One of the predictions I made about the effects that the recession/depression will have on the IT spending was that it would separate the wheat from the chaff in the startup space, validating those companies that provide real value and impaling those that are built on hope and coolness-factor.  In an incredibly tough economic environment like the one we're currently in, companies that don't actually provide value quickly go to zero.  Deflationary credit collapses have a nasty habit of popping bubbles of any and every kind, technology bubbles included.

I find the Enteprise 2.0 adoption discussion very interesting, and it brings to mind some lessons I had to learn the hard way.  I come from the geek mindset, where the tool itself is what is cool, because I use them directly, I read about them, and sometimes I even build them.  I get very excited thinking about semantic Web technology, tagging, user-generated content, federated identity, etc, etc.  But it took me a long time to realize that technology is just a tool, not a solution.  I get excited thinking about all the possibilities, not necessarily about solving a problem.  It’s a problem I have, and I’m working on it :)  But really, if all you have is a problem, to a large extent you don’t really care about the tool as long as it gets the job done.  I think geeks like me tend to lose sight of that, and the result is vaporware and eventual disillusionment.

Imagine if Home Depot sold Web 2.0 tools.  You could walk in and pick up an automatic tagging tool, a user-generated video tool, a rapid AJAX-ifier, social networking connectors, an RSS attachment, and of course the handy rounded-corner router.  Well, I can’t see Home Depot going and trying to sell these tools to companies that weren’t looking for them any more than they would hit the streets to hawk the newest hammers to carpenters that had no need for them.  The customer comes to them for the tools they need, not the other way around.  You don’t shove the tool down people’s throats, you wait for them to see the value in it and ask for it.  Otherwise, you’re just a glorified traveling salesman trying to sell a better mousetrap.  No Soliciting.

So, to be honest, I really don’t care when someone looks up from their beer and shouts “Eureka!  There’s no tagging for the enteprise yet!”.  There’s no YouTube for the enterprise either, that doesn’t mean there’s a hole begging to be filled.  Yet.  Unfortunately, end users take time to digest new technology before they realize they need it—before they can put the pieces together and realize that this tool solves that problem.  That’s why the dot com-boom of the 90’s turned into a dot com-bust.  It wasn’t because the technology was bad, people just didn’t realize the value yet.  That’s how I see the relationship between Web 2.0 tools and the enterprise right now.

The true secret to new tool adoption lies in the cross-functional geek.  IT folks who are not only good at what they do, but are also familiar with the business itself.  They probably even came from the business side but moved over to IT because they saw how to apply the tools there to solve real problems.  Those guys are worth their weight in gold, and if a geek is ever able to truly be successful he needs to be able to put himself in that person’s shoes.  THAT is when Enterprise 2.0 will happen.

Well who woulda thunk it:  Vista sales are below expectations, and pirates are to blame!  <cough>RIGHT.</cough>  An article by Nick Farrell reveals Steve Ballmer's sadly funny reaction to disappointing Vista sales:  it's those darn software pirates!  The solution?  Tighten up the piracy controls aka Windows Genuine Advantage!  More activations!  Call in the product keys!

It'll be interesting to see what the next response is once that's been done and it still doesn't improve sales--could be Osama Bin Laden activating pirated copies from his cave to undermine the US economy, or aliens be setting out to destroy Microsoft?  Or maybe, just MAYBE, nobody cares about their operating system any longer?  I'll almost guarantee the number of Vista sales closely parallels the number of new PC sales from here on out, simply because there is no longer any compelling reason to upgrade an operating system:  the Internet is THE reason to own a computer, and it works just fine on XP or a Mac (or Linux, if they ever start selling it at mainstream retailers, which would pretty much shoot Microsoft in the head).

Oh, but they have a solution for that too.  Says Ballmer:  "We won't go five years again, I promise, between big Windows releases"  So the solution is to continue churning out irrelevant software, but FASTER now.  That'll teach them pirates.  If it wasn't for the XBox 360, I'd be shorting Microsoft stock right about now.

Yes, you heard that right:  as if Sarbanes-Oxley isn't unenforcable enough, according to Declan McCullagh at CNet Senator John McCain is planning to introduce legislation (the "SAFE" act) which will make certain files (initially child pornography, real or fake, the line is as blurry as they get) illegal.  Apparently existing laws which require the reporting of illicit images are not enough, and so fines of up to $300,000 will be assessed against any service that allows user to send or receive communication which does not report any files on the government's black list.

Now I'm not sure if McCain was drinking one night and thought up this brilliant plan or actually has any IT people working for him... but how on earth does anyone expect this to actually be implemented?  Do they plan to mandate that this check against a global blacklist become part of the server operating system, thus making certain operating systems illegal?  How do they plan to build this black list?  Someone needs to send a message to the moon or wherever McCain is hanging out these days and tell him to stop legislating technology at LEAST until we get the current mess with SOX sorted out.  More unenforcable and vague legislation is NOT what we need, all it does is make consultants a lot of money and suck productivity out of the economy.

If Washington insists on legislating on technology, they need to establish a Department of Information Systems or something which has knowledgable, elected officials voted in by people who know a thing or two about technology.  Washington has a bad habit of tripping all over itself any time it touches technology, this is a bad situation that keeps getting worse, and it needs to be fixed.  I hope this legislation dies, but if it does not I hope it kills McCain's presidential run on grounds of crippling the economy.

From Gunnar Peterson via Kim Cameron:

“Thieves took sensitive personal information on 26.5 million U.S. veterans, including Social Security numbers and birth dates, after a Veterans Affairs employee improperly brought the material home, the government said Monday."

You've got to be kidding me.  I'll bet a VA IT guy took the backup tapes home with him because they didn't want to pay Iron Mountain to come get their offsite backup tapes and put them in secure storage.  Somewhere an IT Manager is receiving a pink slip today...

I just read possibly the worst advice ever.  The post is titled "Keep your ambitions in check".  The writer goes on to advise you to "train your brain to see and take the detours", and suggests replacing hard problems with easy ones so that you don't have to work as hard.  If you want to climb Mount Everest, think about taking an elevator to the top of the Sears Tower, it's much easier.

If people had taken this advice years ago we'd still be trading pelts and believe in a flat Earth.

Software users are a fickle bunch.  Make software too complex, and they hate it.  Make software too simple, and they hate it.  Guy Kawasaki posted a question earlier asking what people thought of Goowy, a Web desktop in the crowd that includes Pageflakes, NetVibes, Protopage, and a host of others.

The question itself was pretty mundane ("I'd like to know what people think of something I've found"), but the comments that resulted were pretty interesting.

Goowy's obviously trying to be simple for somebody to pick up and use, which is what everyone wants, right?  Apparently not.  61% of the people who responded gave Goowy a thumbs down, and most of the comments revolved around the basic idea that people weren't "WOWed" by it.  Here are some samples:

• "Definitely "me-too" in all retrospect but the name is catchy and there is a definite need. However, it isn't something I would personally use." - John Nguyen
• "On the downside these ajax desktops just don't provide a large enough variety of QUALITY applications for me." - Charlie Key
• "This web-based GUI has some major limitations which are not compensated by any kick-ass feature." - Sander
• "I see nothing unique, nothing new. Software world is full of this same old stuff." - Michael Taylor
• "I have to agreed with everyone here...this is an old idea with a new User Interface. I don't see any WOW factors here!" - Creative One
• "Don't see anything here that I can't do better with Google and/or Backpack." - Phil

However, everybody is quick to admit that it's easy to use.  And it's a very nice, friendly user interface, very slick, done in Flash and nice and colorful.  My mom could use it, and it would probably be pretty useful to her, too.

If So on the one hand it's easy to use, but on the other it doesn't have enough features.  What to do?

I'm going to call this Apple Syndrome.  Apple makes good software that's easy to use, Apple is successful, everybody loves Apple, and everybody wants to be Apple.  And what makes Apple software and hardware so great?  It's not because it's simple, it's because it's easy to use.  The two often get confused.  Although simple is usually always easy to use, easy to use is not always simple.  There's a difference between lacking features and presenting an interface that is easy to use.

Entire companies have been built around this mistake.  And I'm sure they're successful, but when users mature past the point of the their simple software they are STUCK, and start to need the features the software doesn't have.  They have to find a more mature software package to meet their needs.  This isn't good for the software company, and it's certainly not good for the user.

Feature-rich software doesn't have to look like a miasma of toolbars.  It can be clean, easy to pick up and use, and should adapt with the user as he matures in his use of the software.  The features that a user needs to perform the task he's doing should exist, even if they're not shown the first time a user opens the application.  The fact that somebody can pick up an iPod and start using it without reading a manual is great, but there are tons of things that I didn't know about mine until I read the manual.  (I can add a song to the "On the Go" playlist by clicking and holding when it's selected, podcasts and audiobooks save your spot, etc.)

Features are necessary for good software, so is a good interface.  I've often wondered why there isn't a position in software companies called "User Interface Artist" or something like that.  One of the best books about writing a good software experience that I've ever read is Designing Interfaces : Patterns for Effective Interaction Design, but I've never seen a programmer recommend it.  However, the user interface is JUST as important as the service oriented architecture that sits behind it, if not more so, because a terrible user interface will never get used.  Open source software is plagued by user interfaces that only programmers can use.

Bad Interface + Feature rich = Shelfware

Good interface + Few features = A nice demo

Good interface + Feature rich = Good software

UPDATE:  I've been thinking and posting more about this topic here (further defining SOA and Web 2.0 and how they inter-relate) and here (what I believe is the solution--which doesn't exist, yet--for fixing this "misunderstanding).

There's been a lot of discussion lately about "SOA vs. Web 2.0".  See these posts by John Hagel and Jeff Nolan.  This is just wrong, wrong, wrong.

In my eyes they are the EXACT SAME THING.  This debate about REST vs. SOA, is completely off base.  You're debating about what method the user interface should use to access services.  A service is a service, it doesn't matter if it's called using SOAP or REST or a freakin' TCP/IP socket.

The real point is, the software needs to be written as a service.  If it's built properly (and this is very important, as certain Web 2.0 companies <cough>37signals</cough> have basically derided proper, loosely coupled, software architecture as limiting) you can throw another interface facade on top of the logic code an expose your service whichever way you want.  Hell, if I decide I want to expose my service via smoke signals tomorrow, all I have to do is write a smoke signal interface for the business logic layer of my application.  Not that there's anybody to consume it, but hey, when the smoke signal guys get all up in arms about it I can be the first vendor to embrace their standard :)

There are already mechanisms out there for rich Web clients to consume SOAP services, REST just happens to be the most popular mechanism to access services by a browser right now for whatever reason.  I personally like SOAP 100x better than REST, I think it's more enterprise-ready, and there are many, many specs out there for extending it and making it secure.  But really, WHO CARES what an app uses to access a service?

To clarify:  when a Web 2.0 app makes an HTTP request in the background to get data, it's calling a service of some type.  When you click submit and it updates data in the background, it's calling a service of some type.  Now, there are exceptions, such as when a Web app makes a direct call to a business logic layer, but the entire point of Web 2.0 and AJAX is that you're trying to avoid round-trips to the server, which is where most of that happens. 

The real problem is people who don't understand both camps trying to have a debate about why they're right and the other guy is wrong.  How can you debate something you don't understand?  You're both saying the same thing, just in a different language.

I think sometimes companies get ahead of themselves with buzzwords. Take the "performance management" industry, for example. Here's a list of buzzwords I found in a recent article:

- Performance Management

- Multidimensional Analysis

- Root Cause

- Hidden Effects

- Stream of Data

- Information Interpretation

- Information Augmentation

- Data Mining

- Measurement

- Operational Effectiveness

Huh? You expect a manager to pull up your product with a Google search? This sounds like part of a doctorate thesis, not an advertisement. No wonder these guys spend 2 years educating consumers and blow their sales cycle out of the water. Why not just use:

- Reporting

- Business Intelligence

- Analytics

Everyone understands those, that's what they are. Does that just make things too easy?

-j

Original Article

"Every feature that’s missing is essential, a must-have, and the fact that it’s missing is killing someone. Yet the #1 thing that people like about our software is how simple it is."
What a freaking cop-out.  Are you guys just too lazy to respond to your users, or are you really not able to figure out how to implement new features in an easy-to-use manner?

• "I couldn’t agree more and frankly am appalled that I can set a due date and time for something as insipid as picking up milk in Backpack but not for something that could make or break my company’s relationship with a customer in Basecamp"
  • Um, last I checked your product was for product management.  Care to elaborate on why due dates are not critical features?
• "A product request which would boost the attractiveness of Basecamp: Make the view of to-do items common — it is infuriating that all my items are differently ordered than on my team members’ screens."
  • This is why I personally STOPPED USING THEIR PRODUCT!  As far as I was able to tell, ordering tasks was the only way to set their priority.  And this isn't even consistent between users???   I'm sure they have better things to do with their time, such as making posts ridiculing user feedback.
• "BaseCamp didn’t have a convenient way to enter all of our schedules so we could plan meetings, etc. This seems to me to be a major oversight for planning software."
  • While not a critical feature per se, it's a damn good idea, and how dare you put this suggestion in a post deriding user feedback.  I wouldn't be surprised if this user leaves after reading your post if they haven't already.
• "We’re looking to get into basecamp, however one of the features that is a MUST for us is having email reminders."
  • This is not exactly a textbook sales technique, putting a sales inquiry email into a blog post as an example of an email you don't want to get.