Pattern Finder

Book: "Inside Steve's Brain"

Prompted by Peter O'Kelly's blog post, I bought Inside Steve's Brain by Leander Kahney and gave it a read. As Peter notes, it's a quick read even though it's 294 pages long, due to both the writing style and the book's small form factor (7 1/4" tall by 5 1/2" wide).

Rather than being a biography of Steve Jobs laid out in chronological order, Inside Steve's Brain is a business strategy primer laid out in theme order. The chapter titles explain its organization:

• Focus: How Saying "No" Saved Apple
• Despotism: Apple's One-Man Focus Group
• Perfectionism: Product Design and the Pursuit of Excellence
• Elitism: Hire Only A Players, Fire the Bozos
• Passion: Putting a Ding in the Universe
• Inventive Spirit: Where Does the Innovation Come From?
• Case Study: How It All Came Together with the iPod
• Total Control: The Whole Widget

The high tech world has long been populated with companies that are organizational manifestations of their founders: DEC (Ken Olsen), Wang Laboratories (An Wang), Microsoft (Bill Gates), Apple (Steve Jobs), Oracle (Larry Ellison), and Salesforce.com (Marc Benioff). Having worked at one (Wang Laboratories) for many years (17), the value you get from a founder's unified vision can't be underestimated. Employees understand how to behave and what to do based on passed around stories about the founder's behavior. It's a tribal thing--something sort of primeval and messy that's not always acknowledged in this digital world focused on "facts"--that is nevertheless very powerful.

So I was interested to read about Steve Jobs' view of the world and the stories that instantiate it, and I was not disappointed. I think the book could have used some pruning here and there--from time to time the book makes the same point over and over--but all in all a pleasant read that passes along some insights in a painless way.

Book: "The Box"

Initially, the title of this book--"The Box"--leaves you hanging: "Hmm, is this about product packaging? Is it about some Claus Oldenburg sculpture that I don't know about?". However, it all becomes clear when you read its subtitle: "How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger." Written by Marc Levinson in 2006, the book went on to become a minor classic, being short-listed for the 2006 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the year and winning the 2007 Anderson Medal from the Society for Nautical Research.

It argues that the creation of the standardized shipping container played a major role in driving down global shipping costs and increasing shipping speed--or, as The Economist puts it, "Without the container, there would be no globalization." And, by the end of the book, you're absolutely convinced that that's true. By drawing on a variety of disciplines--economics, business history, maritime history, and regional planning--and peppering the story with biographical vignettes, Levinson offers a highly readable account of how shipping containers have made $7 T-shirts from China a commonplace thing.

The catalyst for this change was a maverick named Malcolm McLean, a trucking company owner who won business by monitoring and cutting costs, a rarity in a business run more by rule of thumb in the 1940's and 50's. McLean Trucking was the first major trucking company to use diesel engines in its trucks; to keep insurance costs and repair bills to a minimum, the company had senior drivers train new drivers, and if the new driver made it through the first year without an accident, the senior driver received a bonus of one month's salary.

In the early 1950's, McLean was worried that his coastal trucking business would suffer from competition from shipping lines, so he put in motion a plan to buy his own ships and set up terminals that would quickly transfer truck trailers to and from the ships. However, it was easier said than done: such tight integration between trucking companies and shipping lines was in direct violation of the Interstate Commerce Commission's rules at the time. Nevertheless, McLean soldiered on, using a variety of legal machinations to get around the ICC rules and depending on an up-and-coming banker (Walter Wriston, who eventually went on to run Citibank) to loan him money.

Attending Vignette Analyst Day

I'm attending the Vignette Analyst Day today. Annually, Vignette invites IT industry analysts to Boston (the center of the IT industry analyst universe) and collectively brings them up to date by giving them a dog and pony show (a combination of product demos, PowerPoint presentations, and glad handing).

I've been attending these for awhile (here's a post from the 2005 version), and they're interesting for two reasons. First, Vignette personnel vanish and new people turn up to take their place with nary a word, so it's always fun to figure out who's missing in action based on last year's agenda. (Last year I think it was the longtime VP of Sales that had vanished without a trace.) Second, Vignette's Analyst Day is typically heavy with customer testimonials, and that's great. Most vendors cram an analyst day full with PowerPoint presentations from their own team, ultimately taking an entire day to impart information that you could glean from their web site in 20 minutes. However, customers talk about the things the web site or the vendor PowerPoints never mention--e.g., why they bought the product, what they find aggravating about it, and what business problem they're trying to solve. Oftentimes, they use the product in ways or for reasons that you'd never think of or the vendor never mentions. I get similar insights from talking with Burton Group clients; however, the more customer stories the better. Analysts always run the risk of drinking too much vendor Kool-Aid, and customer stories dilute the syrupy mix, reminding you that the real world is never as sweet--and sometimes much more bitter--than the datasheets make it out to be.

XML Power: DAISY XML Add-In for Microsoft Word

Microsoft has announced the availability of a Microsoft Word add-in  (Word 2007, Word 2003, Word XP) for saving OOXML-based Word documents as "DAISY XML." It's available for free at http://www.openxmlcommunity.org/daisy/.

DAISY (Digital Access Information SYstem) XML is the foundation for supporting digital talking books. It works by linking sections within an XML file to points within a corresponding digital audio file. By using special devices or by installing special software on PCs, users who are blind or have poor vision can jump to specific sections in the audio stream or skip over footnotes altogether. This is an improvement over having to listen to the audio serially.

While the Word add-in is OOXML-based, there are ODF initiatives for generating accessibilty-friendly documents. The DAISY Pipeline (as described by DAISY; as described by (SourceForge) is an open source project for performing DAISY-related transformations (including ODF to DTBook). In addition, the ODF Accessibility Guidelines offer an ODF-based foundation for generating accessible documents. However, these two initiatives are developer-focused, giving programmers tools that help them create products that will generate accessible documents. Today's Word add-in cuts to the chase, giving end users with disabilities something they can use today.

Whether ODF- or OOXML-based, such products and initiatives highlight the value of XML over binary formats. Because XML teases out the underlying structure of a document, it makes jumping from section to section or object to object easier than it was in binary formats (which are inclined to treat a document as a serial, undifferentiated thing). Put another way, XML embeds more intelligence within documents, and that's a good thing.

Microsoft/Yahoo!: Remember Microsoft/Intuit?

With the news that Microsoft walked away from buying Yahoo!, everybody and his brother is offering commentary, with some doing it more than once. The New York Times wrote four articles about it:

• Google, From Stirrer to Spoiler, Ends Microsoft's Yahoo Search
• Yahoo Chief Says Microsoft Was the Stubborn One
• Now in Play: AOL, Facebook, and Many Others
• Microhoo, We Hardly Knew Ye

The Wall Street Journal went to town as well:

• Giving Up on Yahoo, Microsoft Rethinks Its Internet Options
• Deal or No Deal, Ballmer Needs to Turn Weakness Into Strength
• Yahoo Holders Turn Up Heat After Microsoft Deal Talks Fail
• Past Shows Microsoft Is Only Jilted for Moment

Microsoft should walk away from deals more often. It hasn't gotten this level of coverage in non-industry media in years, while Google frequently bathes in the Technology section spotlight (e.g., my blog post of September 13, 2007).

The comments on the "Microsoft Walks On By - Yahoo!" post on the Mini-Microsoft blog make for interesting reading, since many are from Microsoft employees. While the majority express relief at the news, there's a wide variation in what to do next: from reorganizing MSN ("What's Steve's big plan to clean out the rot and turn MSN around?"), to fixing Microsoft's image problem (What kills me is how hated Microsoft really is."), to getting back to writing software ("Forget advertising, let's get back to SOFTWARE.").

In glancing through this diverse commentary, I haven't seen anyone mention the aborted Microsoft/Intuit merger a decade and a half ago. Microsoft Money was getting lambasted by Quicken, and so Microsoft said, "OK, if we can't beat 'em, we'll join 'em," agreeing to buy Intuit in October 1994 for $1.5 billion in Microsoft shares. However, the deal unraveled under anti-trust scrutiny and Microsoft paid Intuit a termination fee of $46.25 million to walk away.

I would not be surprised if we now see a replay of that episode here. With its ability to buy its way into a market blocked, Microsoft went back and fixed Money, to the point where in feature bakeoffs it's typically considered either slightly better or slightly worse than Quicken from year to year. If Microsoft did the same here--if it took even a chunk of the $44 billion it was going to use to buy Yahoo! and applied it to basic block and tackle improvements--it could improve from being a distant number three. However, to do so it cannot mimic Google--it must be significantly better than Google in some areas--to get people to try it. That's why Google became pre-eminent in the first place--it was so much better than the incumbent at the time (Alta Vista).

For example, because of its software and services strategy, Microsoft could mine what users do on their PCs (with appropriate permissions from the user, of course) and use that information to give context to web searches (e.g., realizing that user A is a banker, the system would return "automated teller machines" results to an "ATM" query and  "asynchronous transfer mode" results to a network engineer). This is a capability that would be difficult for either Google or Yahoo! to counter and would give better search results. So while Microsoft is currently down, it's not necessarily out.

Book: "Revolution in the Valley"

About two years ago I read Andy Hertzfeld's book, Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made, and I recently riffled through it again. It's a collection of stories about the early days at Apple Computer--in other words, the world before Apple had cool stores and before the company lopped "Computer" off of its official name.

The book started out as a set of posts on www.folklore.org--and in fact you can still read the book online if you want to--but I must admit I find it easier to take a book to bed than a laptop. It's a lot of fun--the book captures the everyday chaos in a fast-growing computer company--and helps explain that not all business success is predicated on well-trained employees following a vetted business plan. Passion, knowledge, serendipity, long hours, and luck all play a part.

Following are some of my favorite stories:

• Shut Up!: The first demo of the Macintosh for Microsoft (July 1981)
• Software Wizard: The Mac group gets business cards (March 1982)
• Do It: User testing sometimes has surprising results (June 1982)
• Inside Macintosh: Developer documentation was crucial to our success (June 1982)
• Creative Think: A seminar with Alan Kay (July 1982)
• You Guys Are in Big Trouble: We receive Steve's permission to dismantle the onerous burglar alarm (August 1982)
• 1984: The famous 1984 commercial is nearly canceled (September 1983)
• It Sure Is Great to Get Out of That Bag!: We need a demo for the intro (January 1984)

Free Web Analytics: Google, Microsoft, and Now Yahoo! Offer It

On Wednesday, April 9, 2008, Yahoo! announced that it was buying IndexTools, a web analytics vendor. On the following Tuesday, Dennis Mortensen, the COO of IndexTools, announced on his blog that, "Yahoo! currently intends to provide the IndexTools Web Analytics service FREE of charge to clients and partners who accept the standard Yahoo! agreement."

In other words, at this point, three large vendors--Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!--now offer web analytics packages for free. Furthermore, they are not watered down versions, but functional products that any small- and medium-size business (SMB) would die for:

• Google (Google Analytics): Executive dashboard, custom reporting, map-based reports, search engine marketing cost analysis, landing page optimization, user segmentation, scenario analysis, and detailed help.
• Microsoft (Microsoft adCenter Analytics [currently in beta]): Summary reports, custom reporting, campaign reporting, user segmentation, and scenario analysis. 
• Yahoo! (IndexTools): Executive dashboards, path analysis, custom and comparative reporting, workflow, search engine marketing cost analysis, campaign management, user segmentation, merchandise reporting, scenario analysis, and detailed help.

If you're an SMB and don't analyze how visitors behave on your website--how long they stay, where they come from, what pages do they bail from--then I'd encourage you to look at all three, pick the one you like, and use it.

If you work in a large enterprise, you probably use a different package, but investing twenty minutes in reading the Microsoft blog, the Yahoo! datasheet, and watching the Google video is a great way to get a mini-tutorial in web analytics. This is especially true if you've heard the web analytics term bandied about and either don't know much about it or are trying to figure out if you can do more with what you have.

If you're a Burton Group client, I'd encourage you to read two Collaboration and Content Strategies reports I've written on web analytics:

• The Current "Suite Spot" of Web Analytics (Market Landscape, 23 pages)
• Avoiding the Data Pitfalls of Web Analytics (Technology & Standards, 26 pages)