While playing the software game was lucrative, this blog helps software companies sidelined by innovation to re-enter the game and to win.
Once upon a time it was lucrative to play the software industry game. We sold functionality at excellent margins. Annual maintenance was steady money for (rather) little work. Technology advanced at a manageable pace. The peer community dispensed recognition. Growth was steady and life was good.
But then the software game changed. In many niches FOSS has turned functionality into a commodity. SaaS upsets perpetual licensing, while annual maintenance is increasingly suspect. The community scattered as global players bought and consolidated. Innovation quickened. New business slowed.
New design prefers content to sidebars. It’s built with the Thesis Framework but without the typical Thesis look.
I’m pleased to announce that Story Complete has a new design. As I hope you can see, it stresses the blog’s content and not the information found in most blog’s sidebars. If you’re seeing this post in your RSS reader then please pop over and take a look at the new Story Complete.
I changed to a 1-column design from the 2-column format used by most blogs. The post meta information is right of the post content; all other information in the page footer. This keeps the pages clean and highlights the content, which is, after all, why you’re here.
Seth Godin’s book ‘All Marketers Tell Stories’ inspired me to share what I’ve learnt in 30 years of the software business.
Software companies often find themselves stranded on islands of excellence, serving a small group of customers but unable to grow. Opportunistic sales result in a few more islands from time to time.
It’s depressing to see companies with excellent technology shipwrecked. A love-hate relationship with marketing is often a contributory reason. We love having many qualified leads, but hate getting our hands dirty with marketing.
Why’s marketing hated like this? In my experience the cause is often the developer background of many managers. Developers equate lead generation with advertising. And developers hate advertising even more than marketing!
Watch out if a prospect asks you to prove your story’s true. Instead, seek out an audience inclined to believe your story.
I developed applications for CICS on IBM mainframes in the 1980s. At that time IBM had a project to reimplement CICS using formal methods. Reading about the Verification Grand Challenge reminded me of that project.
An ambitious 15-year international research project, its goal is to create a large repository of useful code, verified to the highest standards of rigour and accuracy. An early case study applied automated verification tools to prove CICS is formally correct. For this they used the CICS Z notation specifications from the 1980s.
Apple’s walled garden is becoming a hermetically sealed world with a (secret) licence agreement to sterilise every input.
The clash of worldviews between Apple and developers took a turn for the worse this week. For the first time, Apple will be banning meta programming tools for the iPhone and iPad. Section 3.3.1 of the latest iPhone Developer Program License Agreement states:
3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).
37signals added some mystery to what could be a boring office video. To tell a good story, keep the ending until, well, the end.
37signals has strong opinions about work. But how should an office look if you’re an international team? That often works from home? With a 4-day week? That hates interruptions? For the moment, they’re not saying.
To tell a good story, keep the ending until, well, the end. You can see this in a series of videos from 37signals about their new offices.
There’s no time to think when you’re surrounded by fire. You need to put it out for good by starving it of fuel: customers who don’t fit.
Fire-fighting often becomes a core competency at software companies. The usual cause? Our dread of no revenue forces us to accept customers who are not consistent with our worldview. Unique customers cause trouble.
You’re doing the best you can to deliver great software. You pull all nighters and work weekends to satisfy each hard-won customer. Been there. Done that. But, while it’s great to play the hero fire-fighter occasionally, in the end something’s got to give.
I saw first-hand what happens when your worldview hold’s you hostage: we lost out on a deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Worldviews change; ignore at your peril. At Dynasty Technologies Inc. in the 1990s, I saw first-hand what happens when your worldview holds you hostage.
Dynasty was a 2nd generation client/server application development tool. Our main competitor was Forté Software Inc. Founded in the mid 1990s, both companies had significant venture capital funding with a growing global base of enthusiastic early adopters.
The Dynasty Development Environment generated native C/C++ code with no runtime system. Forté generated proprietary code with a runtime interpreter. For some developers runtimes were OK; for others a pure incarnation of evil. Customer’s runtime worldview was decisive for sales.
The Clang compiler recovers from unknown tokens using a spell-checker. Something small can be remarkable and worth spreading.
Being remarkable doesn’t always mean you have to develop something large. Sometimes remarkable is small, as this Clang example seen today on Hacker News demonstrates very nicely.
Clang is an open-source compiler front-end for C, C++ and Objective C. The project builds on the LLVM compiler back-end with the goal of replacing the GCC tool chain. Their worldview accepts that programmers can and do make mistakes. Amazing feats of Clang Error Recovery shows how they’ve woven this worldview into the compiler.
What caught my eye was how Clang recovers from unknown tokens. Instead of unhelpful error messages (like GCC), the Clang team chose to do something remarkable: they added a spell-checker to guess what you mean:
Software protection schemes annoy customers and don’t stop real pirates. Better to have a remarkable product and a story to spread.
So, it only took 2 days to hack the Apple iPad. Trusting DRM to work was unrealistic on Apple’s part. Even so, we in the B2B software business have our own blind spot when it comes to software protection.
Each of the software products I’ve worked on has included a protection system. Sometimes a hardware dongle, but more commonly software-based schemes linking the software licence to the customer’s hardware configuration.
We were scared customers wouldn’t pay if they didn’t have to. With licence fees starting at $10K for each developer seat, hundreds of thousands were at stake.
Tablets are increasingly around when customers spread your story, so it’s time to start thinking about tablet-compatible content.
The Apple iPad and other tablets open attractive new channels for storytelling. Increasingly be a tablet will be around when your customer spreads your story.
Unlike notebooks, tablets are easily and naturally shared by passing them back and forth. Ideal for ad-hoc demos in the pub!
Check your website looks good in both portrait and landscape at tablet resolutions (1024×768 for the iPad). Check you’re using supported file formats. The Apple iPad doesn’t support Adobe’s Flash, so you’ll need to re-encode videos in H.264 format.
Apple launches the iPad today, so time to share my Steve Jobs story. It’s about the nearest I’ll ever come to working with him!
The story’s set 20 years ago when I was building cross-platform application development tools. Our customer’s worldview was that their applications would be running for decades. They expected to move from one platform to another as technology changed. They wanted to build platform-independent apps.
Customers liked hearing what others were doing. One story was about a customer in Switzerland using a Unisys mainframe as a server. Nothing unusual there. What made them remarkable, however, was that their clients were NeXT workstations from Steve Jobs’ Next Computer, Inc. Back then this sounded (and was) an exotic combination.
Because millions of users associate WordPress with free, the VaultPress team wove their paid-only story into their beta sign-up form.
A post about VaultPress on Mike Davidson’s blog reminds us that weaving a story into software can be easy. VaultPress is from the great team behind WordPress and is a real-time backup service for self-hosted WordPress blogs.
Most WordPress products are freemium. VaultPress is paid-only: a high-end product for high-end users. Or: VaultPress is for people whose worldview leads them to expect to pay for backups. That covers me, and I don’t consider myself a high-end user!
WordPress is very visible company with millions of users. Many of these will notice VaultPress and take a look. Because most users associate WordPress with free, the VaultPress team wove their story into their beta sign-up:
In a famine of qualified prospects, you’ll try to grab anything that appears edible. Lack of a reliable sales process is corrosive.
When prospects are rare you’ll do everything to win. Development adds features. Marketing invents ROI justifications. Prospects are too precious to waste; you cannot risk letting even one get away. You do whatever it takes.
Lack of a shared worldview is an increasing problem as you grow. Special cases abound; exceptions appear. Everybody is paranoid about saying no.
To see how sticking to a clear understanding of your worldview changes everything, take a look at 37signals. They are a 20 person company selling web-based apps for small groups and individuals. With more than 3 million users, they are very profitable.
