Handling this type of spike the old-fashioned way would have been painful and expensive. If you plan on being successful and see these types of spikes in traffic, you should think about cloud computing from day one.
As a kid I used to like exothermic reactions quite a bit, especially the ones that happened very, very quickly. However, I didn’t have access to that much dynamite. Or whales, for that matter.
Adobe’s Open Screen Project is a good move for the company and a reminder that, per Andy Grove, only the paranoid survive. TechCrunch has a good article on the details of the announcement. What’s perhaps a little more interesting is the fact that there have been some significant changes at Adobe in the past few months:
CEO Bruce Chism departed and was replaced by COO Shantanu Narayen.
The co-head of the platform business unit John Brennan departed. The top job in the platform business unit (which has Flash, Flex, ColdFusion, etc.) went to David Wadhwani who used to lead Flex product development.
The head of the mobile business unit Al Ramadan departed to be replaced by the head of mobile marketing Gary Kovacs. Mobile, having been a separate group, came under the platform group where it logically belongs.
The net result is an alignment of strategy around Flash with a focus on market penetration & share grab in new markets such as mobile. This adds much needed coherency. In the past, for example, Flash Lite tried to balance penetration with driving revenue. That didn’t work well. Similarly, online Flash was open-sourced and standards-based in some ways and proprietary in others. Now file formats and wire protocols get opened up.
By opening up this way, Adobe is altogether eliminating or putting at risk some small revenue streams (Flash Lite licensing and some of the enterprise data services) with the hope of cementing Flash’s cross-platform leadership.
But, you might say, Flash has had all the market share online that it might ever need yet this hasn’t translated into a huge business for Adobe. What’s the real impact of the Open Screen Project likely to be? My guess is that all those leadership changes, followed by as big an announcement, are indications of an upcoming shift in how Adobe views the business model around Flash across platforms.
The 2008 Nantucket Conference opened up with a session led by world-class design firm IDEO. The session title was Design Thinking for Entrepreneurs: Identifying New Markets and Developing the Winning Product or Service. Although they could have designed a better title, Devorah Klein (Human Factor Specialist) and Eric Saperstein (New Business Initiatives) did a great job walking people through the IDEO process. Tim Brown, IDEO’s CEO, sat at the back and helped with answers to some questions from the audience.
Focus on Desirability
The core of the IDEO philosophy starts with a focus on desirability. Come up with something people want then figure out how to optimize the technical and business aspects of it. Keep in mind that designing for people means designing for a journey through the product/service lifecycle.
The presenters told cautionary tales about clients who come up with a vision of something that people want but then cut so many corners to get feasibility and viability where they want them to be that the end result deviates substantially from the original vision.
The lesson here is to stay true to your vision. Apple under Steve’s inspired but at the same time occasionally ruthless leadership is probably the best recent example of a company doing everything it can to stay true to its vision. The teams building the iPod and iPhone jumped through a lot of hoops to build great products. Apple even took the risk of launching the iPhone on the relatively limited AT&T network rather than compromise their vision in dealing with larger mobile operators. Microsoft’s Vista is an example of a product that comes from a company which has lost some of its vision.
The Process
The IDEO process goes from observation to solution through intermediate three steps (a) synthesis, where observations get abstracted to a core form of knowledge and understanding about the domain, (b) the development of a generative framework based on that knowledge which in turn enables (c) the creation of many prototypes.
Get Inspiration
Getting inspiration through observation is where it all begins. IDEO’s approach here is similar to other methodologies such as Contextual Design. However, inspiration can come from other sources such as the prototypes you’ve built. Some ideas for getting inspiration:
Spent time with people, both current customers and people who you’d want to have as customers. Develop deep empathy.
Imagine what the future could be. Do not constrain your thinking.
Embrace failure. Failure is data.
Build to think. The act of creation helps you see things in a different light.
Build low-res prototypes. Paper is OK. Iterate quickly. Generate many options. Be passionate about your prototypes but evaluate them dispassionately.
Build it yourself. It’s another way to get yourself to see things from a different perspective.
Prototype
The value fast prototyping is huge. I tell the entrepreneurs I work with that they must fail quickly & cheaply but that is OK to take a lot of time and a lot of money to be wildly successful. Here are some words of advice on prototyping from IDEO’s Devorah Klein.
Five things to try tomorrow
The presenters left the group with the following five suggestions:
Spent time with customers. Really push yourself to think about unusual but relevant people you should talk to.
Be visual and tangible. Build a prototype of something. Paper is OK.
Try it yourself. This is the classing dogfooding principle.
Get out of your category for inspiration. You won’t know what you don’t know until you see something that inspires you.
Test-drive ideas. Do it all the time.
How does IDEO do it?
Thinking about IDEO’s process, three interesting questions came to mind:
Is what they are doing unique?
How do they recruit?
Is their process teachable?
For the first question, I turned to my friend Jules Pieri, an entrepreneur who is an industrial designer by training.
With regards to the second question, Devorah’s comment was that IDEO likes to recruit T-shaped people, folks who are deep in one are but broad in many.
Last but not least, CEO Tim Brown mentioned that IDEO is currently involved with projects in Africa where they are packaging some of their methodology to help local entrepreneurs design better products and services. Tim’s take is that IDEO’s process is definitely teachable.
For those who’d like to know more
I have four book suggestions if you are interested in this topic.
Some of you may be wondering whether it makes sense for an early-stage startup to engage IDEO. Last year I approached the Boston office of IDEO with the very same question. The short answers is “probably not”. An process iteration tends to cost in the six digit range. Also, engaging with IDEO requires a lot of human resources from the company going through the process.
As with many things in startup life, it’s best to be self-reliant–learn to apply some of the core principles of the IDEO methodology yourself.
I haven’t blogged in nearly two months. It’s bad form but I have been rather busy. I’m in the process of co-founding a company in San Fran which will help bloggers write more and better posts. Which makes me blogging less ironic.
I’m at the Nantucket Conference on the eponymous island. The weather is great and the event kicked off with a couple of interesting talks. IDEO talked about their design process and how it might be adapted to startups. Then there was a good panel on buzz marketing with BzzAgent, Brand Networks, TripAdvisor and KarmaLoop.
A couple of days ago I listened with empathy as a passionate entrepreneur told the story about bootstrapping his business over many years. Like many other entrepreneurs in his situation, he had to repeatedly make micro-optimization decisions that got him to the next month knowing full well that he’d do things differently if he had more resources at his disposal. Short-run vs. long-run trade-offs are the way of life in early stage companies but they also carry consequences. One of the key qualities of great entrepreneurial CEOs is the ability to make these trade-offs in a fast-paced uncertain environment better than their competitors’ leaders.
Sometimes, trading speed and efficiency now for cost and effort later helps startups reach some form of initial scale which buys them either enough capital or time to fix things before the next stage of growth. Other times, the same repeated trade-off puts them farther and farther behind the 8-ball. Nowhere is this more visible then when a product (or site) has to go through a major re-architecture (re-platforming/redesign).
Have you heard about Amazon’s latest re-platforming project? No? Not surprisingly since Amazon hasn’t had one of those… Great products/sites can evolve and take on best-of-breed capabilities/technologies in a way that’s almost transparent to their users. Amazon is a great example. The site is constantly being worked upon by lots of people. WordPress is another great example, showing the power of the open-source community. Good products/sites can be re-architected or re-platformed with relatively benign levels of user disruption. MySpace is a good example. MySpace had to significantly evolve their initial architecture (a web site built on one ColdFusion server) to end up where they are now. Others, say, the first-generation Friendster and many e-commerce sites, make it painfully obvious to their customers that it’s taking them too long to evolve & improve. Some die in the process.
A common pattern I see is that many successful technology companies have figured how to use what I like to call fluid architecture to manage the balance of trade-offs between the present and the future. Fluid architecture is not just about software. The core certainly is about good software architecture but there is also a continuous improvement process component and a cultural component. The cultural element has to do with two things: (a) a mindset of ongoing, explicit, open and honest discussion about the trade-offs that are being made and their future implications and (b) a commitment at all levels of the organization (not just inside the product group) to not end up behind the 8-ball. Companies that embrace this broader concept of fluid architecture can rebuild themselves on the go and move at the pace of today’s business.
My personal experience with fluid architecture has been very positive. For example, every major release of ColdFusion between 2.0 and 7.0 required re-architecting large parts (20-90%) of the server core while preserving 100% backward compatibility. ColdFusion 6.0 (a.k.a ColdFusion MX, which was the first release after the Macromedia acquisition) was a complete, from the ground up re-build on a Java as opposed to C++ codebase. Those were great examples of fluid architecture at both the product and at the company level. Our technology was excellent but we had done a number of things wrong initially–easy to do when you are the first Web application server and have nothing else to compare yourself to and you bootstrapped on $18K. What we did have, however, was a focus on continuous architecture improvement. We had lofty goals for the company and knew that great architecture would be the basis of our ability to evolve ColdFusion both for itself and to serve as a base for other products (anyone remember Allaire Spectra?). We also had the fortitude to break the bitter pill in pieces and take smaller cost/timing hits release after release so that we never had to take the bitter pill all at once.
Which, in a roundabout way, brings me to the second topic of this post. ColdFusion 8 won the Jolt Award for Web Development. I find that pretty impressive for a product that defined the category back in 1995. Remaining relevant–let alone cutting edge–for such a long period of time is something very few products achieve. The reason, I think, is more than a decade of commitment to fluid architecture.
Fluid architecture is ever more important in the Web 2.0 world of quick and cheap experimentation where prototypes overnight become production web sites after your blog post about the private beta makes it on the front page of Digg.
It is fair to say that we are in a Renaissance of the Web Hacker (v2.0). (The main difference with Bubble 1.0 is the the Web 2.0 Hacker listens to KanYe West while the Web 1.0 Hacker listened to 2Pac. Well, there is AJAX, Web services and a few other bits and pieces but they are less important.) One of the issues I consistently find with some of the startups I’m seeing these days is that they are making important trade-offs about technology, product roadmap, user experience and go-to-market implicitly as opposed to explicitly. That is a core violation of fluid architecture principles and, potentially, a recipe for disaster. Invariably, when I start a discussion on this topic, the team tells me that this is not a problem because they are agile. I beg to disagree. Agile development by itself won’t prevent a company from risking its long-term success through a series of convenient short-term decisions. Embracing a fluid architecture approach in addition to all that Web 2.0 technology goodness is one way for startups to better position for success.
One can have a lot of fun these days poking around Wikipedia, discovering various types of inaccuracies and, perhaps, fixing them. But how should one treat a case where Wikipedia accurately reports on an otherwise inaccurate statement?
This thought comes to mind following an exchange I had over the past few days with Jimmy Guterman, editor of Release 2.0. In the latest issue Jimmy correctly quoted the common statement of Metcalfe’s Law, which, according to Wikipedia amongst others, states that “the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users.” It turns out that’s not what Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, founder of 3Com and my partner at Polaris Venture Partners, claimed. I pinged Jimmy about this and he was kind to blog about it and spread the word. I explain what I learned from Bob about Metcalfe’s Law here (a post which was triggered by an IEEE Spectrum article that Metcalfe’s Law was wrong). About the same time, Bob also did a guest post on my partner Mike’s blog.
Should the Wikipedia article be changed? Should the original image from Bob be included in the article?
Following my post on the Flex 3 and AIR launch, a number of you have pinged me privately about the Flash vs. AJAX question. It goes something like this: “I know you are going to write that you prefer Flash/Flex because you were chief architect at Macromedia but what are you telling your own companies? Should they go with Flash or should they go with AJAX?” Flash vs. AJAX is the wrong question for a number of reasons, the most obvious one being that Flash is an application runtime environment and AJAX is a design/implementation pattern for applications.
In the next few days I’ll collect my thoughts and do a post on real question, which is about technology/tool/platform choices for building Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0 and Mobile Web 2.0 applications.
Tomorrow, at the invitation-only Engage 2008 event in SF Adobe will launch AIR and Flex 3.0. If you want to get a sense of what will be shown, here are the slides from the January pre-release tour. The event has attracted a high-powered group. For example, Marc Benioff, Chairman & CEO of salesforce.comwill speak. (Salesforce.com’s AppExchange platform has a number of Flex-based extensions, including our own Centive.)
The AIR / Flex 3.0 launch is a big deal for three reasons:
The AJAX ecosystem is heavily fragmented
Flex 3 is a big step forward
AIR is a disruptive innovation enabler
There are just too many pure AJAX frameworks out there. This may be great for some abstract notion of innovation but is pretty bad for market adoption. It causes confusion and friction. Developers hate that. They want to feel like they are developing skills for the next cool technology which will be around for a decade. The tooling is also pretty immature, although my friend Paul Colton @ Aptana is doing some pretty cool work. I have also seen a number of new startups trying to make things better in this space but for now the situation is not great. After initially missing the AJAX boat in a big way, Adobe has recently gained traction in repositioning from Flash vs. AJAX to Flash vs. DHTML, both of which use AJAX. As proof, I’ve seen more startups mixing Flash/Flex with DHTML/AJAX.
There seems to be a rule that really big software companies get things right by version 3.0. That has been the case for years with Microsoft and now Adobe may be large-enough to join the list. Flex 1.0 shipped late and left a lot to be desired, which made Flex 1.5 more or less a requirement. Flex 2.0 was a big step forward but there was much more left to do to build a great RIA platform. Flex 3 steps up the innovation pace on a number of fronts. Better developer tools. Improved frameworks. Smaller application size. Better data handling throughout. And the Flex SDK as well as the BlazeDS remoting and messaging services are now open-source. Everything is in place to accelerate Flex adoption. There is a massive shortage of Flex developers in the market, always a good sign for a platform. The main challenge for Adobe remains monetizing the platform. I’m not 100% on board with the Flex Builder tool as the main revenue driver although the team recently added some great people from the ColdFusion team who really understand Web developers. For examples on what Flex can do, check out the app showcase. Warning: you may spend more time there than you previously imagined.
AIR will become the biggest enabler for media-heavy Web applications. To get an idea about what I mean, check out the Allurent Desktop Connectionvideo. This only scratches the surface of what one can do with a cross-platform, always on, richly interactive application with Net access and plenty of local storage. Adobe isn’t the only company who gets this–Google has plans based on Google Gears and Facebook has also moved in this direction with the Parakey acquisition–but Adobe has so far executed the best. Not surprisingly, Microsoft remains paralyzed by the Web <-> desktop strategy tension.
AIR is truly disruptive–in Clayton’sexact sense of the term–for two reasons. First, it given Web apps access to the desktop. Second, it does so while subverting the native operating system installers (using the Flash player executable as a conduit) which gives Adobe and its ecosystem substantial freedoms. One caveat–security. Adobe has done a pretty good job with the Flex 3 security model but it hasn’t been extensively tested in the wild. Also, the anti-virus and anti-spyware vendors have often been trigger happy in the past to blacklist totally legitimate software. I’m not expecting them to blacklist the AIR runtime but who knows how they’ll treat some of the apps… I hope the Adobe platform marketing team and evangelists have spent enough time with the security vendors. This is something I advised them to do at the Engage event last year based on some bad experiences from our portfolio.
With this launch, Adobe cements its platform leadership in Web 2.0 and makes life easier and more interesting for millions of developers and designers. A shout out to all my friends at Adobe who worked hard to make it happen and to everyone who put skin in the game during the beta process.
