Category: Uncategorized

LE1700 – New Tablet from Motion Computing

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I see Motion computing has release a new Tablet PC – the LE1700. Looks pretty nice, though not too much different than the LE1600 on the outside. Then again, I love my LE1600, so I am not sure what I would change about it. Obviously, the new Core 2 Duo processor, and support for up to 4 gb of RAM are both nice enhancements.

I would still like to see some tablet vendor, somewhere, do something innovative witht he power connector. Just having it stick out the side does not seem to work. Anytime you are using the tablet in tablet mode, so much torque is put on the connector that in time, it cannot help but get loose. A solution to this cannot be that hard. I mean, how about simply recessing the socket, so that the plug does not stick out. Or, put a clip for the wire to shield the plug from some of the torque. This is still my one main reliability complaint about slate tablets.

Still looking forward to getting an LE1700 though J.

One of the saddest things I have seen in a long time…

I just finished reading Death threats against bloggers are NOT “protected speech” (why I cancelled my ETech presentations), having been led there from Taking the week off. Before I get to expressing an opinion about this, I just want to express my support for those who have been the victim of these attacks.

The kind of abusive, sociopathic behaviour demonstrated in the posts they are talking about really makes me sick. I have only been following the blog world for a little while, but I have been participating in and watching online interactions since the early 90s – including IRC, then ICQ, various more mainstream chat environments, and multiplayer games. Watching verbal abuse in chat rooms. Watching anti-social, racist, sexist, and just generally unacceptable behaviour is games like Ultima Online, World of Warcraft, and Halo, not to mention Saint’s Row (note that I am NOT criticizing these games per se – I am commenting on the behaviour of people in these games where they can hide behind thier characters).

It has always boggled my mind how many people abandon all civility and rational behaviour as soon as they think they believe they are protected by anonymity.

It has at times made me question human nature. Are these people representative of the world at large? Would they act this way in the “real” world if the thought they could get away with it?

I guess that last point is what scares me the most. It makes me wonder how much of “civilization” really is just a thin veneer – given the right (or wrong) circumstances, would much of the population resort to this kind of behaviour if there were no consequences, like we’ve seen in all those “post-apocolyptic” science fiction movies?

I would like to hope not – but this kind of stuff scares me.

Fewer hurdles

One of the best sales guys I know told me that a large part of the sales process is removing objections on the part of the buyer. I guess one of the best ways of removing objections is by gettting rid of hurdles before they become objections.

MyMicroISV has an interesting post on 13 Fewer hurdles = more micro-ISV sales. I whole heartedly agree witht he items he lists. It amazes me (not just online, but in the real world) just how hard businesses sometimes make it to buy thier products. A case in point would be when I bought my current Tablet PC. It took (seemingly) forever to find a way to buy, mostly because the vendor seemed only to want to sell as part of vertical solutions. A consumer wanting to buy a tablet just did not seem to fit thier model (I think that this is a problem with the whole Tablet PC marketing scheme, but that’s another story).

When thinking about removing these hurdles, it occured to me that the same philosophy cold be applied to software design. How many of the programs do we continue to use which annoy the heck out of us, only because they are the only option, or the least annoying option? How many opportunities exist for just, plain good software, that does what it is supposed to do, without annoying the user? This goes back to what we all used to be taught as part of our first-year programming courses: Keep It Simple, Stupid! (I wonder, do they still teach this?).

There is a very great focus now on adding features, making things prettier, going for the latest whiz-bang bells and whistles, when in reality, what is most needed is software that just works, and does so without being annoying. This seems to be a great opportunity for the Micro ISV model.

 How hard can it be?

New Product Ideas – How hard can it be?

Ok, the title of this post is a joke. I know that new product idea generation is never easy.

Actually, I do not think that is quite true. Coming up with ideas is sometimes not all that hard – sometimes it seems like I come up with ideas faster than I can write them down, or even think about them. The real trick is coming up with good ideas, or being able to recognize the good ones form the piles of ideas in which they are buried. This, in my opinion, is the big challenge in developing a defined innovation process – how do you take this idea generation, selection, and development process more predictable and less serendipitous.

In the past, most of my efforts in this area have been within the context of an employer. This is important, because in general, this provides constraints on where you go with your ideas. For example, if you are working within a vertically targeted software company, your idea-generation efforts typically work within that vertical, and even more tightly, close to your niche area within that vertical (this is not always a good thing, it just seems to be true). If by chance you get the opportunity to take your efforts into a new vertical, you are still constrained. Typically, you will be trying to leverage what you are successful at in one vertical, and trying to replicate that success in another vertical. I am not claiming that any of this is easy, but it is not what I want to talk about in this post.

What I am thinking about right now is the challenge of starting from scratch. Here you are, on your own (alone or with a group), with no particular historical context, you have a wide-open, blue sky ahead of you. Well, where do you start? How do you decide where to begin? How do you narrow down the playing field, and how do you pick ideas to tackle (wouldn’t be nice to be able to try all of your ideas)?

To me it all starts with “what do you want to be”? What is your vision for the company you want to create? Do you want to follow the Micro ISV model, and start a company which will only be you (or at most a few of you)? Do you want to start a company which you envision will develop into a small software company, but bigger than an ISV? Or, do you want to go all the way and build the next 800 lb gorilla? Or do you have a completely different business model in mind (remember, innovation can be found in a business model as much as in a technology). This decision is vital to picking your ideas. Some ideas just will not work in some models – or at the very least will have great challenges. Unless you have a pretty good idea of where you are going, it is tough to identify an idea which will get you there. As one of my physics professors taught us “never start a problem until you have some idea what the answer looks like – otherwise you will not know when you get there”.

A second big piece of the puzzle is “what do you know how to do/what do you like to do”. Obviously, if you want to develop a useful (and hence successful) product, you need to either possess or develop a deep expertise in the relevant field. This is especially important if you are developing a vertically oriented product. Breaking into a new vertical is a huge challenge even for an established, successful company. As a start up, trying to develop a product while learning about the vertical is just making your task harder. So, if you can, it pays to attack a space you already know. That being said, you may have an idea which is so compelling that you want to attack a space you do not know well. In that case you will just need to acquire the expertise you are missing – learn it, buy it, whatever you have to do. The other side of this question is what do you like to do. No matter how good your idea is, taking it from idea to successful company is going to take an enormous amount of work. Your chances of success will be greatly improved if you are doing something for which you have a passion. Can you be successful doing something you hate? Yeah, sure. But, given the choice, why would you?

So, once you have figured out these simple questions, what next? Well, I will take that up in another post.

Assessments of various blogging options.

This discussion of various Blogging Platforms looks interesting, and very timely for me. I am currently evaluating platforms to use (internally) for blogging within my company as a collaboration and idea exchange tool (external blogs may or may not come later). As a part of an overall innovation program, I think internal blogs will be very useful – even within a relatively small company it is really easy to be completely unaware of cool things others are working on.

I also love the Mind Map in that post – I use mind maps everywhere, and love to see others using them.

Evaluating great (or not) ideas

One of the aspects of the innovation process on which I have been focusing a lot of thought lately is the evaluation of ideas. Assuming you have a process for generating and collecting ideas, how do you decide which ones are worth exploring further? And, once you have dug a little deeper, how do you decide whether to keep going, or when to stop? I was just reading a post on Escape from Cubicle Nation: Is your business idea the next YouTube or a Jump to Conclusions Mat where Pamela lists some good guidelines for assessing your business idea’s potential. I guess the only real concern I have is that the guidelines mix the evaluation of the idea with the self-evaluation of the individual with the idea – this is not necessarily wrong, I am just looking at the more isolated problem of evaluating ideas on their own.

I have also been reading the book Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want by Curtis R. Carlson and William W. Wilmot, which I highly recommend. It describes an innovation management approach from SRI International. There are a few ideas I like in this book. A fundamental point that I like is their definition of innovation – essentially that it is not innovation until it creates value for a customer. This feeds into the meat of the approach, which focuses on the analyses of Need, Approach, Benefits, and Competition (NABC). I will not try to explain their approach – the authors do a much, much better job of it than I ever could. A key characteristic of the analysis, to me, is that it is not 100-page document. It is a succinct, few-page description of the overall value proposition.

Coming from the technical side of things as I do, it is my natural tendency start with an Approach – with a really cool piece of technology, some really cool solution – and then to try to prove that it fulfills some need. Unfortunately this often leads to really cool solutions which nobody wants.

This is, of course, the wrong way to do things from a business perspective. From the business side, you always want to start with a compelling customer need. You can then look at how the competition fills that need, and assess whether there is room for a new solution. Only after that do you start looking at your solution approach, and its benefits. Using this approach probably has a higher success rate in terms of making sellable solutions. However, using it exclusively leaves many opportunities for ground-breaking, technology-driven advancements.

In the real world, you need both approaches. What appeals to me in the NABC approach is the emphasis on the fact that, no matter where your idea comes from, or what your focus is, you need to be able to address all 4 of these areas. If your idea comes from the techie side, and is focused on Approach, then this framework forces you to come up with the Need and Competition answers. If your idea comes out of marketing or elsewhere on the business side, then it forces you to at least look at the approach early on. The best thing (in my opinion) is that, in order to address all 4 of these areas, you must draw on expertise from multiple functional groups, thus creating the collaboration which is needed no matter what approach you take. It also encourages us to put ideas in front of customers/prospects early in the process.

Another thing I like about this approach is that the NABC analysis evolves with time. This gives us a tool for continuously evaluating the value proposition as we move through the innovation process with a given idea, giving us a decision tool to help us decide when we have invested enough in an idea.

The Next Big Language – WHY?

I have been doing some work lately teaching myself some of the basics of Ruby, Python and a couple of other languages. As I was working with these languages, I was suddenly hit with a question – why? Over the course of my career, I have programmed in a lot of languages (somewhere around 20 that I have actually used to do useful work, I think). I am sure many of you can say the same thing. And do you know what? They all suck in one way or another! I have seen language’s popularity come and go. I have seen arguments in person, in newsgroups, and all over the web which bordered on religious fanaticism. Even as I write this, a good discussion continues in response to The Next Big Language.

Again, I ask myself “why?”

Looking back over projects in which I have participated, led, observed, or otherwise been involved, I cannot think of one where the success of failure (or degree of success – failure is not usually absolute) of the project was due to the limitations of the programming language. Nor has the programming language been the determining factor in the cost of the project, or the quality or the maintainability of the code.

There are so many factors which are accepted to have much greater impact on the course of a project than the choice of language/technology – requirements, architecture, realistic planning and tracking, and proper resourcing to name a few – that I find the whole debate around programming languages to be somewhat meaningless in the real world (actually, I find it more annoying than meaningless).

This is not to say that I do not believe we should always be innovating and inventing new ways of doing things (including programming languages). It does mean, however, that it is highly unlikely that any of these language advancements (or The Next Big Language, whatever it is) will make a significant difference in software development in either a corporate IT or commercial product development world – at least not any time soon.