Dave Concannon

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.

The astute reader will notice an extra widget on the right hand side of the blog here. It's in support of the Startup Visa idea which will grant visas to entrepreneurs with existing funding looking to start their companies in the states.

This initiative will create new jobs and significantly increase the talent pool of highly-skilled entrepreneurs in the states.

The Startup Visa Act proposes legislation to modify the existing EB-5 Visa drive job creation in the US and increase American global competiveness by helping immigrant entrepreneurs secure visas to the United States and create new companies, where there is investment capital available from a sponsoring US venture capital or angel investor of at least $100,000 in an equity financing of not less than $250,000.

More information on the startup visa here: http://startupvisa.com/2010/02/24/kerry-lugar-startup-visa-act/

How can you help?  Add the widget to your blog from this link: http://startupvisa.2gov.org/widget/.

Access to technology has become easier than ever. Technology concepts that once had a high barrier to entry to the uninitiated have converged into frameworks, APIs, and libraries which give even relatively unskilled programmers the ability to create web software easily. Cloud infrastructures can alleviate a large part of the cost and complexity of scaling and availability under high traffic demands.

The abstraction doesn't even stop at the basic technology; at one level above this, some of the fundamental use cases in web software can be delegated to high availability services e.g. Twitter or Facebook Connect for primary user login and profile management or Yahoo Pipes to translate and combine different data sources into a format you require without having to write a line of code. Reusing the essential use cases of software was an original vision in a startup I worked for nearly ten years go, and at the time it seemed a distant and indistinct goal. Today, loosely-coupled Service-Oriented Architectures allows business the freedom to focus on the core business problems.

Dot Com Lessons

The dot com bubble exploded around the concept of the "first mover advantage" whereby companies had to be the first brand in the consumer's mind regardless of the cost to get there or the value of the underlying business proposition. Huge amounts of capital were burned trying to build the sort of basic infrastructure that is now available for free or at a fraction of the cost. The web 2.0 era has been both caused and inspired by a massive innovation in technology used on the web; at first revolutionary but now almost fundamental to how some users experience the web. The battles between innovative frameworks and libraries that do similar things eventually leads to a de facto standard. In some languages and problem domains, more and more developer time is spent simply connecting different technologies together (slide #93).

I'm not claiming that technology has hit a dead end - that is clearly not the case. Engineering innovation will always be a core requirement for certain types of business, the point is that the barriers to technology implementation that a business faced even five years ago made it a very difficult and costly problem. This is no longer the case.

This Decade's Focus

So where is value added? I believe that this decade will fundamentally be based around a businesses attitude to design. When all product or software businesses can assemble the same basic set of underlying features that solve a customer's problem for little to no cost, remarkable design and marketing is the differentiation. You cannot outsource creativity.

Design

Graphic work can be turned into a commodity on crowd-sourced forums such as 99designs, but as Eoghan McCabe points out design is something very different. Apple excel at distilling consumer trends into a product vision that they conjure remarkable designs around and whip up a frenzy of demand for. Mint took the basic problem of not knowing the best prices on essential banking and utility services and wrapped it into a clean interface that requires next to no user interaction to save money. In both these cases the value add is from a beautiful design that wraps pretty basic features in a creative way.

Flexible Business Models

Innovation will also come from business model design - using concepts from Lean Startups and Business Design Innovation to rapidly react to market forces and pivot. As technology can be built with less inertia, and more about your user's interaction with your product can be measured and analyzed than ever before, changing direction is arguably less painful now then it has been at any point in history.

So, what do you think? Has technology been commoditized to the point at which it's almost no longer a concern for a lot of businesses? Is design (of product and business model) the new king?  What is the must-have skillset for a programmer in an era where technology is no longer the be-all and end-all?

After reading the hugely inspirational "Tribes" I've been on something of a Seth Godin binge.  Purple Cow is a how-to guide to revolutionize a  comatose company into something truly remarkable. The idea of this "Purple Cow" is to make a product that is so remarkable, so antithetical to the status quo that it immediately strikes a chord with your target market.

Purple Cow is a book about how taking the 'safe' course of action is riskier than making the ballsy decisions that defy convention and make a really remarkable product.  Seth describes the 'TV-industrial complex' which used television and print mass-media to advertise and create mindless demand in niche markets that did not yet have a clear leader. The profits from these ventures resulted in a continuous cycle - more money spent on advertisements means more profit means more money spent on advertising.

The end result of this cycle is that consumers become more and more inoculated against your advertising and eventually every product in a given sector is an indistinguishable clone of it's competitors. In markets saturated with similar products that make similar claims the best course of action is the controversial one - stand out. Remarkable products pick a specific customer and solve their problem really well. They solve this problem in a way that turns ordinary customers into fans, and makes fans want to tell everyone else they know.

Most importantly is the premise that remarkable doesn't happen via design-by-committee, watered-down compromise, or blindly imitating your competitors. It's by being what your competitors aren't prepared to; the nicest,  the fastest,  the newest, even the most hated as long as you follow the golden rule:  The surest way to make a terrible product is to try to please everyone at the same time.

I spent about an hour  yesterday integrating OAuth into a learning project. From the time I decided to play with it (knowing the absolute bare minimum about OAuth), to the point at which it was successfully doing what I wanted it to took about 40 minutes. This was the development version of lego - plug in a bit of code, configure the specifics, hook it into the desired area you want, tweak a little bit... done.

Juxtapose: The time I've spent trying to work with code that has no discernible interfaces - A black box with no windows. Pages of instructions to achieve something trivial. Configuration in multiple places. Hours spent trying to guess the "magic" variable that you need to reference that's defined somewhere in the depths of code but never mentioned. Underlying it all - the assumption that I know how you think.

Other developers don't think like you. The simplest units of code should do one thing, have a clear way to make it happen and then verify that it happened. It should not affect other things that aren't related to what the code is designed to achieve. It should be efficient. It should be Orthogonal.

Your users do not think like you do. They do not understand the inner workings of your software.  The interface should require an absolute minimum of context to be useful. Even if they were dropped onto a random screen it should be clear to them what will happen when they perform an action, and it should be clear to them when the action has happened. They should never have to ask "What do I do now?".

They should not have to understand how your brain works.

Space Avalanche just hit it's first birthday, and I thought I'd share a few stats.

We're pretty pleased to say the least. Here's the overall traffic graph for the year:

(Click to view larger image)

As a sort of "happy birthday" celebration we thought we'd run a competition. The first prize is a one-of-a-kind, never-to-be-repeated hand-drawn artwork signed by Eoin and we're also giving away a tshirts and prints.

This is also a good opportunity to thank:

Charlie and Eoghan at huggl.es who host the comic on their server and go way way outside the expected to make sure the comic stays up.

Noah at DrawnByMouse and John at Mint Condition for continuing support.

The reddit comics forum who give us (mostly) fantastic feedback.

All the people who have translated the comics for us into French, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Everyone who follows us on twitter, facebook, and particularly all the people who take the time to comment on the comics. It's amazing to get such great feedback and it's very much appreciated.

Check out the competition, and keep reading the comics! Thank you!

A recent hacker news article about technology advocacy got me thinking about the Lean Startup philosophy, particularly the tenet of "platforms enabled by open source and free software".  To summarize briefly, Lean startups are built upon:

1. Agile development practices
2. Customer-centric rapid iteration (Customer Development)
3. The use of platforms enabled by open source and free software.

This last concept is something I want to dig into a little bit more. Is the success of a lean startup really dependent on all three of these elements?

Relevance of the Open Technology Stack

In what ways does an open or free software platform directly benefit a lean startup's success? Let's pretend that we clone a startup model; we have two startups each consisting of identical teams. Each of the teams has verified that a problem exists for a set of customers that have money and are willing to spend it to solve their problem. Each startup consists of:

1. Gifted technology implementers
2. An equally gifted team of customer development experts

We send them out to try to further validate any assumption about the customer problem, and they then set set out to build and rapidly iterate upon a technology solution that satisfies the minimum viable product.

Here's the kicker - Team one use open source technologies, Team two use a proprietary technology stack. Does success hinge upon the use of technology? Can an MVP delivered in a "locked-in" technology stack be as effective at solving the customer's problem as an open stack?  I would argue that given the same gifted technology team it will not have any negative effect on a startup and in some (albeit limited) cases, a locked-in technology stack may actually be of benefit to a startup. Here's that diagram redefined:

Lean Solutions

Here's the takeaway point - Technology is just a tool to solve some sort of problem. For a lean startup you can use any number of wonderful toys to implement your solution - the point is that you should spend your time and money as effectively as possible. Lean startups are low burn companies by design (slide #47).

Spending money effectively is the key point! Effective spending = a longer runway = more iterations = more learning = a higher chance of success. Paul Graham is very outspoken on the topic of more "enterprise" technology solutions as a reflection of the intelligence and ability of a startup team. He makes very salient points, though I can't agree with all of them. However, as mentioned previously there are instances where if you can ensure that a specific technology allows you to learn as effectively for the same cost, then a proprietary technology may actually be a competitive advantage (or at least, it won't be a disadvantage). One example is Enterprise sales.

Lean Startups and the Enterprise

Companies who have an employee base of tens of thousands tend to have been expertly sold on Enterprise solutions from companies like Oracle and SAP. It can provide safety and comfort for the CIO of an enterprise company to purchase from an established vendor such as this - the old adage of "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".  The end user of your product may only be one of several deciding parties, and could have relatively little say in the final decision for a potential sale. In many cases a sale hinges upon buy-in from a technology manager whose criteria is "How much of a headache will this product cause me if I need to to roll it out to 10,000 users?".  Choosing a technology stack that they already rely on may push a decision in your favor.

Technology Choice and Customer Development

As a final point, I believe that technology choice is a critical output of the customer development process. When defining the initial problem set for an enterprise customer, a startup needs to determine what existing platforms the economic buyer of a product has approved in the past and ensure at a minimum that technology choice isn't a disadvantage. "Crossing the chasm" and gaining adoption by the pragmatist / conservative mainstream will in part depend on how well your technology choice integrates with the customers existing platforms. New technologies can make some customers very nervous.

For consumer internet startups, technology choice is less of an issue as long as it can solve the problem effectively - focus on lean learning from actual customers over technology advocacy.

Edit: It's been pointed out to me that Eric Ries describes the "open source technology" point more definitively as 'Technology Commoditization" in a later explanation, so it seems we're on the same page. I think actually referring to "Open source technologies" has some benefits - it further facilitates the spread of the "lean startup" philosophy itself among technology enthusiasts.

Tribes is a manifesto for self-driven change for everyone tired of the status quo - A call to identify the problems in your company, town, or life and start solving them with a like-minded group of enthusiasts.

Seth has written a clear guide through what he describes as a "factory" mindset - Where a job is clearly defined and you do the same things every day in a predictable manner, with someone telling you what to do next. The reality he proposes is that the factory mindset when applied to real life is dangerous - dangerous for the individual who doesn't have the freedom to produce remarkable works with their talents, and dangerous for the company that lets great ideas stagnate due to poor policy.

The central principle of the book is that change is created by people - by leaders who are proud to go against the grain to do what they know is right. Movements are created by groups of these people, all working together at a singular aim without the fear and inertia that stifles innovation and talent.

I've dipped in and out of Seth's blog and always enjoyed it but never really 'drank the kool-aid'. No more - I found this book absolutely inspirational, and if you bump into me in the near future you may find me trying to force this book into your hand. Buy it, rent it, or steal it - this is something you need to read.