Pattern Finder

Analyst Trick #2: Look Back at History

A History major in college, I've always tried to gain insight into the future by looking back at the past. In my role as an industry analyst, that predilection is extremely useful.

Let's face it--trying to predict what will happen in the future is a task fraught with danger, and industry analysts are not always good at it. A decade ago, back when I was working on the vendor side, I remember amusing myself by reading three-year-old Forrester Research reports and seeing how far off their predictions were.

This isn't to say I haven't committed my own howlers. When I wrote the first analyst report on web analytics back in mid-2000, I forecast that the market would have revenues of $425 million in 2000 (up from $141 million in 1999) and enjoy robust growth for years to come. The $425 million number was actually pretty accurate--however, I didn't foresee the impact of the dot.com bust, which caused revenues to remain stagnant for the next several years. The web analytics market certainly didn't hit my predicted mark of $4 billion in 2004. So that mistake has turned into a history lesson for me: take into account outlier scenarios.

I've worked in high tech long enough that it's easy for me to see that new technologies are often old architectures wrapped in a new vocabulary.  For example, Ajax is another name for client/server on the web. In fact, client/server itself was a repackaging of an architecture used by the Wang VS minicomputer back in the 1980's, when every VS terminal contained a Z80 chip so that graphics could be performed on the terminal without sending an interrupt back to the central CPU after every keystroke. (In contrast, every terminal keystroke went back to the DEC VAX, which is why Wang always beat DEC in high-volume word processing applications.)

Analyst Trick #1: Look for Disgruntled Users

This is the first in a series of posts on "analyst tricks"--heuristics and behaviors that I've picked up over the years that help me analyze technology and markets.

Whenever I hear an end user toss terms into the conversation such as, "obstructionist," "bunch of bozos," and "hard to use," my ears perk up. There's an opportunity for a technological revolution lurking somewhere here.

Major technological revolutions have taken place because they allow users to be significantly more productive. The invention of the word processor meant that secretaries didn't have to retype an entire letter when they got a sentence wrong; spreadsheets meant that financial analysts didn't have to manually add up numbers. These two technologies led to huge advances in productivity and helped explain their popularity. (When I worked at Wang Laboratories, there were a number of stories of secretaries--once they had seen a demo of the Wang Word Processor--who refused to type another letter until their boss bought one for them. These devices were not cheap: $20,000 in the late 1970's).

Pretty basic, huh? Such a statement is not a huge revelation. However, a twist on this rule is that technological revolutions take place when a product offers incremental productivity but gives users much more freedom and and a sense of well-being. Put another way, if you're looking only for huge productivity leaps, you'll miss the popularity of products that give visceral joy.

Kindle 2: What I Like About It

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I got a Kindle 2 for my birthday--my mother sent me money for my birthday and I decided to spend it on a Kindle--and I like it a lot, for a variety of reasons:

• It feels and looks good: It's a clean design, and has a nice heft to it without being heavy.
• The screen is easy to read: The electronic paper has nice contrast, and the matte finish means you don't get glare in your eyes.
  
• You can adjust the size of the type: For someone who has to now use reading glasses all the time, this is a godsend.
• You can buy books instantly: Being able to buy books instantly from Amazon.com is a big plus. You don't need to finagle with downloading books to your PC and then remembering to transfer them to your PC.

I knew about these features, and they helped convince me to buy it. However, now that I've been using it for over a week, there are some pleasant surprises as well:

• It's as pleasant as reading a book--This is a function not so much of the Kindle but of the cover I got for it. Initially, I went for the official Amazon.com cover--black leather, emblazoned with the Amazon logo--but I didn't really take to it. It had a funny smell and the back of it would flop away from the back of the Kindle. So I swallowed hard and bought another cover: the Mocha M-edge GO! Jacket for Kindle 2. For the same price, it's ten times better. The cover is more rigid, the back of it clips securely to the Kindle, and the leather is top grade: it looks and smells gorgeous. (Trust me, I know what I'm talking about: my family used to be in the leather tanning business). The upshot is reading the Kindle is a more sensual experience than reading a mass market paperback. I love books, including the feel of them in my hand, and I was worried that the Kindle would be a diminished experience. Actually, now everything I read on the Kindle is a leatherbound book.
• Even the "Off" screen is fun--Rather than presenting you with a blank screen when it's off, the Kindle displays a picture of a literary great (e.g., John Steinbeck, Oscar Wilde) or a famous etching (e.g., Durer's St. Jerome in his Study). Each time you turn it off, a different picture comes up. This packaged serendipity makes the Kindle just as much fun turned off as it is turned on.
• The Amazon connection lets you drill into a subject--With the Kindle, you get the Amazon recommendation system on steroids. I've found--and bought--a lot of great physical books on Amazon.com due to its recommendation system. The Kindle means you don't need to wait for UPS to turn up with your book--it's instant gratification. I somehow found Stephen King's book On Writing and bought it for the Kindle--and then wandered over to Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life and bought it as well. So if you get engrossed in a subject, the Kindle makes it easy to find and get relevant books. The only downside is the money you spend.

However, I don't want to give the impression that the Kindle 2 is all milk and honey. It could use some improvements as well. I'll blog about them in a later post.

ThinkFree Behind the Firewall; Zoho for SharePoint

Yesterday was "news rich" in the productivity suite market. Two small vendors, ThinkFree and Zoho, made interesting announcements.

ThinkFree released its ThinkFree Server Enterprise solution on June 22 and announced it on June 23. Basically, this allows an enterprise to take ThinkFree's SaaS productivity suite/document sharing solution and install it on an internal server behind the firewall.

At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference on June 23, Zoho announced Zoho Office for Microsoft SharePoint. The e-mail I got from the PR person says,

This add-on, when installed on a Microsoft SharePoint Server, integrates Zoho Office Suite with Microsoft SharePoint.

The add-on provides users with the following functionality:

• Create new documents and save them to SharePoint in MS Office formats.
• View existing documents within SharePoint using Zoho Apps (Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show).
• Edit existing documents with Zoho Apps and save them back to SharePoint.
• Provides collaborative editing capabilities based on SharePoint's sharing permissions.

You can find more information about it in a post on the Zoho blog.

Via a server-side install, this connects Zoho to a document sharing/management application, similar to Google Apps, Microsoft Office/SharePoint, and ThinkFree--a capability that isn't offered by Corel, IBM, Novell, or Sun.

If you've been poking around, looking for alternatives to Microsoft Office/SharePoint, these are both worth looking at. With the entrance of Adobe into this space earlier in the month, the options just keep getting better and better.

Vendor Oops #4: Not Saying What You Do Upfront

This is sort of "odd but true"--in the course of a briefing, some vendors take forever to explain what they do.

There are three reasons for this:

1. They Go for PR Speak: For example, early on in the briefing the vendor will put up a mission slide that says, "XYZ Corp. leverages Web 2.0 technologies across multiple channels so that companies can deliver the right information to the right people at the right time." In other words, a mission statement full of PR babble. OK, all the buzzwords are there, but what does it really mean? XYZ Corp. could be selling social networking; or an RSS server; or a search engine; or a tagging engine--the list goes on. So the vendor thinks it's clear--but the analyst is going, "Huh?"
2. They're Familiar with What They Do and Figure You Are Too: This vendor assumes what they do is self-evident, and dives into the technology without setting any context: "Two weeks from now we're announcing version 4.2, which adds semantic analysis to the Enterprise Server."(OK, but since I'm unclear on what you do, I don't know whether that's good or bad.)
3. They Get Around to It Half an Hour Into the Presentation: This vendor often starts with a history lesson ("XYZ Corp. was founded in 2007 in Sunnyvale"), moves on to management depth ("200 total years of experience in document management products), talks about customers (attempting to win the prize for the most logos that can be squeezed on a slide), announces the new product features, and eventually gets around to saying, "So that's why we we're so good at entity extraction." (Finally!)

The issue here is the vendor needs to quickly set context for the analyst. This may be the fourth vendor briefing of the day, and things are starting to blend together; the analyst may have been writing a deep dive report on a competing technology and needs a signal of, "And now for something completely different." Saying by slide three, "We're XYZ Corp. and we do this [in plain English]" suffices.

When I worked at Aberdeen Group, Bob Moran and I would keep track of how long it took a vendor to clearly say what they did. After the briefing, we'd close the door, sit down, and grouse, "Well, that took 10 minutes; at least it was better than last week's record holder, which was 18 minutes." I remember in one briefing I couldn't contain myself, and eventually said, "Pardon the interruption, but it's now 25 minutes into the briefing and you still haven't said what you do." Stunned silence from the vendor, and then a hesitant, "Uh, we offer an easy-to-use data mining product for marketing professionals." "Oh, OK. You should have said that up front. I've spent the past 25 minutes trying to figure it out."

It's simple. Say what you do. Up front.

Looking for People to Interview on Productivity Suites

As I hinted in yesterday's post, I'm writing a quadrant report on office productivity suites. The list includes:

• Corel WordPerfect Office
• Google Apps, Premier Edition
• IBM Lotus Symphony
• Microsoft Office
• OpenOffice.org
• OpenOffice.org, Novell Edition
• Sun StarOffice
• ThinkFree
• Zoho

While I've talked to some reference customers supplied by the vendors, I'd like to talk to some customers who haven't been cherry-picked. So if you're an IT manager responsible for purchasing one of the above packages and are willing to spend half an hour answering 36 questions, I'd like to talk to you.

The answers are confidential--I won't be using any customer names, and I won't be blabbing to the vendors--I just want to get a feel for what works and what doesn't. The questions cover things such as product quality, customer support, what's still wanting in features, etc. You can contact me at gcreese at burtongroup.com. Thanks for your help.

My Productivity Tools Aren't Making Me Productive

HELP!

Auugh! I'm going through a period where my productivity tools aren't making me productive. Maybe the group name should be changed to "time sink" tools:

• Microsoft Outlook: A month or so ago, Outlook 2007 decided to create new Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, and Notes files without telling me. So someone would book an appointment, the appointment would turn up in e-mail, I'd accept it, and the appointment would go "poof"--it wasn't in the Calendar. (It was lurking in the new, invisible Calendar.) After some near misses--"So, are you going to be on the customer call in ten minutes?" "What customer call?"--I eventually figured out what had happened and began working with two Calendars open: the one that I'd been using for three years and the one magically created by Outlook that received all new appointments. No one seems to know why Outlook decided it didn't like the old files. The fix is to export information from the old file into the new file. Umm, yup, that's what I want to spend time doing.
• Microsoft Live Meeting: Last week, I created a Live Meeting invitation and then couldn't get into the Live Meeting. I spent 45 minutes trying to fix it (downloading the latest software, altering parameters) and then punted: I hijacked a Live Meeting one of my co-workers had set up earlier in the week and used it. That worked. (There was some humor in all of this. I'd set up the Live Meeting for a demo by Sun Microsystems of its StarOffice suite; when I apologized to the Sun attendees for the failure of the "Microsoft software" there were loud guffaws all around.) It turns out the password that I'd used for the last three years was no longer valid--Live Meeting passwords now had to include some uppercase letters. So when I created a meeting, instead of Live Meeting telling me that it couldn't verify my credentials, it blithely sent out invalid invitations. Umm, sounds like a design flaw to me.
• BlackBerry Storm:I finally up-reved the software on my BlackBerry Storm cellphone a week ago, and it blew away my Enterprise Server password so I could no longer receive e-mail as well as blew away most of my ringtones. (It took me awhile to figure out that my phone was ringing--when it wasn't). That took me about two hours to research and fix. Umm, that was a pain.

Over the years, I've had the motherboard fail on my desktop PC, the LCD screen stop working on my laptop, newly installed software blow away other software...the list goes on. This recent flareup will fade away and I'll have to battle other problems down the pike. I just wish it weren't so.

Book: "The Soul of a New Machine"

Cover of The Soul of a New Machine

Until 1981, books about computers were written by nerds, for nerds. You know the type--"How to Get the Most Out of Your Daisy Wheel Printer." That all changed with the publication of Tracy Kidder's The Soul Of A New Machine. All of a sudden, designing a computer was a noble adventure, with all the excitement of a novel. I still remember reading the book's Prologue in the Andover Bookstore, instantly buying it, and then rushing home to finish it that night.

The Soul of a New Machine is about the work and sweat involved in designing Data General's Eclipse MV/8000 (codename "Eagle") computer. At the time, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Data General (DG), Prime Computer, and Wang Laboratories were selling minicomputers like hotcakes to departments who were tired of having to deal with uppity mainframe programmers. I worked at Wang Laboratories at the time--one of DG's rivals--and it was a heady time: Wang was growing faster than Google is now.

You worked 12-hour days and loved it. The Soul of a New Machine captured that excitement, with all the little details that were true: Space Planning swooping in and moving the entire department (usually at the most crucial time), and warring development teams playing chicken with development schedules ("I can develop that OS in 12 months." "I can develop that OS in 10.5 months." "I can develop that OS in..."). The battle for resources was brutal. In 1981 I was working in programming, supporting Wang Manufacturing. I remember coming in one morning to see a new programmer we'd just hired from DG staring in wonder at his workstation. "It's still here!" he said. "Huh?" "It's the end of the quarter and our computer is still here!" "What's so odd about that?," I asked. "At DG, at the end of the quarter, manufacturing comes around at night, steals your computer, packages it up, and sends it out to customers so it can meet its revenue numbers."

With its novelistic approach, the book influenced an entire generation of books that came after it, such as Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft and Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software (my review of Dreaming in Code is here). While the technology described in The Soul of a New Machine is now dated, the human dynamics are not, and I still recommend it to non-technical people who want to get a feel for what it's like to work in the computer industry.

To give you a taste, I'll leave you with some excerpts from the Prologue:

The $64,000 Question: Google Docs, Acrobat.com, or Other?

A week ago, ReadWriteWeb published an interesting poll, entitled, "Poll: Which Web Office Suite Would You Pay For? Adobe or Google?" At the moment, out of 519 votes cast, 22% (114 votes) were for Adobe, 38% (199 votes) were for Google, and the greatest percentage, 40% (206 votes) were for neither. A number of commenters took the article to task for failing to point out ThinkFree and Zoho, two startups that offer productivity suites. ReadWriteWeb replied, "...we intentionally left them out so as not to dilute the vote between the two companies that are arguably industry giants as opposed to (awesome!) startups."

The problem with such open polls is you never really know the survey universe--it could include some Adobe or Google employees, hoping to tilt the results; it could include many respondents from SMBs, rather than large enterprises; and so on. Probably the more interesting part of the article is the comments, as they highlight many of the viewpoints I hear from clients. Here is a sampling:

A week ago, ReadWriteWeb published an interesting poll, entitled, "Poll: Which Web Office Suite Would You Pay For? Adobe or Google?" At the moment, out of 519 votes cast, 22% (114 votes) were for Adobe, 38% (199 votes) were for Google, and the greatest percentage, 40% (206 votes) were for neither. A number of commenters took the article to task for failing to point out ThinkFree and Zoho, two startups that offer productivity suites. ReadWriteWeb replied, "...we intentionally left them out so as not to dilute the vote between the two companies that are arguably industry giants as opposed to (awesome!) startups."

The problem with such open polls is you never really know the survey universe--it could include some Adobe or Google employees, hoping to tilt the results; it could include many respondents from SMBs, rather than large enterprises; and so on. Probably the more interesting part of the article is the comments, as they highlight many of the viewpoints I hear from clients. Here is a sampling:

Acrobat.com: Needed to Boost Revenue

Adobe's announcement yesterday that revenue dropped 20% year over year adds some urgency to its move into the productivity suite/document sharing space. Sales have lagged for Creative Suite 4, its main suite for designers and graphic artists, and income from other areas--e.g., commercial use of Flash and AIR, enterprise purchases of its digital rights management, and increased use of Acrobat.com--would no doubt be welcome.

However, I'm not convinced Adobe will have easy going in this space. It has been selling enterprise software for awhile now (I'm thinking, for example, of its LiveCycle Enterprise Suite), but that's still a small portion of its business. Most IT groups don't yet think of Adobe as an IT solution provider. Cisco, HP, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, yes; Adobe, no. There are all kinds of things a vendor needs to rejigger--for example, licenses, support, and documentation--to be a true partner with IT departments. There are really no shortcuts here, as Google as discovered. It just takes time to get good at selling into IT departments, as well as develop the necessary infrastructure and ecosystem.

However, it isn't as if Adobe is completely behind the 8 ball, either. Flash and AIR make it know to development groups; it's been calling on security managers with its LifeCycle product; and it has a solid reputation with creative professionals. It certainly has brand recognition and goodwill going for it; it now just needs to flesh out the delivery and support logistics.

Adobe Joins the Productivity Suite/Document Sharing Fray

Image via CrunchBase

This week Adobe Systems announced that Acrobat.com was coming off of beta and that it would offer two subscription types:

• Premium Basic: $14.99 per month or $149 per year, allowing web conferences for up to five people and the conversion of 10 documents/month to PDF.
• Premium Plus: $39.00 per month or $399 per year, allowing web conferences for up to 20 people and the conversion of an unlimited number of documents to PDF.

Adobe is also offering previews of two document processing applications--a spreadsheet application (Tables) and a presentation application (Presentations)--that will ultimately join the Buzzword word processor.

Coverage of the announcement includes:

• InformationWeek, "Adobe Launches Acrobat.com Out Of Beta"
• PC World, "Adobe's Acrobat.com Collaboration Services Emerge from Beta"
  
• The Wall Street Journal, "Adobe to Charge for Acrobat.com"

Adobe thus joins vendors such as Google, Microsoft, ThinkFree, and Zoho that currently offer (or have publicly stated that they will offer) online productivity suites allied with document sharing.

The "heating up" of this space is why I'm currently at work on a Burton Group Market InSight (i.e., quadrant report) on productivity applications. At this point, it's difficult to understand the players without a scorecard--so I'm building the scorecard.

Pattern Finder is Available for the Kindle

For those readers who use an Amazon Kindle, this blog is now available on Amazon at the Kindle Store: Pattern Finder. And here's what it looks like on a Kindle 2: