Author: Fred

Apple’s Mac Set to Soar?

I am always amazed (and somewhat amused) to listen to the press and many bloggers pound on Microsoft, and hold up Apple as this golden idol of alternatives. Don’t get me wrong, I love Macs – I have ever since I started using and programming them back in the late 80s. I even liked the Newton. And the new iMacs – damn I want one.

But there are a few points of the Microsoft is evil/apple is great discussion that I find deeply amusing and ironic:

  1. Apple, with Steve Jobs, handed the desktop market to Microsoft on a platter. The Mac UI in the early eighties was way beyond anything Microsoft would produce until Windows 95. With that lead, Apple could have taken over the desktop. However, through the closed, anti-clone, “we must maintain the purity of the platform” view they had through the eighties, they gave that advantage away. Even though DOS was crap in terms of usability, and Windows was graphical crap, the availability of cheap clones and many, many hardware choices, the PC won out. Once again, inferior technoogy won because the people behind the better technology acted stupidly. (Note that Steve Jobs continued this stupidity with more great technology with Next).
  2. Apple has always been the ultimate “closed platform”. Standards rarely come into play. If you want to develop on the Mac (at least anything useful) you use our tools. Until recently, even all of the hardware has been non-standard. If Microsft were anywhere near as closed as Apple, the Justice Department would have shut them down. Heck, on many Apple devices, you are not even allowed to change your own battery, or add an industry standard memory card.
  3. Apple has rarely created technology which benefited (from a tech community sense) anyone but Apple. Consider Microsoft’s Tablet PC platform. Microsoft could have “gone it alone” on the Tablet, as Apple would have (and probably will). Instead, Microsoft defined the specification for a Tablet PC, and left it to hardware vendors and startups to build the hardware, and IVSs to build the application, thus creating a sub-industry benefiting many businesses beyond Microsoft. Compare to Apple and the launch of the iPhone.

Again, I love Apple, and I think they have some of the best design people in the world. But I do not fool myself into believing that they are in business for anyone’s benefit but their own.

But I want to be Disruptive!

I have spent a great deal of time over the last couple of years thinking about the process of innovation, different types of innovation, and how to innovate in a small but established organization versus a startup organization. I was reading Innovator’s Dilemmas: Do You Really Need To Be Disruptive? over on consultaglobal this weekend, and got to comparing some of Jose’s thoughts with work I have done in the last year.

As Jose says in that post, he is more interested in the process of defining a product roadmap in terms of gradual innovation, and in managing product portfolios. We have been very successful with this type of innovation, having a strong product management process for our existing product suite. In my role, I have been more interested in how we do larger scale innovation – how do we come up with the innovations now which are going to drive our growth 2+ years from now?

I have defined an innovation cycle as shown below.

image

Recognizing that disruptive innovation is, well, disruptive, as this cycle is traveled counter-clockwise starting from the upper right, we go from a high-chaos, low-process environment to progressively higher process and lower chaos.

In this model, the upper right quadrant represents what we are really good at, evolutionary innovation driven by product management.  The upper right quadrant represents the starting point – the idea generation engine. This is traditionally a hit and miss process of collecting ideas from various parts of the organization (or just a few people), and trying to pick which ones to invest time and money in. It is my belief that this activity can be wrapped in a process without destroying the creativity needed to really come up with ideas. Among the activities I consider important in this quadrant are:

  • Establish some context for innovation (see this earlier post)
  • Get ideas from everybody, not just R&D or Product Management
  • Get out and talk to customers
  • Involve your staff who are in front of customers, especially professional services people if you have them
  • Engage in structured/facilitated brainstorming with groups from various cross-sections of your company
  • Know how you are going evaluate ideas and decide which ones to investigate more deeply

The last point is important – it is no use having lots of ideas if you have no way to evaluate them. No organization can go deep on all the ideas generated, and a small organization can only really attack a couple. See this earlier post for my thoughts on using the Needs, Approach, Benefits, Competition (NABC) approach. At the end of this stage, and ideas should have a reasonable Needs definition, with a rough indication of the other three categories.

The next quadrant is what I have called Play. This is where ideas which survive the evaluation in the Ideas stage and start to play with them, flesh them out, create prototypes, and generally move the NABC definition forward. Early in this phase, the Approach needs to be clarified, while the Needs are evaluated more deeply.  Later in this stage, if a viable Approach is identified, and the Needs continue to make sense, then the Benefits and Competition need to be addressed (note that in reality, it is never anywhere near this linear, but this is for the benefit of description). By the end of this stage, we should be able to present a fairly strong value proposition for those ideas which have survived the process.

The next stage is to Build the products (ok, probably only one) for which the value proposition seems best. I will not get into the build process, except to say that the NABC analysis should be kept at the forefront throughout the process, and not be afraid to make hard decisions if things stop making sense.

The final stage is the Evolution stage, where the product moves into the incremental, evolutionary development cycle of a completed product. Note that for a new product, there may be some iteration between Build and Evolve.

Finally, the cycle is closed by having ideas from ongoing product evolution feed back into the Ideas stage.

So, is it ever this neat and clean and linear? Well, no. But that does not mean it is not valuable to have a model which you at least pretend you are following!

Apple and Open XML

This post Apple Beats Microsoft at its Own Open XML Game and PC World article to which it refers are both mostly just more Microsoft-bashing fluff.

It is very interesting to me, however, that Apple has implemented programs which are able to read Open XML format documents. Given that one of the major complaints from the ODF camp is that the Open XML specification is too large and complicated, and contains references to Microsoft proprietary material, making it impossible or impractical for anyone except Microsoft to implement.

How do they answer Apple’s apparent ability to import and display Open XML documents?

Also, a question for anyone actually using the Apple programs – how is the format fidelity when importing these documents? 

GigaOM Web Innovators Group: Boston Startups Come Out & Present «

I noticed this over on GigaOM GigaOM Web Innovators Group: Boston Startups Come Out & Present «. I noticed that a company called frevvo. This company was founded by a gorup of people I have worked with in the past. They have some cool technology that is worth checking out (I would describe it, but hey, go look for yourself!)

Why IT Executives aren’t embracing Agile

Wille Faler has written an interesitng post Why IT Executives aren’t embracing Agile, referring in turn to another post on the same subject. Given my background, and my current role, I think I can comment on a technology executive’s opinion of agile processes.

Over the years I have worked on projects using a wide range of processes. Back in the eighties I worked on a team of very bright scientists, writing software primarily for their own use. We had almost no real development process (at best it was managed chaos). This was also one of the most successful software teams of which I have ever been a part. I do not think this is repeatable in most software development environments, because that particular environment had a number of unique characteristics:

  1. Really, Really smart people, especially in the domain in which we were working (satellite control).  
  2. Staff Retention: nobody ever left. When I joined the team, most of the people there had been there, working on the same code for 15+ years. Most had written the original versions of the code, and invented the algorithms.
  3. The developers were the users of the software – eliminating alot of problems of capturing requirements  and expectations. It is pretty hard to have unfulfilled expectations when you are writing software your own software.

Shortly after that, I was was involved in a large military project (10 years, billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of requirements). Needless to say, we had plenty of process. This was the epitome of the heavy process. Between the company I worked for, and the many subcontracting organizations, I was exposed to many flavours of software process (all of them heavy). I was also involved in ISO 9000 certificatiom programs, CMM assessments, 6-sigma programs and Design for Manufacturability programs (we did hardware, too). One of the things I learned in all of that was that you can have all the process in the world, and still fail. While having a strong software development process (whether it is heavy, agile, or otherwise) may vastly increase your chances of success, it by no mean guarantees it.

In the past 10 years, I have become a great proponent of “just enough process” – trying to take what I have learned from the heavy processes on the military projects, and apply what makes sense in a small, product-oriented environment, while leaving much of the “weight” behind. In the period from about 1998 through 2002 (the last time I directly managed development projects) I was greatly impressed with agile processes. While we never fanatically applied any of the agile methodologies, we did adopt many aspects, such as user stories, iterative incremental development, and test driven development. Some aspect just did not fit our environment (such as pair-programming). We had a fair amount of success using this approach, and many aspects of agile development are still in use.

Getting back to the topic at hand (why IT executives do not embrace Agile processes), from my perspective, agile processes are definitely viable and advantageous in certain contexts. Also, “heavy” processes certainly do not guarantee success. My feeling is that there is a time and place for both kinds of process. As in most things, it is important to have a number of tools at your disposal, and to have the knowledge of when it is appropriate to use these tools. Remember, an idea is a dangerous thing when it is the only one you have (didn’t I use that a couple of days ago?).

For example, I think it is entirely innappropriate to use “heavy” processes in small, commercial product development. Similarly, as an IT executive, I would be extremely hesitant to use an Agile process on a large, complex development project, because I have not seen sufficient evidence of the viability of the approach.

It all comes down to using the right tools in the right situations.

Do Trackbacks work to ZDNet?

A couple of days ago, I wrote a post regarding the death of Microsoft as reported in a ZDNet blog posting, and also provided a trackback to the post using the provided URL (http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/wp-trackback.php?p=1313). The original post still shows that there are no trackbacks to the post.

i wonder if there is a problem either with Trackbacks from WordPress (I do not think so, since others seem to work) or at ZDNet?

Usability – interesting analysis of WordPress

I just had a look at the results of this interesting usability analysis of WordPress.

While I do not necessarily agree with all of it, it is a very good analysis, and most of it makes sense. The biggest thing I liked in it was the concept of “not getting noticed”. As much as I love slick new UI models, and lots of graphics and animation, in reality the best software in the world is software you do not even think about. As a user, I should be focusing on what I am trying to do, not how I am going to make the software do it. Especially for any activity which requires any level of focus, having to constantly context switch from thinking about your work to thinking about whether the software will let you do it is extremely invasive.

I had not really thought before about the design of WordPress (hey, I started using it because it is free!), but overall it seems pretty good. Goodness knows, if it had done things to annoy me, I would have whined about it on my blog somewhere!

Am I getting too old for this?

So it is the weekend, and my brain is tired from being on vacation all week (I read even more when I am on vacation than when I am at work – that is why I take vacation, to catch up on my reading!). Looking at a lot of stuff I am following lately, much of it relates to social networking, web 2.0, mashable content, etc. – much the same as everyone else in this business I guess.

There is also a significant amount of press related to age, and this being a young person’s game.

You know, the idea that no one who is not in their 20s or younger should be starting a Web 2.0 business, and people in their 40s are completely out of it.

Now, I personally do not buy this for a minute (probably because I am in my 40s). I do start wondering, however, whether I really grasp all of this stuff. I get a lot of it, but some of it is just beyond me. I have already talked about Second Life, and I still am not convinced that it is meaningful. There are Twitter and Pownce. These I just do not get. I do not need to know that much about anything anyone is doing. Mashups I get, and I wholeheartedly agree with the idea, but I do not think I get them on that deeply intuitive level.

So, I ask the question. Am I getting too old for this?

I do not see Microsoft going down just yet

It seems there a few almost guaranteed ways to bring some hits to your tech blog, and maybe even get it dugg:

  1. Say something really, really smart about things that people really want to read about
  2. Say something very controversial about something people love or hate
  3. Declare Microsoft dead

(of course, I always go for approach #1 😉 )

I was reading yet another post over on ZDNet (Is the era of Microsoft ending?) declaring that Microsoft is dead, or soon will be. I do not really see much data that supports anything in the post, and the post itself certainly does not provide any. Microsoft still has pretty good numbers, a fair amount of cash, and some market share to play with. And in many of their primary business units, they have minimal realistic competition. And in areas in which they are late to the table (search, online advertising, etc.), while they are certainly not dominant, they are not out of the game, either.

Will Microsoft reign supreme forever, as it has for much of the last 10-20 years? Maybe, maybe not. Like most businesses, if they fail to adapt to new technologies, new circumstances,  and new competition, they will not be successful. If they do it enough, they will whither and die. Even now Microsoft is going through major transitions, as Gates begins to step away from operations. A transition like this is difficult for any company.

I will repeat what I said above – if they fail to adapt, they will die.

However, I do not see a lot of signs of this happenning right now. yes, there are areas where they have slipped up. The only business that never screws up is one that never tries anything new (and that business is already screwed from the start).

It will definitely be interesting to see where the computer industry is 20 years from now, but I would be very surprised not to see Microsoft alive and well, and extremely viable long after many of us have stopped worrying about it.

Someone Already Thought of My Idea – Now What?

This post Someone Already Thought of My Idea – Now What? is a few months old, but I just came across it tonight. it makes some very good points about a problem I think many of us have – we want to come up with that brand new, perfect idea, that no one else has ever even dreamed of.

Well, it is probably not going to happen. No matter how smart you are, there are many many people out there as smart or smarter (unless you are that one person out there who actually IS smarter than everybody else – it is not me, so I am not going to worry about it), and it is highly likely that at least one of them will have thought up an idea very similar to yours.

So, what do you do about it? Well, you do not give up for one thing. Just because someone has the same idea you have, does not mean they have the same business you have. There are so many variables, and so many opportunities to innovate every aspect of your approach, that you absolutely can do it better than someone else.

Ultimately, it comes down to execution. Given two people/organizations with the same idea, the one that executes better has a much higher likelihood to win. Note that no matter how good your execution or anything else, there are no guarantees – you can do everything right, make no mistakes, and still lose (I think Picard said that on STNG – kind of sad that I am quoting Star Trek wisdom!).

I will make an analogy with football (I frequently do – and I mean American football, not soccer). Both teams in a football game have the same objectives, often have very similar levels of talent, are on the same field with the same playing conditions, and really have pretty much all the same tools and strategies available to them. More often than not, the team that wins is the team that executes the best on game day – executes on the fundamentals, and does not do things to hurt themselves.

Much the same holds true in starting a business, and when you find out someone else has had the same idea as you, you only have two choices: execute better than them, or leave the field and find a new game.