polarization drives interest, and that interest drives adoption further up the slope of normalcy, and one day we wake up and it’s done. 

On that day we will see that the stories and the language have shifted almost unnoticed in the fracus.  We’ll see people like Gilmore and Scoble battling the Social Media Curmudgeons for a little while longer, but then the romaticism of a post like Steve Gilmore’s will start to seem quaint, then dated, then kooky.  We will mourn the passing of the phenomenon.  The Beatles (Gilmore likened Twitter to the Beatles) will break up, and we’ll be left with bands that seem less meaningful, less heartfelt, and a lot more commercial. 

That’s bad for a band, but good for a business tool.  Please join us on the mainstream side of the Chasm where Social Media works quietly to deliver value every day.

Coghead Shuttered: Another in a Long Line of Non-Developer Developer Tools

Coghead has shut down.  Techcrunch has a copy of the letter sent to customers announcing the shutdown.  Customers will be able to run their apps without support until April.

Meanwhile, SAP of all places has acquired the technology.  I can’t imagine anything further removed from SAP than a tool for non-developers to use to create low end database and form apps.  After all, SAP is known for unbelievably flexible but costly to implement and extremely complex high end enterprise apps.  But, I assume a Grand Plan will be revealed in the fullness of time.  Maybe they just wanted to hire the developers as a team.  Intuit Quickbase have extended an offer to try to bring Coghead’s customers over.  It’s a generous offer, but transitions like this are not easy.  Coghead was a proprietary tool as most of these are and so the apps will have to be rewritten.  Still, presumably there are folks dependent on those apps who will have to do something.

The market for tools for non-developers to build software with is littered with interesting remnants.  They range from things like BASIC (still successful, but not clear VB is as simple as the original BASIC people were using to write Lunar Lander games with) to dBase/MS Access to the brief Renaissance of 4GL tools from companies like Powersoft that marked the early part of the Client Server era.  Many of these tools have vanished without a trace, or at least gone off to niches where they’re much loved but seldom heard about.  Lots of fancy names have been bandied about for this breed.  Coghead calls itself a “declarative application” for example.

In general, these tools are really difficult to get right.  Developers are expensive, and there is often a need for a little app that doesn’t warrant the expense of hiring the developers.  It seems so tantalizing to many that an app can be created that suddenly makes it possible for non-developers who understand their business problem to crank out the apps like crazy.  Alas, mostly it doesn’t happen so easily.  The products demo well, but programming in the end is, well, programming.  It ain’t easy if you’re not really a programmer at heart.  Probably the best example of a successful product for non-programmers is the spreadsheet.  But look at why it succeeds: 

-  They completely broke the mold.  There was nothing remotely like spreadsheets before Visicalc arrived on the scene.

-  They limited themselves to a particular domain–accounting and financial statements.  And that domain gave them a ton of elbow room because there were a lot of “apps” (spreadsheets) that needed creating there, and they were all highly custom.

-  The availability of this new invention intersected and rode on the back of a major paradigm shift that was underway:  the PC.  Spreadsheets, together with Word Processing, were the “killer apps” that made PC’s important to business.

This other genre of products doesn’t benefit from any of those qualities.  They mostly don’t break the mold enough to really make programming easier.  Instead they borrow ideas from lots of places and wind up complex grab bags of ideas.  Their domain, simple apps that need forms and databases, often just don’t have enough compelling apps to sell.  And lastly, that paradigm shift hasn’t been there to help much.  In a world where you had a choice of BASIC or dBase to build a custom accounting system, life was easy.  Today you could use so many different choices, and all the existing accounting systems are so much more customizable, that it’s hard to argue for this class.  Coghead was at least SaaS, some called it a Platform as a Service, but I just don’t think the paradigm shift was favorable enough given other available choices.  I also agree with Sinclair Schuller that the highly proprietary nature of a lot of these tools makes adoption a lot harder.

An adjacent space that I think is much more viable would be the easy-to-use “P” languages:  Pearl, Python, and PHP.  Ruby on Rails counts too, even though it doesn’t start with “P” and may be a little more cerebral than the other 3.  I’ve seen non-programmers do some pretty amazing things with these tools.  They have huge communities, and the languages are amenable to the sort of copying-and-pasting-of-examples-barely-understood.  At least they’re not proprietary and its easy to get lots of help, whether in the form of books available everywhere, online help, lots of finished examples, or even meeting someone pretty easily who is an “expert.”  Another I would throw into this category is Adobe’s Flex, which lets you do some very cool things indeed, though it is a touch more proprietary.

Other players still standing in this space:  Caspio, Bungee, Longjump, and probably others I have missed.  Best of luck to you guys!

Email Needs a “Reply to Community” Instead of “Reply to All”

I read with interest AC Nielsen’s decision to eliminate the Reply All button from their email in an effort, as Andrew Cawood, Chief Information Officer for Nielsen Company, puts it, to “eliminate bureaucracy and inefficiency”.

Robin Wauters thinks the idea this will eliminate inefficiency is absurd, and I agree.  In fact, absent an alternative mechanism for communication, Nielsen is eliminating one of the few mechanisms Old School organizations have to reach across silos on any regular basis.

After thinking about the problem, and about how we prefer to use email at Helpstream, I had an inspiration.  If Reply All is intended to facility communication with broader audiences, and I think it is, why not make it a “Reply to Community?”

Assuming your company has some for of internal community, as ours does using our own software, one of the biggest problems is getting people to move email discussions into the community where they can be more effective and more accessible.  It would be awesome if I had a “Reply to Community” button that would copy the email thread up to that point into a community forum, for example.  Instead of a list of recipients, I would be prompted for which forum the thread should be started in, and whether I wanted to just use the Subject as the name of the thread or whether I wanted to create a new name.  Everyone on the distribution list would automatically get a note telling them the conversation had been transferred to the community thread, and they would be automatically email subscribed to it as well.  While we’re at it, depending on what other tools your organization uses, checkboxes should be available to engage them as well.  Perhaps a thread wants to be moved to Twitter, or perhaps you want to Tweet updates to the community thread to a particular Twitter account.

Wouldn’t this be a useful facelift for email?  Then it could be primarily used for 1:1 more private communicates while seamlessly transferring broad participation to a tool that’s better suited to it in the first place.

Black/White – Symmetry/Asymmetry – Forum/Social Network – Search/Browse

Interesting post by Ross Mayfield on the disadvantages of symmetry in Social Media.  In particular, he is focused on the disadvantages of forums for this reason.  As he puts it, forums are about ideas not people.   The big selling point of following people instead of ideas is you’re leveraging other people as a filter.  The ultimate example he gives is that when someone is too obnoxious, you can’t unsubscribe.  BTW, that’s not really true.  Nearly every forum I participate in has an “Ignore” feature that does exactly what Ross hopes for and eliminates the need for you to ever hear from that person again.  I use it sparingly to eliminate trolls from poorly or un-moderated forums.

I am a big believer in subscribing to people, but I think you miss out if you choose to ignore all the “symmetrical” Social Media (BTW, it’s symmetrical WRT subscribing to everyone, but asymmetrical WRT subscribing to ideas, so I just see these media as a mirror image to the people based in terms of what’s symmetrical/asymmetrical, but that’s a pedantic note). 

Don’t yield to the Western tendency to have to pick a winner for any choice someone points out.  There is great value in following both options.  I find, for example, that I find the right people to subscribe to by following ideas.  The converse is also true, but the difference is evolutionary.  I seldom find the existing crop of people originating big new memes in my personal infosphere.  It is the people I didn’t yet follow that bring those memes in, which causes me to follow them to hear more. 

Because of that use for finding who to follow, I value “subscribe to everyone” models for building communities and relationships early on.  Once you’ve matured those, go in search of the “subscribe to person” model to reduce the information flow to manageable levels.  If you’re involved in a community that is sufficiently specialized that the information overflow situation doesn’t arise (I am involved in many), you’ll want to avoid “subscribe to person” lest it overly restrict your access to what little information is available. 

And don’t forget to search.  Being subscribed is great, but if you let yourself get so consumed with your subscriptions that you never go exploring, you’re missing out there too.  I was recently in a similar conversation where some folks from one of the REALLY BIG Internet companies asked about the Helpstream application.  We support both searching and browsing (as well as subscription).  They wanted to know our thoughts on the preferability of Search versus Browse, recognizing that you need both (Thank Goodness–they avoided the Western, “There can only be one winner” trap!). 

My answer was in three parts, and bears comparison to what I’ve said above.  First, new users gravitate to Search and have greater success there.   It isn’t surprising as it can take some exploration to learn what the browse hierarchy looks like and internalize where to go to find what you want.  Search jumps you straight in.  This is analogus to links versus search in the mainstream web.  Second, as I’ve discussed many times before, there are personal Learning Styles at work here.  Some people like the add-hoc and asynchronous feel of search.  Others need to know how all the pieces fit together and are organized, they are browsers.  My sense after working with both models at several startups is that this maps well to personality traits (engineers do a lot of browsing), but that Search is slightly more popular, say 60% search, 40% browse.  Individuals will show a marked preference for one versus the other.  The last point is that of task.  If someone is focused on a task that is idea-centric, they like search.  If it is social-centric, they seem to want a “place” (albeit virtual) to go for that task.  It is valuable to the evolutionary hard wiring in our brains to think of information or people as being in a place. 

I think there is a lot to the “place” metaphor.  You can feel it as you’re interacting with various social tools.  Search misses out on providing a place.  It homogenizes and warps “place space” so that things are artificially close to one another depending on what you’re searching for.  That’s best suited to one shot rather than repeat interactions.

More evidence for why you need multiple models, and shouldn’t settle for thinking any one tool is best for all things.

What Keeps Microsoft Office Strong is Incompetence

There, do I have your attention with that headline?  And how the heck can incompetence make a product strong?  No doubt you’re assuming I mean Microsoft’s incompetence, but it’s quite the opposite.  I am referring to the myriad competitors to Microsoft Office.

I got started on this rant after reading Larry Dignan’s rehash of a Bernstein report on Cloud Computing (executive summary: lots of buzz but it won’t have that big an impact, they’re wrong, but that’s the subject of another rant another time).

Getting back to the subject of incompetence, that is perhaps too harsh a word, but what’s wrong here, the reason cloud versions of the Office products are not getting uptake, is tragically avoidable.  I agree 100% with Bernstein’s analysis of what that problem is:

While Google Apps and Open Office from Sun have almost all of the functionality of Microsoft’s Office the conversion of documents is still not 100% effective, although Open Office comes very close indeed.  In a recent test Open Office could easily open a Word version of one of our published notes with formatting that was over 98% accurate.  Open Office could similarly open one of our financial models written in Excel – over 3Mb, and using a variety of Microsoft functions with iterative calculation.  Once again the document opened almost perfectly but a minor change was needed to ensure the model converged properly.  Google Docs did less well and could not handle the Excel model but opened our Word note and preserved about 90% of the formatting. Even though these programs are very nearly comparable in functionality and can offer additional functionality in terms of allowing users to simultaneously edit documents – which the client versions of Word and Excel cannot do – we still perceive considerable reluctance on the part of users and IT Departments to use them. 
 

The mystery to me is why these vendors can’t get compatibility with MS Office right.  There has to be some form of incompetence there, because it just isn’t that hard.

Let me explain.  I was a General in the Office Wars of the 80’s and 90’s.  I was responsible for Borland’s Quattro Pro.  It was 100% compatible not just with Excel, but before that with Lotus 1-2-3 during the DOS days when that product was King of the Hill.  None of the kinds of errors described for today’s MS Office competitors existed in our offering because I knew that any little hiccup trying ot use the original files would be the kiss of death.  As a matter of fact, on the predecessor to Quattro Pro, a product called Surpass, I personally did all the file compatibility work with Lotus 1-2-3.  It took me 4-6 months as I recall, and this while I was CEO of the company and working on a lot of other things.

Borland also had a Windows Word Processor that was MS Word compatible.   Unfortunately, we never got it shipped for various historical reasons (largely profitability issues made us fight over whether to spend the money, my argument was a single app can’t beat a suite no matter how good it is, the rest is history), but we were compatible there too.  And of course we were compatible in the database market, having shipped software that was compatible with dBase.

We were by no means the only software at that time to achieve that level of compatibility.  It is a mystery to me why the industry seems to have lost the capacity to think and execute in those terms.  It is no harder today than it was then.  The Quattro Pro product was built start to finish with just 10 developers in about 18 months.  I can’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be straightforward to do it again from scratch with a very similar budget.  That’s certainly within the reach of Google and others who want Office-killers.  Yet they don’t get it done.

Outlook is even more vulnerable than Office, yet there is no good synchronization software available for the non-email functions of Outlook.  Lest you send me a flurry of comments about one solution or another, be aware I’ve tried a whole bunch already.  Google’s version failed utterly.  My best result was with Plaxo, but it ultimately destroyed my calendar and contacts so I turned it off again.

The thing Bernstein, Microsoft, and these would be Cloud Upstarts have to keep in mind is that until this problem is fixed, Microsoft will keep dominating.  But it isn’t that hard to fix, and once fixed the friction preventing a switch goes down radically.  Heck, Microsoft can’t even get good uptake on Office 2007 if I look at the number of people that can’t read my files because they have the older version of Office.  Cloud Vendors, let me know if you need some names from my original Quattro Pro team.  They’re still around, still brilliant, and still able to build a product that’s 100% compatible and will get you where you want to go.

Can we get on with it?

What is Twitter Good For in the Enterprise? 3 Key Use Cases

Some rumblngs among the Enterprise Irregulars about Twitter this morning.  The usual discussion broke out between the Twitter-lovers and the I-don’t-get-Twitterers.  Being a group of Enterprise types, it was a little more focused on informed opinions and less on inflamed passions that this conversation often is, and it reminded me to write a bit about this topic which I had internalized, taken for granted, and then stopped worrying about.  Let’s just run through some uses for Twitter in the Enterprise and some reasons not to ignore it.

Parts of the Conversation Take Place on Twitter Because Some Prefer It

Whether you’re a Twitter lover or not, be aware that there is a group that wants to have their conversation there.  If you don’t connect with Twitter at all, you are going to miss out on that conversation.  Don’t assume the only thing being discussed is which fast food people had for lunch each day.  Why do people like Twitter for this conversation instead of blogs, forums, or social networks?  First, let’s just drop the “instead of”.  For many, it’s “in addition too”.  Second, I’ve written before about the idea that Learning Styles can influence how people like to consume or create content on the web.  Here is my diagram for a sort of “Myers Briggs” of the web:

If you think about the matrix, you’ll see why a lot of things on the web invite such a polarized love/hate relationship. It’s all about how people communicate and which type of web experience maps best to those preferences. It’s well understood through examples like the Myers-Briggs test that everyone doesn’t learn and communicate in the same way. If you’ve ever tried a system like Myers-Briggs, you’ll understand how much light it can shed on why two people are having a hard time communicating successfully in business. Keep in mind that the same thing can happen on the web and if you want to be sure you are successfully communicating with, or at least listening to, every group, you have to cover every learning style.

Eventually business will realize this and they’ll create a superior web presence that checks all of the boxes on the matrix. Some are trying and getting close already.

Twitter Forces Short Responses: Ideal for Purposes Where Brevity Focuses

Getting back to the language of the Enterprise and it’s practitioners, have you ever heard about or employed some of the principles that can be used to make meetings or other inter-personal processes (offsites, budget planning, etc.) more efficient?  Consider messaging exercises of various kinds like creating mission statements, or key messages on a web page.  Don’t these exercises benefit when restricted to brevity?

Twitter falls into this category too.  By only allowing 140 words, it changes the nature of the conversation that takes place.  Ask yourself what kinds of conversations are better served by only allowing 140 characters?  As a quick, special purpose brainstorming tool, I suspect there are a number of “Twitter Games” one could come up with that would be ideal.  How about the exercise of naming a product?  That seems ideal for a Twitter exchange.  Or how about working on an elevator pitch?

What about forcing brevity to summarize?  This transitions to the idea of Twitter as telemetry or news feed.  If you can scan a list in Twitter and see tinyurl clickthroughs for those that need more attention you’re being more efficient than dealing with the information in situ with the full mass of words.  That’s got to be valuable for a number of enterprise processes.

Twitter as Telemetry or News Feed

There are certain kinds of information where it is important to tell at a glance what the current status is, but to be able to go back over time and see how that has changed as well.  Think of the old-style stock tickers and news feeds.  Twitter is ideal for that purpose.  For example, I use TwitterFeed to update my Twitter stream every time I post to this blog, for example.  That way, anyone following me sees there is a new post, sees the title, and can check it out with a tinyurl click if they like.

There are plenty of enterprise applications for an information stream that talks about what’s happening right now.   The reason I use the term “telemetry” is that Twitter can literally be viewed as a component of some larger system.  You can feed it messages (as I do with TwitterFeed, but it could be almost any corporate information source), and you can also pull the messages off Twitter via apis to use in various ways.  Maybe you are a busy sales manager just trying to keep certain messages top of mind for your sales reps, but the messages change constantly.  They’re promotions or some such.  Build a quick and easy Twitter telemetry system where you can type the messages of the day in as needed and they appear on a window that the sales reps monitor.  At my day job (no, I don’t blog for a living!) for Helpstream, we have built Twitter into the business rule fabric of our Customer Service application.  You can use it in this telemetry fashion as you see fit for your business.  For example, it’s trivial to create a Twitter stream that would reflect every new idea submitted to our Idea Storm facility.

Conclusion

I hope I’ve given you some ideas for why Twitter could be useful in the enterprise.  There’s a lot more potential in Twitter than what I’ve covered.  What are your ideas for how to put it to work in your business?