Wither Microsoft? Web 2.0 and the begninning of the end of Microsoft

In 2003 Joel of Joel on Software predicted that Microsoft was in big trouble since developers in increasing numbers are not programming to the Win32 APIs. Win32 APIS are what most Windows programmers, beginning Windows 3.1 , based their applications on. If you wanted to create a Windows application you had to learn Win32 APIs. The reason Linux desktop and Mac have had such tough time against Windows is because of hundreds of thousands of applications written for the Win32 Apis. These applications cannot be easily ported to other operating systems. In essence Microsoft has had a architecture lock-in and thus a monopoly. But the cracks in Microsoft's armor are starting to appear.

With more and more developers and customers opting for Web based solutions, the need for developing applications on Windows is getting confined to niche applications in the Enterprise.
The Web is very different than traditional desktop application programming. None of the core architectural pieces such as HTML, CSS, XML, JavaScript, etc. are not owned by any one but belong to the community as a whole. MS had one chance to monopolize these standards when it owned 97% of the browser market share. Unfortunately the MBAs at MS went to sleep and let Mozilla change the game. Mozilla now has 20% market share and a serious contender. In essence the desktop is becoming more irrelevant.

Take the case and point of Silverlight- the flagship Internet technology from MS. The Flash competitor now not only has to support Internet Explorer but other open source browsers such as Mozilla, Safari and Opera. Amazing for a company that just a few years ago declared Open Source evil. It is also behind in other core Internet technology areas such as search, social networks, web enabled mobile devices and web based business applications.

The people at Redmond just don't get. They have hung on to their desktop software model too long and missed the boat.

Web 2.0 for Small Businesses: Introduction

With all the hype around Web 2.0 and social networks, small businesses are increasingly asking how can they take advantage of this phenomenon. Is it yet another hyped up technology created by the Silicon Valley propaganda machine or is it for real. The answer is of course more complicated. In a series of Blogs I will examine this question: How can Web 2.0 help small Small Businesses.

Here is an outline of what we will cover:

1- The Technology Impact of Web 2.0
2- New Marketing Realities with Web 2.0
3- Opportunities for start-ups
4- How to market small businesses
5- Who will be the leader in small business web 2.0 solutions.

Unique Value Proposition (UVP)

If you have pitched to a VC or seen VC style business plans you may have come across the term Unique Value Proposition or UVP. I have found that many companies and businesses usually think about this after they have created their service or product. That is a big mistake. If you are product manager and you are creating a UVP after the product has launched you are in big trouble.

The importance of UVP did not hit me until after I did a few sales calls. I currently own a small IT consulting company that works mainly with SMB. Initially I was fairly successful because I knew the right people and it got me a lot of customers due to relationships I had built. But one day, one of our salesperson came back very frustrated because every potential customer had told him that their current IT company did exactly what we did and cheaper. I validated this with some cold calling on my own. Suddenly I faced the dilemma of not having a UVP and was stuck in brutal price war.

I learned a valuable lesson that day; you have to create a UVP before you create your product or service. Here are some examples of some good UVPs:

1. Wendy's: Fresh Fast Food
2. Google: Fast and accurate web search
3. Microosft: The only game in town for PC Software (at least in the 90s)
4. Apple: Innovative consumer electronic products that customers love
   
5. Disney: Fun for the entire Family
   
6. Wii: Fun and Easy gaming console for the whole family

Notice that UVPs are very succinct. Customers have short attention span. You have 30 seconds to win or lose a customer. Here are some attributes of a good UVP not in any order of priority.

1. Clearly Defined Market Segment --You cant be everything to everybody.
   
2. Uniqueness-- Significantly better than the alternatives both within and outside the industry
   
3. Value -- Makes the life of the customer better (health, productivity, prestige, security etc.)
4. Pricing -- Makes the product accessible to the target market
5. Focused -- It is very clear what the product or service delivers.
   
6. Strength- Leverages your key assets and strengths.
7. Divergent -- Unlocks a new market segment
   

What do you think? Comments are appreciated.

When it is not Product Management

It seems like the definition of Product Management (PM) is kind of nebulous across different companies. But here is what it is not:

• Spending lots of times on sales calls.
• Doing lots of project management.
• Constantly writing new data sheets and collateral.
• Constantly being in crisis mode

Let me address each one;

1. PM is not spending lots of time with sales. Spending some time with initial sales calls is good since you are training the sales team. Spending all the time with sales means your product sucks and you have not done your job. A good product is unique and has high value making it easy sell. You don't see the iPhone product managers manning Apple stores do you? Also do not confuse discovering customer needs with selling the product. The approach is totally different.
2. PM is not project management. Many companies confuse this role. Hire a project manager for this role to get it done right. PMs do help define the critical milestones and help with getting resources to get the job done. But a dedicated project manager is more suited for this role.
3. PM is not about writing compelling collateral. Some companies confuse the role of Product Marketing and Product Management. Product Marketing and PR should be responsible for all outbound collateral. PM should initiate the core positioning and pricing and should build the product so it is easy to use Web 2.0 type marketing. PM should define customer segmentation and work with the Product Marketing Manager and PR to get the right message to the right audience.
4. PM should not be in a constant crisis mode. Occasional crisis and being paranoid that your product is successful is good. Constant crisis and not finding time to do your job means either your product sucks or you do not know how to delegate. Think strategic and delegate.
   

Now you might say Moin you have never worked in a start up. Sometimes due to lack of cash you have to shoulder the load of multiple responsibilities. Trust me I know since I have made all the mistakes outlined above. If you cannot delegate or outsource some of the above for a long time, you are headed for failure. The real job of the product manager is to spend time on product discovery, validation, design and taking action on customer feedback. You are ultimately responsible for the success or failure of the product. Don't blow it.

How to Fix Vista

I was told by my friends that I was too negative on Vista and I should offer some constructive ideas on how to fix it. Here is an outline of a plan for fixing Vista and creating more enthusiasm for the product. For starters focus more on the consumer segment. This is where the growth is. And do not wait another 7 year to ship an updated OS. Do it within 18 months. Here are some additional ideas:

1- Fix the driver incompatibility issues. I would talk to the engineers and see if they could write a compatibility layer to work with XP/2000 drivers. If not then get the OEM evangelists off their butts and start creating tools that make it dead easy for device manufacturers to create new drivers for some of the old stuff. Give them incentives so they would move their butts. Start a certified with Vista campaign and make it meaningful by making sure that certified drivers really do work better.

2- Get rid of the zillion of Vista SKUs down to 4. Home Basic/Premium and Business Standard/Enterprise. There are so many versions of Vista that it is very confusing for the customer.

3- Add some real value to the Premium editions. For example a very good photo editing, video editing, a good email program, and a good mapping program. Jazz up the media player. Most people now have multiple computers. Leverage the P2P technology and make sharing files, music, photos and videos a breeze. Kill Windows Home Server. Synch bookmarks, contacts and history among the computers. And finally add a good incremental backup solution so that all the data is centrally backed up. Make the PC fun not a drudgery. Also give the Vista Premium people a break on MS Office Home and Student Edition. Like $99 for the whole family. Make it a bundle with Word, Excel and Publisher.

4- It has been almost 2 years and there are still no applications of note that take advantage of the great graphics, p2p and video/audio conferencing capabilities. Looks like the Vista evangelist teams went to sleep. Even MS Office products decided not to take advantage of the cool new technologies. Light a fire underneath that team and get some cool applications that drive the adoption of the Vista PC.

5- Make it easier to tie it up with web 2.0 technologies. MS should be offering the equivalent of Apple MobileMe to the consumers. Online phtoto albums, VOIP calls, video conferencing etc.

6- Reduce the bloat and focus on performance. Compared to Mac OSX Leopard, Vista is a pig on an equivalent hardware. Get rid of all the crappy software that OEMs put on the PCs. It only slows things down and creates incompatibility issues. Slap HP and Dell and tell them to stop putting crap on the consumer PCs. It is only giving MS a bad name.

Team Leadership and Cricket

Ok I  admit it. I love cricket. I am a bit biased but I came across this article in cricinfo how an underdog team, the Rajasthan Royals,  with mostly B-grade players won the IPL (Kind of like the Super Bowl of Cricket). It is commonly known that that cricket teams from the sub-continent are fraught with in-fighting and unchecked individual egos. Playing as a team is a novelty. That a sub-continent team came together and played great team cricket is nothing short of a miracle. Here are some great lessons in people management and leadership. 

Here is the summary of how they managed to create a winning team:

1. The team had a clear vision of the type of team it was going to be and had the role of each player clearly defined. This was then committed to paper. It was later shared with each player and their input eagerly sought. With the help of player input the vision paper and the individual roles were further refined.  By the end each player knew clearly knew what to before a single game was played.
   
2. Egos were checked at the door and team play was emphasized. Of course it helped that one of greatest cricketer of all times was the captain of the team.
3. Go on-one with each team member and understand what makes them tick. Listen and don't just giver orders.
4. Make everyone feel they can contribute to the team.
5. You can't quantify how important  passion and drive are to the cause. It is all about trust, honesty and respect. Treat people fairly and evenly and they will respond. This goes against the traditional sub-continent management style, which is that as soon as you get power treat your subordinates like dung.
6. Look for something good. It is easy to criticize but harder to find something good to say. Build the players self-esteem.
7. Put forth a united front to the team . Discuss your differences behind the curtain but once a decision is made it must be  supported by all the leaders. The players must see a united front from the leaders.

Great stuff from the real world. Thanks Shane Warne and Darren Berry for saving me $29 bucks that I would have spent at Amazon.com on some fancy business management book.

Designing from the Outside In

Traditionally here is how a database driven application is built.
1- Talk to customers.
2- Draw an Entity-Relationship diagram
3- Design your database
4- Use some wizard driven software to create quick UI.
5- Call the designer to make it all look pretty.
6- Throw it to the user.
7- Iterate based on user feedback.

I own a small IT company where tracking down the hours spent per customer is crucial for cashflow. I was sick of employees recording their hours in spreadsheets and scraps of paper which then had to be entered in another spreadsheet and so on. So I decided to write my own billing and timesheet management software. I fired up VS 2005, designed by data base and data layer. And bascially followed the design process outlined above. I thought I got a great little app done and sent it over to my employees expecting them to be amazed by my coding prowess. Well.. things did not turn out as I expected. After a few days I noticed that nobody was using the TimeSheet software. Perplexed I finally asked one of my employees why he was not using it. He got up the courage and told me that it sucked. He was wasting more time entering data in my cumbersome software than ever before. So he swtiched back to paper and pencil.

I probed deeper and decided that the goal of my software should be accuracy and fast data entry. I had to do better than paper and pencil. I decided to design from the outside in. So the design process went as follows:

1- Talk to customer and observe how they worked with alternatives such as paper and spreadsheet.
2- I drew mockups on paper on what an input forms would look like. One employee said that the goals of the software could be achieved if the input form behaved like a spreadsheet but stored data like database. Bingo! We had a breakthrough interface. Easy and familiar to use but better than paper once I added auto-complete and a built-in timer for quickly recording time.
3- Built a mock UI in VS 2005 and let the users try it out. Got even better feedback.
4- Finally re-designed Views and UI to match the user feedback.
5- Connected it back to the data-models with some modifications. I had to add UI centric data tables in addition to the accounting data I had to capture.
6- Success. Users loved it. Improved billings by 25%.

I learned a big lesson. Designing from the outside in means:
1- Pay attention to the goals of the user. What makes their job easier. What makes using your software a less of a drudgery. Make your software fun to use.
2- Pay attention to the details to achieve 1. They really do matter.
3- Connect the user goals with the business goals. In the event of the timesheet software it was fun and easy data entry with accurate capture of billing data.
4- Plan for lots of iterations and feedback.
5- Work with the data model in parallel not in sequence.

So what does this mean for you the product manager? The answer is that design of your product is crucial. Be a leader and drive the design from the outside in.

Why Vista? Or What was Microsoft Thinking

Today I finally convinced my father-in-law to ditch his new HP Vista laptop and get a Windows XP Laptop from Dell. My main motivation was that I was tired of providing free tech support for a product that never should have shipped. After 6 system recoveries and 3 full Vista installs it was time to throw in the towel and get our money back. Maybe I should send an invoice to Steve Ballmer and claim compensation for emotional distress as well.

Despite the rosy picture painted by Steve B. on how he is so pleased with the sales of Windows Vista, the fact remains that Vista has failed to produce enthusiasm either among the consumers or the corporate users. The only reason the sales of Vista are so high is because it is the only choice available to users buying a new PC. Unless of course they buy a Mac or Linux.

So where did Vista go wrong. What were the Vista product managers thinking? Here are Five Mistakes made by the Microsoft Product Managers.

1. Failed to understand the customer
   
2. Failed to create innovative value
   
3. Emphasized Security over User Experience
   
4. Failed to generate developer enthusiasm
   
5. Its all about the Web Stupid!

Failed to understand the customer:

Microsoft has made the same mistake that Dell has made. They have failed to recognize that the current and future growth in PCs is driven by consumers. Apple correctly read this trend when Steve Jobs took over Apple. The Mac is the best consumer PC hands down. Hence their feature set is geared towards the consumer. The PC has evolved from a tool purely used for business productivity to one used for having fun. It seems that a comparable task is more fun and easy on a Mac.  The consumer centric design permeates from the user interface all he way to the type of applications bundled with the Mac. The Mac is capturing legions of new customers. I hear and see more people excited about upgrading to a Mac than people lined up to buy Vista. 

Failed to create innovative value:

Vista does pretty much the same things as Windows XP but costs hundreds of dollars more. Duh! Need I say more.

Emphasized security over user experience:

Vista is supposed to be more robust and secure than its predecessors. While we may argue that Vista and Security are an oxymoron, (I had a Windows Vista laptop hacked within minutes on an unsecured network) for the sake of argument let us assume that Vista is more secure.  So in the name of greater security,  user experience has taken a major backseat. In Vista, you are constantly being pestered to give permission to the OS to perform the simplest tasks. It is confusing and makes the user more paranoid. The Vista security model has also broken existing drivers and applications further exasperating the user. It takes the FUN out of using the PC. The design philosophy is backwards. The OS should handle security in the background without making it a burden on the user. I have a Mac. I do not feel harassed using a Mac but I do when using Windows Vista. Windows Vista was supposed to be all about user experience but in reality it is more about user pain.

Failed to generate developer enthusiasm:

I am not sure who were the developer evangelists for this product but looks like they all took a vacation. It has been over 1.5 years since the launch of Vista and I have not seen or heard of one killer app using Vista technologies. Even the MS Office team decided to stick with MFC rather than WPF libraries. It looks like MS forgot its own launch of Windows 95. Within a few months of the Windows 95 launch there were thousands of cool applications that provided a reason to upgrade. But maybe the Vista product managers are really smart and realized that the PC applications are irrelevant in the long run which brings me to the next point.

Its all about the Web Stupid!

Now how can the Vista product managers miss this point. They had a chance to really enhance the web experience. Except they blew it. IE 7 looks like a FireFox clone except a lot slower and buggy. Gadgets look like Mac Dashboard's ugly step sister. It would have been nice to have the search feature built into the task bar. RSS feeds could have shown up on my desktop.  The OS could have had built-in web services that kept my bookmarks, searches, contacts, and history accessible from any Vista PC in my home network. A blog app would have been nice too. Or how about seamless sync of images in MyPhotos to my favorite web based photo album. Maybe a builtin support for Video conferencing and VOIP could  have been the icing on the cake . But instead we are given Windows Vista which looks like Windows XP warmed over.

What do you think?

What to Expect from this Blog

This is my first attempt at a blog -- so bear with me as I experiment and try.
The goal of this blog is to present and explore ideas on what it takes to create a great software product.  I welcome comments from fellow peers and friends. The process to create a great software product is very difficult. For every Googles and Facebooks there are thousands of companies that never went beyond the shareware stage. Working in this industry can be brutal and the burnout factor is high. But it can be also be hugely rewarding where success can mean your products are affecting the lives of millions.