On IT and beyond

Brand Eins is a german magazine that takes on issues around marketing and management. They are normally very sophisticated and every issue is dedicated to one specific topic. The January 2006 issue is about complexity. Jason, that one’s for you.

Flock was announced some months ago as a new experience in social software, a browser, based on Firefox, that additionally allows for blogging, tagging through del.icio.us and other social network activities.

I don’t know why there were people expressing anger against Flock in the first place. For sure, the idea is definitely cool, the developers made things right and published public alpha versions and there was quite some coverage at the usual sources in the beginning.

I tried it out by myself but when I didn’t succeed in logging in to my MT account through Flock I gave up. I instantly succeeded with the Performancing blogging tool, though.
In the meantime, there appeared new extensions for Firefox like the del.icio.us extension or the Performancing plugin for blogging within Firefox. In a recently published statement, the founder of Flock commented these developments rather angrily and stated that you might of course use Firefox with duct-tape appended extensions but that this was way below the original idea they had in mind with Flock.

I don’t doubt that the guys from Flock are clever and that they have great ideas and capabilities. But I doubt that they will succeed or even will be able to ship a final product. Firefox is a rather popular browser but it still has more hype than users, I heard rumours of about 15% market share in the US and 10% worldwide. While social software is definitely on the rise both in geeky and rather mainstream flavors I do doubt that a product that does several things at a time will be a mass market success. Some thoughts:

• Mash-ups of Google maps and address/event/people-based applications are rather successful.
• SOA is on the rise.
• The number of plugins for Firefox is constantly climbing.
• Linux and other -ix based OSes are successful because of the interoperability of many small tools and a significant community of open Source developers.

While there definitely are markets for larger integrated applications with a broad range of functionality, like ERP, PPS etc. the interoperability of applications will become so transparent for the user that he thinks he’s working in one app while he actually works just in a frontend that combines several services. Users definitely don’t like to switch apps back and forth but developers have learned that they don’t need to reinvent everything but rather take advantage of stuff others are providing.

So, in the end, everything that Flock promised will be accomplished either through Firefox plugins or through other means. And more flexible. Today we have Flickr, Del.icio.us and the row of well-known blogging tools. Tomorrow, there’s something new in this realm. Developing new plugins that support applications with an open architecture is definitely easier than adding to a monolithic application. That said, I have read about Flock being open and a community project and all that. Still, what’s the use? I don’t see the specific advantage.

In the recent weeks I noticed an interesting phenomenon. I visited several owner-managed shops in my vicinity who happen to have a, generally very basic, internet appearance. For instance:

• Uwe Mumm
• MacGarden
• Bandenba
• Gwinner Einrichtungen
• Sirius23, which is no shop but a small nevertheless successful internet media agency

Even to the people not fluent in German you should notice that none of these sites is special. Their aren’t even particularly well designed. But… all of these shops are managed by their respective owners, there is no nationwide chain behind them. And all of these shops excel in customer service. They really try to solve your problem. Of course they have to make a living but still, first and foremost, they really do care.

I rarely find that kind of service in larger shops or department stores. Au contraire, I recently had more or less bad experiences with larger chains like Gravis, Dell etc.. My guesses:

• Small shops are very similar to startup companies. But they seldomly will experience being taken over by a larger company. They either strive or they die.
• Owners of small shops take it personal. They do understand that they get their income from their customer. Their is a direct relationship between service and success.

What are the consequences?

While this is not really a true Long Tail phenomenon I’m still convinced that the non-existence of service in larger stores lowers the market entrance barrier for smaller shops. Although the small shops don’t have the economies of scale on their side they can create passionate customers who even take into account higher prices if the service is just right. That’s another reason why I personally always prefer Amazon to eBay, even if I get some items cheaper at the latter place. Amazon makes it easier to return goods, they don’t charge in advance, they don’t charge shipping at certain level, they have product ratings, so they have many properties that the aformentioned small shops have as well.

But for the small bookshop around the corner even Amazon is no real competition: If you do happen to be in town anyway and you need some advice on what to buy, say, as present or whatever, the small bricks&mortar business outperforms Amazon easily. And the small shops gets the ware to you as fast as Amazon.

Chris Anderson has another great piece on the Long Tail. Generally, I have nothing to add in this context.

Interestingly enough, there is enough software that is expected no behave in a non-Gaussian way – that is: they have to work perfectly with no flaws at all (OK, at least for these parts that are mission critical. Another “long tail” here?). Mail servers, production automation systems, ERP systems, you name it. But human beings themselves perfectly fall under the model Chris Anderson presents in his essay.

MSN Desktop Search doesn’t stand my real world test. I tell you why:

• Indexing takes ages. on My 2GHz Intel Centrino-based notebook with 300Gig overall HD-capacity, all with 7200rpm it took 24 hours to index everything. Index size was about 2gigs.
• Search speed is not really lightning fast. It’s OK but not really impressive.
• Search results suck. It simply doesn’t find everything, say emails or whatever. Preview doesn’t work reliably even on simple text emails. NewsGator entries don’t work either.
• Firefox is not supported (duh, it’s a MS product )
• The improvements to IE are not worth the install without using the search

Conclusion: I uninstalled it and reinstalled my tool of choice, LookOut. Version 1.3 is really stable, fast, indexing took 2 hours on my email and my documents and it finds everything really fast. The index is smaller than 100megs and it simply keeps its mouth shut (thanks HMK for that one) and sits in a corner of my Outlook.

I was a regular reader of the well-known heise.de-Newsservice. They have a high street credibility and Heise is a publisher of first class magazines like c’t or iX. But their newsfeeds sucks as they do not publish full text, just headlines.

Finally I stumbled on Golem.de. They deliver at least a meaningful excerpt. Their content is as good as that from Heise. So Golem.de is overall more useful. I switched and unsubscribed the Heise feed.

As of today, Google Music Search is not available using the German Edition of Google. How come I feel slightly patronized? Probably the european music industry saw another possible danger further reducing their CD sales. Tell you what, the net knows no boundaries…

VentureBlog has some interesting thoughts about Long Tail economics. He must have read my book

A new site announces the birth of the Structured Blogging initiative. I’m curious how this will evolve. I wonder why Technorati is missing since Technorati’s Tantek is, in my opinion, THE microformat guy in the business.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to structure my blog using this particular WordPress service. Let’s see when I find some interesting new fields on this entry page. I guess the customs fields already available are a first step in this direction but way too abstract to be used in daily business.

Jason, I really like your blog. It’s entertaining and there’s lots of insight in it. Yet I wonder if you might think the world is a disc. Reading your statements about “Less”, “simplicity” etc. makes me nod my head instinctively. You are right. But yet you are not. You don’t want “less” inside an airplane’s cockpit. Your don’t want “less” inside the insurance keeping the records on your health insurance. You don’t want “less” inside a military defense software. You specifically don’t want “less” inside your car if it comes to controlling the ABS, the ESP and what not.

So let’s face the facts: While “less” is a nice idea for a startup in order not to lose focus it is a bad idea for mature companies solving real problems. While I totally agree that the user interface has to be kept as simple as possible (but not simpler) the underlying functionality sometimes is complex because reality is complex. Nature has no straight lines. thus all processes that have to take environments into account don’t simply calculate a+b.

TadaList is nice. But I don’t need it. I use a wiki. Backpack is nice. A wiki does the same job. Basically, I could use Notepad for most of what your products are doing. No offense here but it’s a fact. Your products do a better job than notepad, but overall performance gain is not dramatic. Without modern process control software though, most imported goods, cars, computers etc. would be ridiculously expensive. In that case, simple software is no alternative.

While I personally am connected to the Internet 95% of my working time many of my customers (they are joiners) are not. Or only via low-bandwidth. So online-only products currently aren’t ultima ratio yet. Hybrid products like w.bloggar are.

So please consider the real world outside “the Net”. “Less” is cool (specifically looking at a flat crowded with tons of toys from two little children). But ever so often “less” is – too little.