In the last post, I mentioned that I’d seen the open/closed fight play out in gaming and enterprise software, with different results.

I’m all done with the gaming side for now, so back to the enterprise…

On the enterprise side of things, I’ve worked with CAD and document management systems.  In both, when I got started, incredibly closed proprietary systems were the norm.  In CAD, some companies made their own hardware to run their software and sold the whole thing in one expensive package.  In document management, the real money was in system integration which was deliberately kept hard so clients couldn’t do the work themselves.  But data exchange became increasingly important, plugin architectures got created and quite suddenly enterprise players found themselves stuck with openess.

Again, this wasn’t open source, but it was a new kind of openess that hadn’t existed before.  Eco-systems flourished, hundreds of developers sprang up for every platform, much money was made and customers gained all kinds of new abilities they’d never had before.

You could make a reasonable argument (especially if you weren’t as lazy as me and actually researched numbers that bear out this thesis) that the closed players mostly died out and the big successes were the platforms that became more open. i.e. the exact opposite of the games industry.

So the question that’s bugging me is this: why did closed work so well in games but open was the solution in enterprise?

My current thoughts:

1. Enterprise software is more mature in its development than the games industry.  Perhaps every industry goes through a cycle of random noise/wild west craziness, evolution of successful closed systems, the eventual destruction of those systems and their replacement by more open systems.
2. The nature of the usage of the technology dictates which will work.  Enterprise software was inevitably going to have to become broadly interoperative and collaborative in nature.  That forced openness.  Gaming (and perhaps mobile) can live with interoperability at its fringe and not at its core, allowing closed systems to continue to survive.
3. It just is.  Sometimes you need one, other times you need the other.  Sadly, you’ll never know in advance which is right for any given industry, but hindsight will be 20/20.

All comments welcome!

Enjoy your Thanksgiving, if that’s something you happen to celebrate.

Categories: Mobile, Random Rants, Thoughts 'n Ideas
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So a couple of posts ago, I was prattling on about open and closed in the context of mobile and a less than thrilling conference I attended (see here and here).

As I stewed on it some more, I realize I’ve seen this game played before in multiple industries.  The two that spring to mind are enterprise/high end B2B software and gaming, and the outcomes were not the same.  Since the latter seems much sexier, I’ll start with that.

When I first joined Rainbow Studios (mid 90’s) they were developing titles for the PC.  The consoles of the day simply didn’t have the horsepower our dev team needed.  But anytime you write code that really stretches a desktop PC, you find out very quickly that one system is not the same as another.  Different graphics cards, RAM, CPU, drivers or whatever will all conspire to make your life pretty miserable.  So even though we were nominally supporting a single platform, there was a lot of time spent on testing and patching for different system configurations that we might encounter.

But just about anybody could publish a title for a PC.  While not an open source platform, development was pretty open, well documented and fairly well understood.  There were no gate-keepers between us and the market place, and although Microsoft controlled the OS, they never interfered with, approved or shot down the titles that were created.  Microsoft’s suite of dev tools were pretty good too. They were clearly the result of many different opinions and a long history of product development for a broad target audience.

When we got word on the specs for the PS2, we were very interested.  Rainbow ended up with a contract for a launch title.  Thanks to the incredibly closed nature of the PS2, we could guarantee that if our code ran well on one PS2, it would run on another.  And every PS2 had more than enough horsepower to do some cool stuff.

But there was a trade-off.  Every title had to be approved and manufactured by Sony.  If they didn’t like your game, you could not bring it to market.  What’s more, the development environment was pretty lousy and had a lot of gaps in it.  I distinctly remember talk of writing our own compiler because we were unhappy with the one that was provided.  It was the antithesis of Microsoft.

But we had more success and made far more money from the console titles than any PC game we ever created.  And while I don’t have the numbers to hand, closed consoles clearly dominate games industry revenue.

When you consider the iPhone and Apple’s control of the eco-system, it reeks of Sony-style control.  And it really is just a focused evolution of the closed model that has been used in mobile for the past 10+ years.

In stark contrast, Google’s efforts with Android follow the Microsoft model rather precisely.

There’s a very appropriate quote, and lest you think I’m some kind of literary type, I can assure you I either heard it on the radio or read it on my breakfast cereal.  But T.S. Elliot once said:

“One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.”

I think there’s a good argument to be made that Google are playing the role of mature poet, stealing the core of Microsoft’s game plan (definitely alien to Google) and reinventing it for their own needs.  Apple are effectively doing the same with with Sony’s plan too.

Goosoft and Appley, anyone?

Categories: Mobile, Random Rants, Thoughts 'n Ideas
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Yes, I’ve been awfully quiet on the blogging and bitching front lately.  I’ve been swamped with work, mostly in a good way.

My current gigs include biz dev work for Shoeboxed, marketing for F-Origin and technology scouting for Sony Ericsson. It’s an interesting and diverse group that certainly keeps my mental juices flowing.

But it’s also left me with little time for blogging… and that lack of time has been complemented by a lack of inclination too.

But like a toddler in a time-out, my urge to speak is getting the better of me.  So I’m back, and ready to blitch.

More soon!

Categories: Thoughts 'n Ideas
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Marketing is the voice for your products.  It’s the tool for creating conversation with everyone you need to talk to, from prospective customers to existing customers, partners, investors and everyone else.

Just like any conversation, there are things you should and shouldn’t do.  When talking to someone, you wouldn’t normally poke them in the eye, act like a crazy person or insult their intelligence. And generally it’s not wise to do that with your marketing either.

But as someone way smarter than me once pointed out, no matter where you are of what kind of conversation you are having, there are three frequently overlooked components.

1.    What you mean
2.    What you say
3.    What people actually hear

You’d be shocked at how utterly disconnected #3 can be from where you started.

For example (all inspired by personal experience)…

1.    You mean:  “Everyone needs to pull together and get this done”
2.    You say:  “The project’s behind.  We need to get back on track”
3.    They hear: “You’re not pulling your weight – I’m doing everything and YOU are slacking off”.

1.    You mean: “The product will ship sometime between May and June 2009”
2.    You say:  “The product will ship in Q2, 2009”
3.    They hear: “The product will ship in April, 2009”

1.    You mean: “This product will make your life way easier and do all kinds of things to simplify your life”
2.    You say: “Our extensive suite of Business Intelligence tools will provide insight into your KPIs (key performance indicators) and improve operational efficiency within your organization”
3.    They hear: “This tool is expensive and may or may not help your business”

What you mean to say is seemingly the easiest – you know you, right?  So when you start to craft a marketing message, think about what you are really trying to say and write it all down. For example:

We really believe this product is great for you and we want you to buy it.  It has a ton of features that will really make your life simpler and easier.

What you say is much trickier because at that point you are no longer talking to yourself.  When you’re talking to any kind of customer, they will have their own view of the world and a matching vocabulary.

For example, one of my clients makes a tool related to expense tracking.  In their messaging they talked about simplifying expense reports.  Seems obvious and intuitive, right?  However, their typical customer is the owner of a very small business.  That’s not someone who thinks about expense reports – for them it’s simply book-keeping.  Expense reports are really the domain of bigger companies.  The net result was that the typical customer read the messaging and heard “our tool is for bigger companies and you can’t afford it”.

Now the difference between “expense tracking” and “expense report” is extremely small.  But in the mind of the customer it’s the difference between “sounds good” and “not for me”.

Another company I recently talked to makes a financial modeling tool.  It’s pretty simple and of great value to their customers.  It quickly and easily shows strengths and weaknesses of the business while allowing for some simple “What if?” scenarios e.g. what if I hire one more admin, or one more partner.

The tool is promoted as a financial modeling tool for small medical practices.  Sounds good, except that most small medical practices probably don’t think they need financial modeling.  However, they’d probably get a much better response if they promoted it as a simple tool that provides feedback on employee and partner performance while making it easy to explore the cost and rewards of adding extra staff or partners.

So the next time you’re talking to a customer, partner or investor, take a moment to explore what you mean, what you say and what you think they’ll hear.  And it’s always good to ask them what they heard so you can check that you hit the mark…

Categories: Thoughts 'n Ideas
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Cast your mind back to high school math (sorry). Scalars have magnitude e.g. driving at 30mph. Vectors have magnitude and direction e.g. driving at 30 mph due east.

One of my recent consulting gigs has been a constant reminder of how startups can fall in to the trap of treating effort like a scalar quantity, not a vector.

It is incredibly important to be applying effort and running fast in a startup. You want to be traveling at 100 mph all the time. But just as important as speed is direction. Running fast in the wrong direction (or worse, with no direction) is a waste of time, energy and morale.

And when you pick your direction, it is just as important to plan how you’ll get from starting point A to end point B.

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across a great visual example of why direction and planning are important. Get direction and plan your route, and hopefully your startup won’t share this truck’s fate…

Yes, a low bridge apparently works like a can-opener on your average truck.

P.s. For the worry-warts out there, other than the truck, no-one was hurt…

Categories: All Business, Thoughts 'n Ideas
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