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Business of Software: Day 2

The Business of Software Conference has come and gone. It was a really valuable experience and I just hope I can take what I learned and use it to figure out how to get the most out of each area of Adaptavant. I didn't think Day 2 was quite as applicable to me as day one, but there were still a lot of great takeaways. The day focused more on marketing and brand image/awareness.

Jennifer Aaker, a professor at Berkeley and Stanford, talked about the way that customers see different brands and products. She described some relationships like a marriage where there's a contract and it's expected that one or both sides would put up barriers to stop the other side from leaving. Another type of relationship is a friendship where both parties remain together because they both want to; neither side tries to keep the other side from leaving. A good example of a marriage is anyone who can't figure out how to leave Microsoft products while a good example of a friendship is anyone who rides a Harley Davidson or shops at Trader Joe's.

She really made me think about the way we treat our brand and the importance of how customer see some of the products that Adaptavant develops. She pointed out that when a company that you are in a relationship with makes a mistake, your response is different based on what type of relationship you have with them. This is similar to when your best friend is late picking you up from the airport, as opposed to when a co-worker you're not very fond of is late picking you up from the airport. Also, your perception of the product is tied to the emotions you feel when you use the product. To emphasize this point, she asked everyone who owns an iPhone to raise their hands and then everyone who owns a Blackberry to raise their hands. She then pointed out that when the iPhone owners raised their hands, they were smiling and there was actually an audible laughter, while the Blackberry users just sort of raised their hands without any expression. It made her point.

The other really good talk of the day, in my opinion, was from the final speaker, Jeff Pfeffer. His emphasis was on figuring out why companies "...don't do what they know they should be doing." A really good point he made was that most companies use metrics incorrectly to figure out what should change within the organization. He quoted someone who said that in golf, you don't measure how far the ball didn't go or how bad the slice was, you analyze the process of hitting the ball. And in business, you shouldn't use measurements of how bad you are to determine what kinds of changes to make. You can use those metrics to determine that there is a problem in a specific area, but then you have to study what goes on within your organization to determine a solution. For instance, Southwest Airlines has a day where everyone works in the airport.

I agreed a lot with this idea, and it brought me back to my days at GameStop where I was using the computer system and thought, "They need to hire me to write their Point of Sale system because I know exactly what will make me best at using it." I work a lot on Solestruck.com and when I first started two years ago, the first thing my boss had me do was go down to the warehouse and work for a day. I got to see how they fold the boxes, find the shoes, ship the shoes, and I processed returns for about 2 hours. It's been a long time since I've been down there and the tools they use have changed (matured, of course), it may be time for some of us to spend some more time there again. While I hear from them all the time and I see their performance reports, I can't really tell what they're having to deal with unless I go use the system for myself.

Matt Mason, author of The Pirate's Dilemna had an entertaining talk but I didn't think it could totally be applied to software and the business of software. He likened radio pirates in London, who broadcast radio stations from basements and apartments illegally, to software pirates. However, making music and broadcasting it illegally is not a lot like taking someone else's product and making an exact duplication of it for free. He was saying that the music pirates, and thus the software pirates, are good because they spur innovation. I'm sure that they did this in the music industry in London but I think his point would be more applicable to Open Source or Indie developers, who really do spur innovation in the software industry.

Matt brought up the fashion industry where a style is copied, then produced and distributed much cheaper. This is still not the same thing because the materials aren't stolen, the idea is. And it's perfectly legal to take a software idea and copy it- just look at virtually any Microsoft product. That's not software piracy, while he contended that it was essentially fashion piracy. The only time he brought his point back to the software industry was when he talked about how the illegal music copying brought products like iTunes. This was the only case he really gave of innovation coming from software piracy, and it wasn't the pirates that were being innovative, so it still didn't prove his point. He has a really interesting topic and it was an entertaining speech but I didn't find it very relevant.

I don't have a lot to say about the others. There was a talk on Software as a Service, which I would absolutely agree is an industry-changing model. The part I didn't like was that I felt like the entire time he was just trying to get me to buy his newsletter. In fact, he had order forms at the front desk and folded inside a sample of his newsletter on each table. It was a good talk but I didn't subscribe.

Overall the conference was a really good experience. I have a lot more to write about and I'll do this over the next week or so. It was great to get to talk to everyone and a special thanks to Neil for putting on the show.

Business of Software: Day 1

The Business of Software conference kicked off today in San Jose, California and I was lucky enough to be in attendance. It's a two day conference and I'll be at the second day, but the first day was the one that really attracted my attention. I think I'll give a recap and some deeper thoughts on the speakers over the next few days, but right now I'll just hit the highlights. There were a total of 12 speakers and I already have 14 pages of notes so there's a lot more to talk about than I can right here.

Tim Lister was definitely on my highlight list for this conference after reading Peopleware earlier this year. He's obviously a really smart guy but I had a hard time figuring out how to apply his message. He went through several slides that identified patterns within several development companies. This is perfect for what he does because in Peopleware, he talks about visiting and consulting for a lot of software companies. However, I wish he would have focused on a few patterns and then discussed how to deal with them. His message was good, which was to seek out patterns in your company, name them, and then propagate or defeat them. He just didn't even really say, in a lot of cases, whether he thought some of the patterns were good or bad. He did have one quote which made me think,

Your software process is what you do under pressure. Everything else is window dressing.

I didn't know what to think of this at first but it makes sense, especially when you consider that you're always under pressure. I'll take this with me back home and look at our "process" with a different perspective.

Joel Spolsky is indirectly the reason I'm here, in that our CEO found the link on his site and we eventually decided it was a good idea for me to attend. He was the final speaker and, as always, I ate up his words like sweet, sweet mana. His talk focused on Fog Creek's hiring practices, including why they hire interns and who they get to do their busy work (because he only hires brilliant people and brilliant people don't like busy work). He gave us the amount it costs to hire interns, and then the amount of revenue that his intern-created jobs board has brought in, and it immediately became clear why the internship program is still around. The end of his presentation was Fog Creek's six categories to score people on: Passion, Communication, Creativity, Selectivity, Brains, and Diversity. He says he generally hires people who score well in all six categories, and that every single interviewer has veto power. I won't go into too much more detail because most of what he said is available on his blog. If anyone wants to know anything specifically that he talked about, feel free to email me, but you could probably email him and get a better answer.

All the speakers were really interesting; Guy Kawasaki gave an inspirational message about innovating, Bill Buxton gave his pretty bleak outlook on the industry as it relates to UI design, and Eric Sink gave an entertaining view on marketing for geeks, among others. There were five Software Idol finalists speaking on a variety of subjects. My favorite was Steve Johnson of Pragmatic Marketing. The biggest takeaway from his speech that I took was,

Great software is built by people, not companies.

His introductory slide pointed out that software is a hobby, not a business. The adoption of high speed internet and Software as a Service has made this more possible than ever. Whereas before, an individual programmer was limited by distribution costs, they can now make whatever they want and as long as they can find a way to host it, people can use it. This has given rise to a lot more startups where all the employees are actually hobbiests and are making software because they want to, not necessarily because the business analysts found there was a market for something. This subject was touched on by a few different speakers, as you can imagine.

So far the conference has been great. I've had the chance to talk to a lot of the presenters in person and also chat with other attendees. While Joel Spolsky and Tim Lister were the two at the top of my list, I've been pleasantly surprised with the rest of the speakers and I'm excited to see what tomorrow has in store.