Marc Benioff, CEO Salesforce (Image via Techcrunch)
Techcrunch has a very interesting guest post from Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce on the inspiration behind their new collaboration suite "Salesforce Chatter". Benioff resigned from Oracle to start Salesforce as a result of his dissatisfaction with enterprise software; a sector which has traditionally been slow to adopt new technology. This is understandable when you think of the effort that was required to install software on tens of thousands of machines in an office network, but something that has gradually changed now that hosted services are reliable and secure.
The basis of Salesforce Chatter seems to be in bringing some of the ideas behind facebook, twitter, and similar social services to enterprise software. I wrote about a similar concept (bring game mechanics to 'serious' software) a while ago. I think the opportunity here is huge.
Enterprise software development is generally driven by directly solving issues within the direct problem domain and rarely do these sorts of social ideas get traction beyond mimicking an email system within software. At some point in time every enterprise system I've worked on has had an email system shoe-horned into it, and it has failed in every case. People already have email, it's not of any benefit to have a separate system to do the same thing.
However, this sort of "soft" collaboration is unobtrusive and very useful. It builds on network effects to grab information from outside the user's direct circle. Salesforce may be one of the first to offer these sorts of services, but they definitely won't be the last - Social media may just have crossed the chasm.
If you're subscribed to my RSS feed, there's a lot of noise coming through. Sorry about that.
I'm trying to get Posterous to play nicely with wordpress, but wordpress keeps trimming out any HTML. If anyone out there has a nice solution, drop me a line.
Dave
From a friend of mine trying to finish a project using Oracle Fusion -
It's like being told "there's a bunch of knackers going to bum-rape you to death. However, you can avoid this by shooting yourself. All you have to do is build this gun. We have a tutorial showing you how, but our tutorial is for building a paper hat, but we're sure you can apply it to your situation. We have experts on hand, who'll ask you why you're not building a paper hat. You can try and look at the documentation on building a gun, but half of it will be for building a trebuchet and the other half won't make sense. Failing that you can mail our public help desk, where you'll get an Indian answering you with a chunk of text out of the 'build a paper hat' tutorial, or postings from the paper hat tutorial writers, who'll be too busy slapping each other on the back for a job well done."
There are many techniques for trying to develop an intuitive user experience, one I particularly like is "persona-based design". With persona-based design you're basically trying to figure out the personality types that are going to use your design, and then put yourself into the mindset of the user, figuring out their needs and desires. The key to this is determining their true intention, and presenting the options to them that most closely match.
An example of a site which has really impressed me this week - Zipcar. Zipcar is a car sharing service. You sign up for a small fee and get a handy ID card which gives you access to hundreds of cars for as short a time as an hour, up to several days. All very handy for someone who's moved to a nice new city which doesn't require much access to a car.
The application process for a non-national is a little more complicated - After the standard web sign-up I had to apply to my old insurance company to get proof that I'm not some car-wrecking psychopath. So, I fired that off and here comes the clever bit - when I come back to the Zipcar website a few days later it understands what part of the process I'm waiting on, and immediately directs me to a page reminding me that I need to send off my documentation and how long the process takes for verification.
This morning I received a welcome pack in the post with my ID card and some instructions. When I go back to the Zipcar site again, it immediately takes me to the "Activate your new card" screen, with simple instructions on how to proceed. I haven't even been in one of their cars yet and I'm already a happy customer - At every turn the information I required was right in front of me.
The next time you're putting together something that a customer is going to interact with, stop for a moment and think - What's their intention? What do they want to know, or what do they need to do? If you can answer the question before it's asked, you will amaze and delight.
The weekly retweet
A recap on any interesting links I posted or retweeted this week
If you have two minutes to spare, I'm running a small survey on Tech events in Ireland.
http://short.ie/tsurv
From the Google blog: Google are developing a power measurement application which seems to link smart power outlets with real-time monitoring capabilities in order to help people reduce their power consumption. Very interesting. I wonder if the smart outlets are using X10 or some sort of wireless?
It seems to be in a private test at the moment, but sounds very interesting.
One of today's nuggets from Guy Kawasaki's prolific twitter stream was a link to "The 100 Best Business Books of all time". I'm not certain of the author's credentials to be able to definitively say that these are the best books on business ever written, or whether the books that are on the Personal MBA list are better or worse, or some intersection of the two is the way to go, or whether you should just put down the books and get off your ass and create something meaningful.
However, it did rekindle an old idea: I'm sure there are a large enough group of people who would want to read these books, yet I'd be surprised if they wanted to buy all of them, or if a conventional library would carry them. So essentially a book club - charge a group of people a small fee (A fiver or a tenner say) to join this book club, and use the proceeds to purchase as many of the books on the list as possible. Books get loaned for a maximum of two weeks, then passed on to the next member who requested it. Set up a simple web site to coordinate the book loans and allow for reviews. If anyone was interested in loaning or donating books that they already own to the group it'd also be useful. I own a handful from the list which I'd be happy to lend.
Opinions?
So I spent a lot of time reading and review books back in '06 and '07. I'd just read Joel Spolsky's "MUST READ" list and managed to persuade my manager to add most of them to the company library, the office admin in charge of signing out the books was hella cute so I had lots of motivation to get to the "library", and I had plenty of spare time to read on the bus in and out of work. Perfect!
Then I started working from home so my usual three hours of reading on the bus turned into half an hour at night, and I started working two jobs simultaneously. Ah well, the path to hell and all that. So now the plan is a more standard sort of blog, and I'll try and throw in book reviews here and there without being stuck with only book reviews.
The second part of this is that I've gone through my "ideas" list, which has grown to around 150 entries. This is a list of business ideas or projects I've had over the last few years, and while there's a lot of crap there's also a few really good business ideas... if only I'd done them at the time I came up with the idea. Now a lot of them have been done by about 20 other companies, or have been made redundant by new technologies. I've started re-evaluating the leftovers and I'm trying to tackle the "low-hanging fruit", setting a few personal learning projects in the meantime.
Fitting in with Niall H's recent blog entry - I intend to make 2009 my "year of execution". So when I get an idea it just gets done rather then gathering dust on a list.
