One of the things I’ve been saying lately about what we’re doing at Percolate is that from a design perspective our competition isn’t other enterprise software tools, it’s Twitter, Tumblr, and the like. Because so many community managers (the most common user from the brand side) are heavy users of social media personally, they have come to expect consumer interfaces across all their tools. Or, as Sarah Lacy put it, “millennial entitlement”:
Millenials are coming into the workforce and the generation has an amazing capacity to demand the world revolve around their desires, whether that’s reasonable or not. Millenials will just start demanding better software from the companies they work for, and if they don’t get it, they’ll start installing their own skunkworks implementations.
Sure, I guess I feel entitled to well-designed software even in a business environment …
designenterprisesoftwareTechnologyFebruary 12, 2012
Well, this quote from a research engineer at Facebook is a relief:
The tools use our own technologies (talk about dog food) so they work, look, and integrate beautifully. Best part, if someone doesn’t like something, well, they can just fix it. (To wit, our email and calendar software is off-the-shelf and is the most unpleasant tool to deal with. Get this – we have a few people “specialized” in sending large meeting invites out, because there are bugs that require peculiar expertise to work around. Not to mention that such invites come with “Do not accept from an iPhone lest you corrupt the invite for everyone!”)
Nice to know big tech companies can’t fix calendaring either. Also, while we’re here, I liked this comment about Facebook’s use of PHP:
Facebook’s outlook of PHP is largely passionless; yes, engineers understand it is far from perfect, and people occasionally rant or show some WTF code sample. At the same time, at Facebook we love doing cool things, and PHP is simply a means to an end. With our extensive framework and libraries, it’s also often the simplest means to an end.
calendarsfacebookphpTechnologyJanuary 30, 2012
It’s hard to get a clear picture of how startups are doing because so much of success depends on perception and founders do anything they can to keep that perception up. For all the talk about failing and it’s value (something I don’t necessarily agree with), it’s rare to hear real stories from real entrepreneurs whose companies didn’t turn out exactly as they might have expected. 37 Signals has a nice wrap up of quotes from folks who had to shut down a product, service or company. Here’s a good one from the creator of Wesabe (a competitor to Mint):
Mint focused on making the user do almost no work at all, by automatically editing and categorizing their data, reducing the number of fields in their signup form, and giving them immediate gratification as soon as they possibly could; we completely sucked at all of that…I was focused on trying to make the usability of editing data as easy and functional as it could be; Mint was focused on making it so you never had to do that at all. Their approach completely kicked our approach’s ass.
Exit Interview: The creators of no-longer-with-us products explain what went wrong - (37signals)
I promise I’ll get back to blogging more non-Percolate things, but here’s one more item. Over at the Percolate blog I wrote up a quick description of how our product development process has changed since we moved to running everything off an API:
We start by sketching everything out and finalizing flows. Once that happens everyone gets to work: Backend writes some Python, frontend writes some javascript and design finalizes interaction and visual design. Because it’s all just data being passed around, no one needs to wait for anyone else. As long as the data is modeled, we can write all the frontend code before the actual endpoints are complete (and before the visuals are solidified).
Running a product team has been a really interesting shift in career for me. Some of the stuff I learned working at agencies has been a huge benefit (working in teams, managing creative people) and some other stuff has been totally new (continually improving something instead of launching and jumping to the next thing). It’s fun to work on improving the process and flow and when you land in a real rhythm it’s pretty amazing (not that different than being in the excitement and madness of a great pitch).
I need to write up a longer thing about my overall experience, but this was a start. I’ve got a goal to write more process posts over at the Percolate blog because people seem to like them, so hopefully there’s more coming soon.
percolateproductsTechnologyJanuary 25, 2012
I think my favorite thing from this article about the crazy floating startup village is the nonchalance about about lasers and undersea internet cables: “A laser could be good, but is susceptible to fog, which is bad in the Bay Area. We’re considering running an undersea cable from ship to shore, but it may be be cost prohibitive. [Blueseed has received estimates of over a million dollars for just the installation, but is still researching permits.]”
Reminds me of my favorite Simpson’s joke ever. Homer and Bart are on a boat in international waters and in the distance is a boat with a big satellite dish. Homer turns to Bart and says, “See that ship over there? They’re re-broadcasting Major League Baseball with implied oral consent, not express written consent—or so the legend goes.”
Startup Ducks Immigration Law With 'Googleplex of the Sea' | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com
Nice little BusinessWeek piece on how Apple wields it’s operational expertise. The whole article is good as it walks through the supply chain, but I’m especially fond of this little nugget about how they made the little light that turns on when you’re camera is on: “Ive called in a team of manufacturing and materials experts to figure out how to make the impossible possible, according to a former employee familiar with the development who requested anonymity to avoid irking Apple. The team discovered it could use a customized laser to poke holes in the aluminum small enough to be nearly invisible to the human eye but big enough to let light through.” As an aside, I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot more of these stories as Apple PR tries to cement Tim Cook as a strategic asset, not just the guy after Jobs.
Via Counterparties
Apple's Supply-Chain Secret? Hoard Lasers - BusinessWeek
Card Case from Square sounds interesting. Esentially it lets you set up a “tab” with any store that uses it and they’ll just “put it on your tab” when you go up to pay. More interesting to me, though, is the iPhone technology they’re using to do it (which I didn’t know about): “Square has taken advantage of a new Apple technology called ‘geofencing,’ which notifies an app when a phone has entered a specified geographical area. The key thing about this approach is that it happens in the background; the app doesn’t have to be on for it to work.” As am aside, I’ve heard rumors that Facebook looks at who else opens the FB app in your vicinity and uses that to recommend new friends.
Card Case: The new payments app that foretells a world without cash and credit cards - Slate Magazine
Muji gloves with a conductive finger for touchscreen technology. Who’s in charge around here again? We now need to buy new clothing with additional pockets for devices, holes for headphones and materials to allow for interaction. We design tools and then the tools design us. As an aside, I was doing some research recently and in the ten years between 2006 and 2016 the smartphone market is estimated to shift from being 7 percent touchscreen to 97 percent touchscreen respectively. Not sure if that’s impressive or just a sad statement about the industry’s inability to think beyond what’s happening right now.
MUJI Gloves
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