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Feb
26
2009

What were they expecting?

By | News & Notes, Tech

4 Comments

the-conversationSucceed at managing your customers expectation and you can never fail.  Fail to manage your customers expectations and you can never succeed. ~ me

This is one of my all time favorite universal lessons I have gleaned from business.  There isn’t really any part of my life that involves other people which doesn’t benefit from the practiced art of managing the expectations of those I’m interacting with.  When another human knows exactly what they can expect from you, on your terms, and when you consistently meet or beat that expectation on their terms, you have set the stage for a powerful ally in business; trust.

The reason this is so important is because people on a whole are very self-referential, which means they see their own perceptions and actions within the conversations and interactions they have with other people.   Imagine two people talking business over lunch.  The speaker could say ‘it will be a short project that we can deliver with limited resources and for a reasonable amount of money’.  The listener will build context around the statements with their own assumptions, drawn from their own experiences of what is short, limited and reasonable, that will ultimately create very different picture than the speaker meant to convey.  At that moment, an expectation was set in the mind of the client that may or may not be ironed out in the contract negotiations but will greatly influence the customers satisfaction when the project is completed.

I worked with a fantastic colleague on the team that had a very bad habit of responding to challenging technical requests with an automatic ‘Not sure yet, but that should be doable’.  What he meant to deliver was ‘It SHOULD be doable, but of course I won’t know until I work on it” and what the customer heard was “That WILL be EASY and there is no reason it won’t be done on time”.  So when said colleague moved heaven and earth to deliver on what turned out to be a very difficult task, the customer was unimpressed.  They had already expected it to be done without effort and was maybe a little disappointed that the colleague didn’t work on some of the other, less important features.  This is what I would call a ‘Technical win and an Expectation fail‘

Here are some tools and tricks I use when working with other people to help set the expectation

  • Pictures and mockups.  When you are working in the web industry, their really isn’t an excuse to not mockup what you are seeing in your mind for the customer.  A tool I like to use is Balsamiq, which is a Flash based web mockup framework that is quick and easy to use
  • Agile Development.  The agile process focuses on rapid delivery of code, typically every two weeks, that gives the customer something to wrap their head around.  I think Ill do a full post on agile tomorrow
  • Closing summaries.  When I talk with customers, I have developed a technique of always closing out a conversation by saying ‘So, what I understand you want is…’ and just re-summing everything you’ve been talking about.  Etiquette might frown on dragging on a conversation past what the listener wants to endure, but I almost always find mismatching expectations in the closing summaries.

What do you do to manage someone’s expectations?

photo attributed to polandeze

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Feb
18
2009

iPhone apps are this decade's dotcoms

By | News & Notes

1 Comment

iphone-cupcakes2

Anyone remember the late 90′s hype over dotcom names?  Everyone was clawing their neighbors and friends to stake their claim on some dotcom property like they were ’49ers in a gold rush prospector’s fever dream.   Back then it wasn’t unusual to sit down for a haircut and have the barber pitch you on his new dotcom hair-related venture that was an absolute lock to make him and his investors GDP-of-Mexico kind of money.  Does that irrational exuberance ring a bell?  If you didn’t get to experience that fun in the 90′s don’t worry, you can see the mini-sequel being played out in the iPhone App Store right now.

Here are the things I’ve read in the last two days that have hearkened me back to a crazier time when sock puppets pitched pet food.

  • Casinos are on alert that iPhones are being used to count cards.  That in its self is unsurprising, money and technology are happy roommates in the criminal youth hostel that is Vegas.  The hype portion of the story is that because its being done on the shiny iPhone with an app available over the app store it is now news.
  • iFart and ‘Pull my Finger’, two highbrow apps that were clearly made instead of that business productivity suite the creators ‘totally planned on’, have landed in a civil court case over trademark infringement.  This story hit CNN.
  • A nine year old kid in Singapore just released his first iPhone app, which was a huge hit to the tune of 4,000 downloads.  That was even before the free press got a hold of the story.  Now expect to see Apple pushing Objective C  as a supplement to Oregon Trail in our public school computer classes (not that the Apple 2e’s many schools have could even run xCode)
  • Average Joe makes $600 grand a month on the iPhone application he made in his spare time.  Not that there is anything average about Ethan Nicholas, the Sun software developer who wrote and aptly marketed his iShoot game and got a whole bunch of lucky when it took off big.  No, the ‘Average Joe’ part is what everyone reading the short news blurb will hear in their head, as in ‘if he can do it so can I’, thereby fueling the next big surge of iPhone Programming for Dummies books.

All this hype is fun to watch but there are a couple things that I suspect will come if this bubble is anything like the 90′s.  First I envision corporate boards around the world calling up their marketing department asking to get their logo branded on an iPhone app that does ‘something hip and cool’, never mind that its a paper company in Nova Scotia who’s clients still use rotary dial phones.  Then there will be the requests by friends and family to help them with their vanity app consisting entirely of coverflow pictures of their cat (free to download, $35 bucks for the upgrade).   Finally, like the 90′s,  it will all end when the one billionth iPhone app is released and the only company to actually still make money is the in the business of indexing all the apps and selling ads next to the results.

Google and Microsoft announced similar app stores for their mobile operating systems, coming soon.  The real question everyone is asking themselves is will important applications like iFart be cross-platform supported.  One can only hope.

Photo attributed to Rachel from Cupcakes Take the Cake

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Feb
11
2009

JSON and the Argonauts

By | News & Notes, Opinion, Tech

5 Comments

greek-statueThe Greeks sure were fond of super-hero team titles.  There was Jason, commander of the Argo and her crew of the best of the best, pitted against irresistible forces beyond moral man’s endurance.   What does this have to do with JSON, the JavaScript Object Notation standard used by the web 2.0′s best of the best of overcome an accent foe called Same Origin Policy?  Can’t think of a thing, I just really liked the title.

A funny thing happened on the way to the Mashup. I’m sure someone somewhere, maybe even here, told you that RSS feeds were going to revolutionize the way we distribute information.  We were all so right in so many ways because RSS, or ATOM if you prefer, has opened up the world to the unimagined possibilities available online.  Think of some way that you want to consume information.  Go ahead, I’ll wait.  Ok, you are all right you can consume information that way. Oh, heh, I mean almost all of you are right.  That guy in the back with the Helvetica shirt in Metalica font, I’m sorry but we can’t help you with your idea.  Thing is, as much as you may want to have a single page that can then pull and update XML based RSS feeds from any site in the world from within the browser without refreshing, you’re not allowed.  It is for your own protection actually.  We call it the Same Origin Policy.

Here is the idea.  When your web browser pulls down a web page’s code from a modern site, it is usually pulling down a collection of HTML, Stylesheets, Javascript.  That HTML tells the page what content goes where and what images to place by the content.  The Stylesheet (CSS) tells the browser how to make that content look and how to make it act on the page.  Then the Javascript is there to give the page life, make it interact with events, make it do impressive things that we have come to love and cherrish.  In the AJAX world, those impressive things involve grabbing information from the server and updating the page without screen refresh.  Javascript is nye omnipotent in the browser, and yet there are some quantum limitations built into the works.  Beyond the sandboxing of JS, there is one little design decision from Netscape 2.0 that has totally altered the web 2.0 landscape.  Netscape decided that a browser would only allow scripts to interact with domains that the page came from.  If a page is loaded from www.bobsdiscountlasers.com then AJAX calls are limited to bobsdiscountlasers.com.  The grand illumination of mashups, where data flows from many different locations onto one page in a relevant way, almost never happened because of this.

Web browsers weren’t designed with mashups in mind, and ‘the warts have been there from day one’, [David Boloker, cofounder of the OpenAjax Alliance and IBM's CTO of Emerging Internet Technologies] says. Browsers contain a security feature called the same-origin policy that’s meant to keep malicious code hosted on one site from grabbing data, such as stored credentials, off another site. The same-origin policy prevents websites from one domain from requesting data belonging to another domain. ~ Security services and Mashups

But, of course, Mashups do exist.  We see Google Maps on thousands of pages not under the google.com domain.  How is it done?  We’ll get to the hero of the day in a second, for now lets look at other popular workarounds

  • Mashup at the Server Side:  Since the JS limitation is browser based, you could do all of your mashups at the server.  The server could serve as the collector of the different sources of information, combine them intellegently and cache the results.  At best this idea is inconvenient because it adds layers where they need not normally be.  At worst this does not scale when you have a single location for distributed information
  • Flash/Flex:  The Flash VM doesn’t have the Cross Domain limitation that plagues JavaScript.  A file on the server gives a list of permitted sites that the Flex app can pull data from.  I have talked with Adobe Evangalists about this option and they seemed to hint that this design decision was intented to hit javascript where it was weakest.
  • AJAX Proxy.  Similar to the first method, a proxy allows the client to pull the information through it.  It isn’t stored on the proxy, though it can be cached, and no combination is done.  Again, this is a scaling issue

Stop passing code, start passing data. What all of these work arounds do is bypass the security concern with Same Origin Policy (SOP).  SOP was originally intended to combat early attempts at Cross Site Scripting (XSS).  Modern XSS has a nasty list of exploits that I don’t have time for here, but one way to think about it is this:  If you let Javascript pull code from untrustworthy places you are inviting problems.  One possible approach to this issue was to stop the push and pull of code but to allow the pushing and pulling raw data.  That is what JSON is, a way to encode data to be pushed and pulled using AJAX calls.  Though the X in AJAX stands for XML, AJAX really is more often using JSON because SOP will allow it to be used cross-domain.  So with JSON you can pull in Google Maps and that list of Micro Brewerys right in the browser, Mash them up using Javascript, and asyncroniously keep the data refreshed, the app reactive, and your buzz in good spirits (You are walking to these pubs, right?)

My prediction; RSS feeds are going to move away from XML and on to JSON in the future.  Or at minimum, support both.  John Resig, the creator of jQuery, even has a converter to get us all started.

Photo attributed to jasonr611

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Feb
04
2009

For 'Bleeding Edge' prepare to pay in blood

By | News & Notes, Tech

1 Comment

knife-edgeIf you are in software development, take a good hard look at the code you are writing right now.  If the string of Roman characters resemble Java or .Net or C/C++ then I have some wonderfully awful predictions about the next ten years of your life; That language is your scarlet letter and will follow/define you for the next two jobs you end up accepting.  That sounds bad but you are the blessed among the damned – You can and will find that next job.  For Bleeding Edgers, the road is not so well paved.

In my last job I was a Bleeding Edger.  You know one if you work with one, always looking at the latest release of the newest language to see if it has a better solution to your particular problem.   In my case as a Software Manager, being a Bleeding Edger meant an obsession with ROI in our software solutions.  Links to anything that could trim development time and/or expense filled my Delicious feed.  I pushed my team to move beyond Java’s heavy web frameworks and to adopt Rails as a rapid application prototyping framework.  We cranked out good, solid software solutions 4 times faster than our java days and I was happy.  When a project came along that could use Flash, we wrote it in Flex instead because knowing how this company worked, they’d want a desktop and an offline version in the future.  A year later we were cross compiling the Flex code into an AIR application and saving a tremendous amount of time, and we were happy.

But being a Bleeding Edger means there will be dark days to contrast the brilliantly sunny ones.   Our ROI figures were not enough to protect all of us throughout this economic upheaval and some would have to make the sacrifice for the rest.  I would like to say that, as the manager, I fell on my sword for them but that’s not really the case.  The decision never reached my level.  I was the highest compensated on the team and so I was killed by simple, cold math.  The blood spilled that day is still dripping.  It still hurts.

The software job market is a rigged system.  Heavyweights in the market put enough momentum behind enough Java and .Net and C/C++ projects that they can be considered perpetual motion machines.  A class hierarchy between Java and .Net, perpetuated by recruiters with a simple word match on a job board, stacks the deck against the Bleeding Edgers in the mainstream.  You are a Hatfield or you are a McCoy or you are an innocent bystander likely to get shot in the crossfire.  The mainstream is not a system able to help the Bleeding Edger.  Sure, there will be the occasional posting that isn’t in your location and is looking for some bizarrely specific, must have requirement that categorically eliminates all humans including the guy who originally wrote the book on the library they are using.  In the end, Bleeding Edgers need to work outside of the system.

For the young, there are no unemployed Bleeding Edgers only uncompensated open source code contributors.  If you have the ability to live on nearly nothing, working outside the system can be a very rewarding and ultimately fulfilling life choice.  For the responsibility burdened older generations, there are really only two options as a Bleeding Edger.  The first, and likely most chosen, is to re-assimilate into the collective; scrub your resume of all references to Ruby and Jython, and  Grail, prop up your sun certifications if you have them, and become a team player.  The rest of us Bleeding Edgers, the ones the economy hasn’t driven to ditch digging, will become the countries next batch of serial startup founders.  We will be easy to spot, just look for the scars.

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Sep
17
2008

The Establishment thinks we are stupid

By | Tech

2 Comments

People are stupid. History has shown it repeats itself, and people make the same mistakes. ~Harry Debes, CEO of Lawson

tanakawhobuildingThat was a pullquote from an interview with ERP software company Lawson’s CEO Harry Debes.  He was answering the reporter’s question on whether software companies had learned anything from previous attempts at making Software as a Service models work.  Clearly, he is not a fan of Salesforce.com, a competitor and SaaS poster child.

Debes makes an enthusiastic case for the merits of traditional software sales over the distributed revenue model of SaaS, which he claims prevents companies from making big returns quickly.  He may be right.

My contention with his argument focuses on his well worn and rehearsed counter claim that customers of traditional software vendors are free to use a software package indefinitely once the upfront investment is paid off, saving them money over time.  Does anyone still believe this fable?  Are we no smarter than we were in the 90′s, or are CEOs simply that far out of touch.

When financial institutions start falling, the press tends to shed light on their spending habits.  If what Mr. Debes is putting forth were true, then surely the 138 year old Lehman Brothers investment bank would be one of the big benefactors to those savings over times.  And yet, they spent over a billion dollars last year in new software. Surely you would expect a financial institution to exemplify the ideals of conservative spending, find any way possible to save money while delivering on their customers needs.  Yet I know that most financial companies spend large percentages of their revenue keeping up technology.  For companies of lesser means, there are still forced upgrades, maintenance agreements, obsolescence, migratory requirements that all lends force to the gale that blows up the costs of keeping companies running.  Has any publically traded company reported in their SEC fillings a year after year decrease in the spending of technology?  Should we be so blind as to assume that hardware, network connectivity, desktops, communication equipment all required new, expensive versions but that the software remained untouched, free from budgetary expenditure?

We now all know the truth masking the lie.  Traditional software would all be free, if we never needed to upgrade. Software as a Service may not reap those immediate returns that you are so eagerly seeking, sir, but do not attempt to misdirect the truth that as long as innovation is a competitive advantage and progress proceeds in a forwardly direction, we will have to pay someone to keep us in the game.

It is unfortunate for the Harry Debes of the world that corporations are slowly but inevitably being inflitrated by open minded technologiest who are apt to question the status quo.  You see, Mr Debes, I believe that people are not stupid.  We do and will learn from our mistakes.  We have already learned some lessons the hard way.  Should you be sitting across from me in your next ERP sales call, I will be more than happy to fill you in on our progress so far.

(photo by tanakawho)