notes and views on products and people who make them

links for 2009-02-27

February 27, 2009 | Filed Under Links and Quotes | Comments Off 

“Pay-to-Pee” Airlines?

Does it get any more ridiculous? Bill Taylor of the “Mavericks at Work” fame praises Ryanair for being ruthless – in being the cheapest airline, both in cost and value. Sure. And if that means people might soon pay to use the toilet on the plane?

Interesting idea, but the law of unintended consequences suggests that some people just won’t pay… what was that smell?

Maybe Ryanair could just as well tear the seats out, too, and fly people the way soldiers fly. Oh no, wait, soldiers do get some personal space, to make room for baggage and rifles. Perhaps stuffing folks atop one another not unlike cattle is transported would be the way to go fly?

It’s not called “cattle class” for nothing!

My point being not to poke fun at Ryanair but rather contest the notion that extremist business models are the way to go today, when the “middle of the road” (as in being out there to please everybody) is a dead end.

Surely there are limits in how much you can reduce value to decrease cost; at a potentially hard-to-define but certainly easy-to-feel line, beyond which there’s more pain than gain for the customer, and the whole deal becomes a parody of itself.

It is my opinion that low-costs need to look back to see the line.

February 27, 2009 | Filed Under CRM | 2 Comments 

Quote of the day

[B]uilding personas is an approach rooted in traditional identity notions of ‘we are different people to different audiences, or in different contexts and environments’. Though this is apparently true, I think this has always been a fallacy – even before the web has blown up the foolproof option of different identities without cross-contamination. I may behave differently so people see different aspects of me but that doesn’t mean I am a different person, a different persona. By putting emphasis on the persona, I become slave to my audiences and contexts who ’shape’ how I display my personas. – Adriana Lukas, reviewing chi.mp (emphasis mine)

Absolutely! And as I hinted a couple posts back, hiding on the web as well as trying to present multiple faces is a fool’s errand. Anybody determined enough will, praise be to mighty Google, put the pieces together. Me, I only have the energy for being me, not someone else’s idea of me.

February 27, 2009 | Filed Under Links and Quotes, Me & You, But Mostly Me | Comments Off 

links for 2009-02-26

February 26, 2009 | Filed Under Links and Quotes | Comments Off 

Requirements defined – the fun way

What’s the difference between an entrepreneur and a consultant?

No, this is not a lead-in to a joke.

Both get things done, but the entrepreneur has the ownership of the problem. The consultant can always walk away.

I’ve been in consulting long enough to know – and feel – the difference. Inasmuch as I love to solve other people’s problems, I’ve felt compelled to create some for myself; then solve them, for myself.

And so I did.

WHY

The #1 problem software project team face is not knowing what to do.The #2 problem is knowing it.

Communicating “what needs to be done” is hard. So hard that there are specialists (requirements analysts, business analysts, etc.) whose sole job is to translate information flowing between the so-called “stakeholders” (people with desires and money to satisfy them) and developers (designers, vendors, …) Even though they all speak the same language. Many times, the developer (and not just a software guy: in the broadest sense anyone who’s making stuff someone else desires) will either not know what the client wants or think he does but be utterly wrong.

No software or tool can make that effortless. Defining the product, the scope, the vision, or the requirements, all that will always be a human activity where tools can merely help.

Or, they can stand in the way, forcing their way of thinking and methodologies and “best practices” down everyone’s throat. Which has been the case with many “requirements management” systems out there.

And so I set out on a mission: to help people get the right things done by creating and tracing their ideas the fun way, or at least the suck-free way, and doing so together so that everyone is in the loop.

WHAT

It wasn’t about building a better mousetrap.

There’s quite a lot of good-enough tools for “managing” the “software lifecycle” and such (throw in your favorite buzzword). I did not set out to compete with DOORS. Or with Basecamp, for that matter.

Instead, I’ve focused on the process of formulating and perfecting ideas, weeding out those that won’t make it in the sunlight, and deciding which ones will.

This usually happens on paper. And in email. And no matter what, it gets messy pretty quickly. Changes get lost, intentions forgotten or mis-shapen, and even when there’s a nice Word document at the end, the time-span between handing it over to the developers and testing out a live product tends to be so long that those ideas that you want to help come true change many, many times (and not just because the world keep spinning – you do, too).

Keeping track of shit and knowing when shit changes is crucial to getting shit done.

And so I’ve begun to think and prototype a tool that would help me and you along the way.

HOW

I am just starting out. That’s after maybe a year working on it. Sounds pretty ridiculous considering the startups that put the shit out after a 72-hour sprint. But hey, it’s a one-man attempt at world domination. And that takes time.

The website has been out for about 4-5 months. The app started looking barely-good-enough about 2 months ago. At this point I’m re-thinking most of it, and making it a real business in the process. Just learned the LLC that’s behind it is – finally! – established and in Good Standing  in the state of New Hampshire, US of fucking A.

What’s next?

Next, I must come out. It’s not an easy thing to do, and this post is one of the first things I’m doing to do that.

I am putting myself out there to re-think and re-define and pro-mote the way people gather and perfect ideas and make them happen. Not an easy task but as Hugh McLeod said in his Microsoft cartoon, “Change the world or go home.” How’s that for raising the bar, eh?

If you’ve gotten this far, the problem I’ve described sounds familiar to you and you’re probably looking for a solution to it. Well then, why don’t you go ahead and test-drive Playground, the application that I’ve made, so that you know if the solution I am proposing is one that could help you?

It is my intention to do this the right way, the customer-driven way. I am working with people who are trying Playground out to make sure that they can define, plan, and implement the ideas they have in a effective (and not just efficient) way.

Let me know what you think.

February 25, 2009 | Filed Under Enterpreneurship, Me & You, But Mostly Me, Software delivery | 3 Comments 

links for 2009-02-10

February 10, 2009 | Filed Under Links and Quotes | Comments Off 

Why hide on the web

Is there a surefire way of protecting your privacy on the web? The quick answer: no. The somehow longer answer: it depends.

Even if you’ve embraced the idea of transparency, whether because you think it has merit or because you gave up, you still may feel uneasy about Google’s data-mining powers. And not just Google’s; everybody and their sister can run a robust dedicated server for a couple hundred dollars, and if their application is popular, you can bet it is so because the proprietor has a good grasp of visitor tracking.

Google et al are mining customer data to make up for the lack of knowledge they can’t possibly have: your living context. Whatever you type into the search box represents your idea or request that you are making at that time, and its aggregated history creates a portrait that might represent you fairly well. But – it’s in the past. There’s a limit to what predictive analytics can do with past data.

And do customers want their providers to know their living context? Sure, some fork over a lot of personal data in exchange for deals of questionable value (like the CZK100 coupon some operators offer to PAYG customers by way of compensation for their names and addresses); others choose the opposite approach and use tools such as Tor or TrackMeNot that either hide or obfuscate your trail on the web.

I happen to believe that a (hypothetical for now) VRM infrastructure would alleviate the need of businesses to operate massive data stores when their business isn’t IT at all; by removing guesswork from the relationships and letting customers signal very precisely what they want. What I believe or not is of questionable value, however; this infrastructure doesn’t exist yet.

Paradoxically, though, the best way to minimize intrusion is to be as open as possible. If you have an online persona (blog, Twitter account, etc.), why not make it a true representation of who you are? There are proven benefits to that; starting with your career but not ending there. Instead of hiding, put out something you’ve created that’s of real value to other people. Create and share.

The need for privacy (not just) on the web is real. Many people (dissidents in oppressed countries, children) have a genuine need to protect their presence and activities on the web. For the rest of us, though, I suggest letting go of the paranoia and only protecting what is absolutely worth protecting. What you type into Google may or may not fall into that category. Most often it won’t.

Invest the time and effort you’d spend there into something valuable that you don’t want to hide but show and share instead.

February 1, 2009 | Filed Under General | Comments Off