caption: gosh, that dog looks delicious!

I know it is bad form to link to someone else's image. Because I know this, I will endeavor to speak of the source of this and other remarkably disturbing images in the most glowing way possible.



(It is possible that such bald-faced ass-kissing (two disturbing co-joined colloquialisms, oh my) will absolve me of my wrong-doing. Maybe. Stand by for take-down request in ten, nine, eight. . .)

So please visit the Nice People at Plan 59, The Museum (and Gift Shop) of Mid-Century Illustration. Delight to their retro-chic ways! Marvel at their collection of commercial art! Buy stuff!

Because the hay-day of product marketing was the mid-20th century, that's why. The energy, the colors! The frightening children! And remember - it was cool at the time. Or at least, it didn't raise eyebrows. That, to me, is the kicker.

It also reminds me that - once again - there is very little in the way of creative work like this happening in software advertising these days, at least not from a graphics arts perspective. You may disagree; if so, please provide examples. Please note - the Logitech "Peeing Baby" ad doesn't count, because it is the exception that proves the rule.

We are living in a wasteland of stock photography, and I'm tired of it. More maniacally grinning kids, please!

commentary: pourquoi j'aime les Francais

It is my regular practice to leave comments connected to the posts that stimulate them. In this case, Alain Breillat's response to an earlier article of mine is worthy of greater visibility. I offer it here, in its entirety.

We forget that the French ruling class looks down their noses at the American upstarts when it comes to finesse in foreign policy and of course in the realm of food (on the latter I would agree with them - American's by and large have no appreciation for good food).

I think you would find Bob, that the real issue is how the media plays on the French aristocracy and technocrats' efforts to stand against the American political endeavors across the world. The Continetal approach is one of white gloved diplomacy and yet we have seen over the last century where their endeavors have failed on a consistent basis (Poland anyone? How about Sarajevo? And lest we forget, who brought down the USSR?) I firmly believe the French political class believe themselves morally superior to the ragamuffins across the sea - but it just kills them that they no longer have the wealth and military power they once had when the day was, in order to truly be civilized, you had to speak French.

There is a belief, ill considered, that the Continentals are the sophisticates when it comes to keeping the world in order and that the Americans are bumbling fools. GW Bush has not helped that perception, in fact his malapropisms and fumbling nature have plummeted us significantly back to the days of the Ugly American. I cringe when I listen to him speak and when I see him fumble with the right approach to dealing with foreign powers (the finesse is what I'm talking about). But the reality is that no single country has so successfully managed their international power and ascendancy as well as the US. There is a rich history of foreign policy in which this hayseed nation has outwitted and outgunned even superior nations like France and Great Britain. (Let us not forget the Battle of New Orleans - Andrew Jackson anyone? and the Louisiana Purchase in which Jefferson gained roughly 1/3 of North America for 3 cents per acre - essentially took advantage of Napoleon's challenge in dealing with the war mongering British at the time.)

Every major European power had aspirations of keeping portions of North America or overtaking it entirely but the Americans outfought and outfoxed them at every crucial turn. Only the US was able to force Britain's hand in allowing them to sustain a massive Navy across the world - something France, Germany and Spain all failed to accomplish militarily - and the US did it without spilling a drop of blood. Spain, France, Britain, Mexico, and even Russia were rebuffed in their attempts to retain or capture portions of what is today US boundaries.

So, I don't think you can blame the French politicians like Mitterand, Chirac, and M. De Villepin for despising the Americans. We pollute their language, we force our culture and our movies upon them, and we ignore them when they seek to influence our foreign policy. For a nation that is as proud as the French, this is akin to pissing in the bottle of Château Le Pin Pomerol 1999 before serving it to them. Don't get me wrong, I love the French, the people at least - they're a part of me - my ancestors' blood from the Haut-Poitu region runs deep in my veins. The politicians are where they go sour.

So, I don't think you can blame the French politicians like Mitterand, Chirac, and M. De Villepin for despising the Americans. We pollute their language, we force our culture and our movies upon them, and we ignore them when they seek to influence our foreign policy. For a nation that is as proud as the French, this is akin to pissing in the bottle of Château Le Pin Pomerol 1999 before serving it to them.

Don't get me wrong, I love the French, the people at least - they're a part of me - my ancestors' blood from the Haut-Poitu region runs deep in my veins. The politicians are where they go sour.

laughs: garrison keillor feigns outrage, unloads on bernard-henri levy

One of our nation's leading stereotypographers, Garrison Keillor, took up the pen in defense of America this Sunday in his review of Bernard-Henri Levy's American Vertigo for the New York Times Book Review.

How insulting, M. Keillor raged, that a Frenchman hired by The Atlantic Monthly to wander through America in search of something to write about should discover. . .oddness! Mardi Gras! Stock car racing! Mega-churches! The Mall of America! Mount Rushmore! Stuff that makes for good magazine articles! Quelle horreur!

Reacting like a polemicist confronted with another practitioner, he expresses outrage at Levy's shallow view of Americans, his fondness of the phrase "as always in America", and especially Levy's "childlike love of paradox". Yawn.

Would that M. Levy had instead settled into a seat at a diner in Ypsilanti to interview auto workers, or gone to run errands with Mrs. Krepalik, he might have drunk deep of the "real America", the one that M. Keillor embodies.

Here's my take on the whole sorry affair. What M. Keillor is angling for is the opportunity to go to France to "return the favor". Because anyone who ends a "review" with. . .

Thanks for coming. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. For your next book, tell us about those riots in France, the cars burning in the suburbs of Paris. What was that all about? Were fat people involved?

. . .isn't making a statement, he's offering an invitation. Wouldn't it just be delicious to read about the adventures of a pasty, garrulous old guy from Minnesota schlepping through the Auvergne looking for alcoholics, angry busdrivers and closet royalists?

Close your eyes - can't you see him "getting down" with some fourth-generation French of Algerian descent talking about soccer? Or wandering through Les Halles raging about how skinny the French are despite their abominable dietary habits? Or grumbing about how "undemocratic" it is that French stores can only hold sales twice a year?

I bet the phone is ringing in Lake Woebegon Right Now with details of an eight-week bus tour, a serialized travelogue, a book deal and, as the pinnacle, a TV special with both Mssrs. Keillor and Levy visiting "the real America/France" with the other in tow. You can smell the excitement at NPR already. Touche, wabbit!

eats: dim sum at the phoenix in chicago

I've got a spotty track record when it comes to dim sum. Years ago I went to a place near Livingston NJ with my wife where, on the advice of a Chinese colleague, I ordered the chicken feet which he claimed were "very delicious" and "something that Chinese people love."

I thought they were like rib tips, and proceeded to eat the entire thing, bones, skin, cartilage and all. After a few days of worrying about a perforated colon care of the razor-sharp chicken toenails, I reported back to my Chinese colleague who proceeded to laugh his ass off. Turns out you're just supposed to nibble on the damn things. Glad he told me in advance.

More recently, we had dim sum at another place in Morristown, where the meal was so hideous that we decided that dim sum actually translated into English as "phlegm nuts". Think mucilaginous pseudo-meat/seafood/vegetable nuggets and you're close.

So it was with some degree of trepidation that I packed up the family today and trekked into Chicago to visit The Phoenix Restaurant for a dim sum lunch. Explanation: my son had been exposed to potstickers somewhere along the line, and care of modern educational excellence had also learned a) that potstickers were a member of the larger dim sum order and that b) there was a Chinatown in Chicago where dim sum was served. In a spasm of ordered associative thinking, he asked to go into Chicago to have dim sum for his birthday lunch.

(Note: enough of the italics, already)

If you've been watching your lunar calendar, you know that tomorrow is Chinese New Year, so Chinatown was hopping in anticipation of the great day. We queued up at the Phoenix, got our number, then wandered around in an outdoor mall across the street for the 25 minutes it took for a table to open up. Result: I am now the proud owner of a number of little phials of ginseng-related liquids of mysterious medicinal value. More on that another time.

When I got back to the restaurant, I noted that there were an awful lot of Chinese people waiting on line and looking happy about it. Good sign #1.

The meal itself flowed in beats, with carts meandering past, round dishes presented and withdrawn, a changing cavalcade of random smallish nibbles. Highlights were tripes sauteed in garlic, hot pepper and vinegar; a fragrant pork dumpling seasoned with ginger; a steaming hot sesame-flecked ball filled with an unctuous sesame paste; and (god help me) the chicken feet.

Good sign #2 took place about 90 minutes later when, absolutely stuffed with the finest dim sum I've ever enjoyed, my wife and I shared the last of a perfectly spectacular pot of tea as we looked out at the distant, cloud-shrouded Chicago skyline.

wondering: awful software product names

When the techy types are running the shop, as they often do at software companies, it sometimes translates into how the company describes products and their value, and how those values are symbolized in the marketplace.

(Curiously, I don't see the same bias at CPG companies, which are, as far as I can tell, not run by soap scientists.)

The most obvious manifestation of this is the woeful state of product naming across the software industry. There seems to be an unwritten rule that software products must be named for what they do. You don't see as many fanciful brands in the software market as you do in. . .say. . .CPG.

And you certainly don't get made-up names like you see in the cosmetics space. What I wouldn't give to see a software product described as "Now with SupraSplectinoids and Revitalin!"

Perhaps it has something to do with building software brands. Brands are expensive, they take time to create, and they require a committment on the part of the creator to sustain it.

I've enjoyed the benefits of working with a super-strong brand, and I've experienced the angst of working with brand-free products festooned with long, declarative names that engineers love, but which are as sterile as the surface of the moon.

We've all done the exercise of trying to describe a brand in a few words and seeing if folks can recognize it. Say "car" and "safety" and most folks would say "Volvo". Can you do the same for a single software product? The names may be recognizable, but what do they stand for?

Here's an exercise - name for me any well-known software company with a recognizable brand promise and I'll put your name in lights in my next post.

(And no, you can't use Oracle, because everyone knows that "Oracle Corporation provides the software that powers the Internet" is their brand promise. Try harder. Microsoft is off-limits too.)

humility: the gmail delete button

As a Gmail user, I had grown so used to opening the drop-down box and tabbing down to the delete option that when I didn't see it, I thought something was broken.

You see, I had come to accept Gmail's "Thou Art an Ass if Thou Throwest Email Away" point of view, and had resigned myself to being the sort of ass who deleted stuff.

So when I finally looked to the left and saw the "delete" button, I wasn't quite prepared for it.

That said, I like it. It says something important about software - you never know how people will actually use your product until you let them. Google paid attention, and reacted correctly.

I've learned to recognize that the way I imagine customers using my products is often very different from how they actually use them. Here's an example of this, but turned around a little.

I've had a bunch of conversations with our sales team lately - they've been wondering, "Hey, Bob, you were the InstallShield PM, and you used Update Service with it, tell me what you liked about it." What blew them away wasn't that I used it to send updates (which, while cool, is rather prosaic) but that I relied on it to know how fast new versions were adopted, what my product mix was, and stuff like that.

Their point of view on the value of the product was "ISVs need to send software updates". My point of view (as a customer) was "I need to know what's going on." And as a customer, my point of view wins.

Just for giggles, I've asked our developers to sit down with our own setup authors to see what aggravates them about InstallShield. They are, after all, customers. It may make your brain hurt when you realize that we use InstallShield to build our installations for. . .InstallShield. We've been listening to external customers for a long time, but we haven't listened as well to our internal customers.

Maybe we'll create a delete button. I'd like to think we'd do something sensible like that too.

tenet: 1 customer is worse than no customers

I won't admit to anything, but I know that sometimes, for whatever reason, you might just be a wee bit early to market with your whiz-bang idea. You embraced the Kawasakian gestalt by not worrying and being crappy. You launched, dropped the press release, printed the collateral, recorded the webinar.

Then crickets.

Don't despair, but don't relax. This is exactly the time for some serious introspection. Why didn't your product jump? You built it, but they didn't come - why?

Often (and this is my particular sin of choice) the messaging you thought was absolutely inspired didn't play. Find a customer of your existing stuff and give him the name Mr. Peoria. Give him your simple 1-minute pitch. Then shut up.

If the 1-minute pitch gets some nods, try your 3-5 minute pitch by means of "providing a deeper understanding". You're watching for tell-tale signs of disconnection. Are you connecting capabilities that matter to your high-order value statement? Odds are you're not. You're giving your customers some sizzle, but they're not finding the steak.

If you get some nods to the 3-5 minute pitch, then you can breathe a little easier. What's likely stumping you is poor execution in the sales channel, bad pricing, confusing packaging. You might be targeting a new persona which is inconsistent with the persona who identifies with your other brands. In that case, you're not spending enough on marketing.

Or maybe you're just ahead of your time. If this is the case - and there's nothing essentially wrong with being a visionary unless of course you're the only one - then contemplate pulling it back just slightly. It's hard, especially if you blew some coin on a launch.

You need to regroup because, God forbid, you might just get a customer. And then you're stuck.

No customers buys you time to figure out the problem. One customer pins you in place like steel through a butterfly.

Or worse yet, you get lots of customers; nothing obscures failure like success. All of this is why you should have done more testing up front.

But don't despair. Not every horse starts fast. Retrench, ask the hard questions, watch your metrics, aim again then shoot again.

declaration: pourquoi j'aime les Francais

His coolness Bernard-Henri Lévy was on the Daily Show tonight; in response, I have to weigh in on the essential lesson of his appearance.

His thesis was that Americans and French are like brothers - we hate each other half the time, we love each other the rest of the time. I have to agree.

Come on, where did Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson hang out? Where did Henry Miller set up shop? Not in Prague or London or Rome, baby. Paris. I could go on, but I won't, out of respect for your knowledge of the rich history of American expats in Paris.

Il y avait une fois I lived just outside of Paris. It was in those three, fleeting years I came to experience first-hand just how alike we are, the French and the Americans.

We both treasure democracy. We value independence, we honor the family, we appreciate good living and hard argument. We are hard-headed, full of imagination, suffused with regret and ambition.

What his coolness Bernard-Henri Lévy argued tonight was that we suffer from not spending enough time together, that we're all victims of a surfeit of sterotyping. But that's OK. We can fix that.

I had the very, very happy occasion to spend some time with two French colleagues of mine (one native and one American) during the recent spate of meetings in San Francisco. We talked about food, poltics, wine, music, women; our conversations ranged over anything and everything, we sat together at a "team dinner" at a Santa Cruz winery and worked our way through two (or was it three) bottles of very respectable cabernet sauvignon as we talked, talked, talked.

I've known for years that I missed living in France, but I never realized until this last weekend how much I missed the French. We can argue - heatedly, passionately, and with genuine rancor - and still let it all fall away like leaves before the wind with a quick pour of wine and a wink.

coping: the "I want it yesterday" syndrome

I cover a lot of ground in my job. Lots of products, lots of product managers, lots of constituencies. There are times I'm so far under water that I despair of ever seeing the surface.

Most of the folks I work with understand this. They work with me to schedule activities, deliverables and feedback. I love these people.

Some of them don't understand this. They suffer from what I call the "I want it yesterday" syndrome. I love these people too, but for different reasons.

These sort of people are passionate about what they do, and that passion spills over into urgency for themselves and others. I appreciate urgency, because passion on behalf of customers is no sin.

The challenge is that some issues are more urgent than others. And this is where the IWIY syndrome turns ugly.

Most of the folks who have this condition are type-A drivers who occupy a place at the center of a universe - their universe. By definition, sufferers of the syndrome are not good collaborators, and even worse planners. But they are excellent at the subtle art of making your live hell by impugning your ability to execute. Which, as all product marketing guys know, is the kiss of death.

And so, here are my hard-won tips to dealing with these people. Who, I must repeat, I simply adore.

1. Don't make committments you can't keep. This is the #1 cause of death among product marketing professionals, and IWIY sufferers know it.
   
2. Don't apologize for your decisions regarding relative task priority across your portfolio.
3. Don't back down from your priorities.
4. Don't engage in private email conversations with them. Bring in their manager and your manager.
5. Do invite them to participate in planning.
6. Do encourage them to prioritize their requests based on business value. Not everything they want is equally important, which oddly enough, they recognize.
7. Don't get angry. They can't help it, and you must recognize that in them, and love them for it.

Letting someone with IWIY syndrome get away with bullying you into shifting your priorities will earn you the eternal reputation of being spineless. Which you don't need. They may not love you for standing up to them, but they will respect you. And if they don't respect you, at least their complaints to your peers & managers will fall on deaf ears and make them look like a-holes.

Which you do need.

tools: the humble 3x5 card

I've gone entirely analog for project management. Flat, white, 3x5 card analog.

Everyone has a favorite way of structuring their time and keeping track of projects. I'm not talking about taking notes - even though I do my best note-taking on paper too, FWIW.

No, I'm talking about the grind of keeping track of all the stuff you have to do. Little projects, big projects, whatever.

And in the process I've discovered that there are an awful lot of folks out there in my (our) line of work who have left the PDA and the Crackberry at home and embraced the 3x5 card.

I mean, hey, if this wasn't a valid way of keeping yourself in order, why would this exist? Or this? Accessories validate lifestyles, right?

And I knew I was on to something when I discovered the very-hip sounding Hipster PDA over at 43Folders. And I felt even more uplifted when I discovered the zen-like calm of the Getting Things Done cult^H^H^H^Hcommunity. No offense. But they are rather passionate.

For me, I just like using the wee little cards like storyboards; armed with a wad of blu-tak, I organize my week into stacks, then lay out the cards on a blank wall to see how everything sorts out. And there is nothing so satisfying as tearing one of them up when the task is done.

When it comes to schlepping the darned things around, I'm a bit less satisfied. Big alligator clips aren't my style, and I don't want to shell out USD$48 (plus shipping) for one of these.

My ideal case would be. . .well. . .if you have an interest in doing some lightweight prototyping, drop me a line.

thinking: my finest teacher

Back in the middish-90s, I had the happy accident to be studying traditional Irish singing and bodhran at the Irish Arts Center in New York City. After one class, I asked the instructor if there was anyone living in the City who gave private lessons.

"Yes, there's a nice young lady named Karan Casey I know, she might give you a lesson or two."

My half-dozen or so meetings with her were perhaps the most important lessons I've ever had, on any topic.

We'd sit in her narrow apartment on the upper east side and drink cup after cup of tea; we'd talk, she'd sing, I'd sing, we'd talk some more. I tried to take notes at first, then I realized what I was missing when I was writing, so I just listened.

Learning how to sing traditional Irish music, or sean nos, is an exercise in personal honesty. It is a style of performing that admits little drama or artifice of any kind. It doesn't lend itself to great displays. From what I've been able to learn, songs in this tradition were often handed down from parent to child like one hands down garden tools or recipes.

Leading up to that point in my life, singing was about performing; what I learned from Karan was that singing was about. . .something else entirely.

She shared some tapes with me of singers she admired, especially (the late) Frank Harte, whom she adored. She taught me a few simple drills for waking up my voice and strengthening my breath. She told me to go buy An Duanaire 1600-1900: Poems of the Dispossessed and read it.

Then she said "go out and sing". Curiously, that was the most important, and difficult, of all the things she taught me. Much of craft, especially musical craft, is learned then kept private. By her understanding of it, if you're going to learn to sing, go sing. It's no more complicated than that.

There comes a point when teachers have nothing left to give you but one last lesson - that the only way to learn anything more of value is through the bitter experience gained from finding your own way.

She who, conscious of her own light, is content to be obscure, she shall be the whole world's model; her virtue will never fail. She reverts to the Absolute. --- Lao Tzu

rule: write the MRD first

I can't count how many times in my career I've had to write a MRD for a product that has already gone to market. It's sad, actually.

Because when you find yourself asking fundamental questions like...

Who are we selling this product to?
How are we going to sell this product?
What is the competitive landscape we're selling into?
What are the sizes of our buyer segments?

...and you don't have a single place you can go to get the answers, you realize, lovely, time to write the MRD. Again.

The MRD - or Market Requirements Document - may be a dirty word to the Extreme Programming crowd, but that doesn't mean it is any less valuable. Maybe what they object to is the common (and unfortunate) practice of writing one then sinking it in Lucite for everyone to worship.

IMO, the MRD is a living document, since what it describes is your understanding of a market problem and what it takes to solve that problem in a compelling, unique way.

Maybe what they object to is the equally unfortunate habit of combining the market perspective found in the MRD with the feature/function perspective described in other documents. They're right. These two things shouldn't mix.

Why? Because the MRD is just one of three key documents you should be writing in partnerhsip with your product management counterparts:

1. The MRD (Market Requirements Document) describes the problem, who is having the problem, who else is trying to solve the problem, and what your unique, compelling solution to the problem is. Think sizing, dollars and risks.
2. The PRD (Product Requirements Document) describes the universe of features required to address the problem described in the MRD.
3. The RDD (Release Definition Document) describes those features in the PRD that you're going to carve off and attack in the context of a given public release.

One thing (among many) I learned from Steve Johnson over at Pragmatic Marketing is that all the key stakeholders need to sign off on each of these. And when I say "sign off", I mean literally "get their signature". If the release changes mid-flight, get agreement on that too.

So back to my premise. When you find yourself swimming without a MRD, you have no guiding principles with which to fashion all the other goodies you've being asked to create, like segment-specific positioning, customer metrics, ROI calculators, sales training and enablement tools. . . you know, all the good stuff that product marketing needs to drive. And without the MRD, how can your market intelligence people tell you if you're winning or losing? They can't, because you have no benchmarks to use to measure your progress other than revenue and costs.

So write the MRD first. It's not as much fun as doing a prototype, or slapping up a webpage, or meeting with potential customers, or even chatting up investors. But you need it to frame your thinking and structure your work.

Sigh.

considered: fond de message

I spent some time during the week asking sales reps questions to discover what gets in their way. Bad this, too little that, too much another thing. What I was trying to figure out was exactly what sort of problem these folks think we solve, and why their customers care. What they believe, after all, is what they repeat, and what their customers hear.

Sorting through your core value messaging is a lot like sculpture - once you knock away everything that the sculpture isn't, you're left with what it is. Michelangelo must have looked at a hundred blocks of marble until he found the one that the David was hiding in. Honest.

I figure that once you determine exactly what it is you do, and why it really matters, the trick is boiling down the messaging to a fond - the essential flavor of your value. The next step is to embrace that flavor for what it is, with all your heart, and embrace the folks who embrace it too.

Anything more complicated than that isn't real. Watering it down to make it cover more ground is like watering down your fond - the flavor gets lost. Watering down your value messaging to make it appeal to more people guarantees that it appeals to no one.

considered: effortlessness

One of the high points of this last week for me was a talk I gave at the kickoff meeting. If you're one of those people who hate public speaking this may seem a bit odd, but I live for every chance I get to work a big room.

It's not an ego thing, which I know you may find hard to believe. It's just that I love the experience of being in the moment. It's totally, entirely exhilarating. I thrive on weaving the stories that turn a concept into a single, crystalline realization. Especially when the lights are up and the faces in the crowd are muted and indistinct.

Afterward, I often find it difficult to remember exactly what I said during those fleeting moments in the spotlight. Public speaking for a large audience is a time-out-of-time, transcendant space that admits and dismisses you, but which for a few, brief moments holds you, tranfixed and shining. For those few minutes, everything was in balance in my world as the story flowed from me,

In the aftermath of last week, as I try to figure out how to eat the elephant of work that awaits me, I'm reflecting on what this tells me about myself. About the essential wa of marketing the way I want to practice it, of effortlessness made manifest.

In short, what can you do to make your work effortless, a natural extension of yourself?

grind: kickoffs, meetings and airports

This is the part of the job they don't tell you about. The part that involves staying up late, finding your way around strange hotel rooms looking for the thermostats and cursing tissue-sized bath towels.

It's the part that keeps your eyes open when your mind is shutting down; of wiring-up before speaking to a room-full of strangers, of abject fear that the AV guys didn't get your deck loaded up right.

Then there's the waiting part. Airports aren't the worst of it. Waiting for your speaking slot, for the next meeting, for the next "team building event".

There's the getting your wireless link to work, your phone to connect, your too-full mailbox to admit one more message.

Anyone who tells you product marketing isn't a full-contact sport is lying to you.

I'll be back and posting uplifting stuff next week.

lesson: phone >> email

Back in the late 70s when I was first finding my way around a DEC PDP 11 I discovered that I could type...really...fast.

Through college it wasn't all that useful a skill, since I didn't have access to word processing tools and I hated to reach for that stupid correction cartridge in my electric typewriter. But then we got a Macintosh lab at school. . .and I was off to the races.

Flash forward to 2006, and I love email. Maybe because it appeals to the ADHD part of me that likes new things showing up and the satisfaction it gives me to reply to them. I read and write a lot of email. Sometimes hundreds a day.

But today, I learned - to my horror - that email is no substitute for picking up the phone and calling someone.

Pride is a horrible thing, I guess. I was so convinced that I was God's Gift to Communicators, that of course whatever I wrote would be read and instantly understood. Nope.

The irony is that I enjoy doing voice-overs and entertaining so very much, but when it comes to doing business, I lost track of the power of the voice.

So. For all of you who live with your Crackberry or Treo grafted to your hand, consider the following:

1. When the level of discourse in an email takes a turn for the worse, don't hit the "Reply All" button - pick up the phone and call someone.
2. If given the opportunity to choose between email and face-to-face, choose face-to-face.
3. If someone adds their boss on the cc: line for a reply, add yours too, then realize that you've got an audience that doesn't want to see you embarass yourself. So be careful about what you write, then take it to the phone.
   

It's a sad fact about our modern age that we are empowered with the ability to make ourselves heard more than even before, but what we really need is to listen - and hear. For a guy like myself who can honestly be accused of enjoying the sound of his own voice, it's a hard lesson.

observed: preemptive solutions

A year ago I had the opportunity to meet Gabriel Torok, the CEO of Premptive Solutions, and my first impression was that he seemed way too normal a guy to be a macha. But there you go.

Preemptive - authors of Dotfuscator and DashO - have a value proposition that you can say with your mouth full of food. Which, if you know me, is my measure of a good value proposition.

"If you're writing commercial software in .NET or Java, anyone can look at it, figure out how it works, and make it their own. Unless you take the time to encrypt it ahead of time. Preemptive sells software that does that really, really well."

A couple of weeks ago I got a "Friends and Family" newsletter from Gabriel with news on the progress of Preemptive over the last year. In a day and age when most startups are chasing rocket-science Web 2.0 stuff, it's a real pleasure to see a growing company making a go of it in what is frankly a rather non-sexy market niche.

With the hue and cry over evil content providers growing louder each day, I think it is only a matter of time before the line between "source protection" and "license protection" thins away to nothing. Why bother enforcing entitlements to .NET and Java applications if you're not obfuscating? Duh.

dazed: why I hate the red-eye

I'll go a year without once taking the red-eye and then all of a sudden I start thinking, hey, I can do this, I'm a macho, "get it done" kind of guy, sure I can take the red-eye instead of staying over an extra night. I've got "stuff to do", and "times-a-wastin'". I'm a "captain of industry" after all, and sometimes the captain needs to be on deck.

(Inject your favorite self-indulgent fantasy of overweening corporate worth here if you'd like.)

So imagine my alarm when 11:30pm (pacific) came and I found myself sitting in SFO staring at the bars across Peets Coffee and every other merchant in the concourse and I saw the looks of abject dread on the faces of everyone seated at gate 86 near me and I realized that I was well and truly screwed.

For I of course had conveniently forgotten that I, in fact, hate the red-eye. I forgot all those other times. . .

. . .like the one time I ended up flush against the window on a front bulkhead seat for 8 hours from SFO to LaGuardia on some Airbus sky taxi wedged next to Attila the Flatulent, praying for death, swearing I would leave the software business and go be a circus carny or something respectable. . .

Through some fluke of logistics or perhaps the collective wisdom on the part of other travellers, I was able to obtain a center seat with three (3) free seats in front of me, three (3) free seats in back of me, and one (1) seat on either side of me. I felt (inexplicably) blessed, and prepared myself for an attempt at sleep. Four hours, dude, you can do it. Spit in the face of your past failures, rise up and "be the ball".

Were it not for the regularly scheduled turbulence and the sodium-flare brightness of "The Corpse Bride" on the dozens of monitor screens glaring down at me from the roof of the cabin, I might have gotten that sleep. But no. Every hour it was bong seatbelt time!! and here come the "flight attendants" to "make sure I have my seatbelt on" and the curiously loud announcement from the "captain" who I endowed with the new title "sleep prevention officer".

I reached for the eject button to spew my tormentors into the icy void of the upper atmosphere, but alas, no such button presented itself to my searching hands.

My other horrid miscalculation was a failure to correctly estimate the amount of space it takes a six-foot-tall American (read: bulky) male to arrange himself into anything vaguely resembling a comfortable sleeping position, even when presented with the opportuntity to "recline" across three seats. It wasn't pretty.

And so at 5:45 this morning, shuffling through Terminal C and through the Tunnel of Epileptic Seizures back to the main terminal, a final insult was delivered when I caught a brief glimpse of myself in a mirrored surface and was treated to one of the most hideous cases of "bed head" I've noted on anyone in a very, very long time. I looked like an immodest blend of hung-over cattle wrangler and, dare I say it, circus carny.

My fears had been realized. I had to be at work before noon, because I had, you know, meetings. With co-workers. All of whom had a lot more sleep chits stored in their brainstem than I had. And here I am looking like a hung-over cattle wrangling circus carny.

Later in the day I discovered (again) why God made caffeine, and thanked Him repeatedly for graciously creating so many exciting ways for me to ingest it. Many of which I explored, to great effect, and in immoderate quantity.

And so now, I look up at the clock and see it is 10:30pm, central. I am officially overtired, and incapable of sleep. My heart rattles like a frustrated child contemplating violence, and my eyeballs feel like very, very lean baseballs of bacon.

I will forget all of this, and some time in the not-too-distant-future, I'll get all macho and think, I can do this, because I'm a macho "get it done" kind of guy.

Remind me then that it's a bad idea, OK? I promise to listen.

eats: groovy japanese breakfast at the Biltmore

I had to fly into SFO last night for a morning meeting here at HQ. Under normal circumstances, travelling on a Sunday is as attractive to me as, well, huitlacoche, but I'm happy to report that the entire experience has been transformed by something rather simple.

The Biltmore Hotel here in Santa Clara features a diminutive "Japanese Buffet Breakfast" as an alternative to the classic heart-stopping "American Buffet Breakfast" trough.

Imagine if you will a breakfast consisting of the following:

A bowl of small grain rice with "bonito sprinkles" topped with small slices of oshinko (also known as tsukimono, or Japanese pickles). Today's selection included pickled daikon radish, cucumber, eggplant, a little seaweed salad, fresh tofu and two other mysterious cubed items that I looked at but avoided.

Accompanying the aforementioned rice + pickle extravaganza was a bowl of "instant" miso soup, crafted from 1. a small pouch of miso paste 2. a small pouch of dried "extras", mostly seaweed and some dried burdock and 3. hot water.

Layer two (or was it three) cups of mediocre coffee and a small glass of (equally mediocre) orange juice, and there you have it. I walked out of breakfast feeling. . .happy.

Disclosure: I am a huge fan of Japanese food, culture, toys, you name it. I've even managed to learn enough Japanese to order sushi, beer, and apologize for not speaking Japanese. ("Gomen nasai, nihon-go ga hanasemasen. . .eigo-go ga hanasemasu-ka?")

Now if I could only find someplace to enjoy a good French breakfast, I'd be set.

press: bc interview in asian wsj

A few weeks ago I spoke with reporter Jeremy Wagstaff, a reporter with the Asian Wall Street Journal, on the curious topic of 'why installing software is so hard'. His article hit the wire today (signup required), but I had to give him props here for what I think is the best computer quote I've read so far in 2006:

The bottom line is, your computer is happiest when you take it out of the box for the first time and boot it up. It's all downhill from there on. I love software and would love you to like it too, but until things get easier, I'd suggest you think hard before you install something new.

Awww, Jeremy, we all know a computer without software is like a day without sunshine. Until fully networked operating systems exist, and until all of the tools we use can be accessed in real-time (and off-line as well) via broadband connections, we're stuck with the sad reality that software needs to get installed.

So whether you're a fan of MSI, InstallScript, RPM, ZIP, TAR, Debian, shell scripting or whatever, you have to package your software for delivery, and unless you want unhappy users, you better get it right. Mr. Wagstaff captured that thought of mine perfectly:

The way he sees it, many software developers spend too much time writing their software, and not enough thinking about how it might actually get onto your computer.

Huzzah, point made!

press: bc interview in SD Times

"The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about." --- Oscar Wilde.

This article in the January 1st, 2006 issue of SD Times is part of the push behind the new InstallShield Collaboration product. I'm especially happy about the banner quote: "If you're not thinking about how to go to market early in the (development) process, you're going to have problems."

Amen to that. Think about how your customers want to consume your product first - not last.

observed: what is special about 10% market share?

In a TechWeb article from yesterday, reporter Gregg Keizer cited a study from NetApplications claiming that Mozilla's Firefox browser is within "half a point" of capturing 10% of the browser marketplace.

He goes on to quote NetApplications' VP of Marketing, Vince Vizzaccaro, who said, "Firefox is very close to hitting a critical mass of 10 percent, which could mean a more rapid adoption rate."

I remember reading about Firefox hitting 10% share last year based on a report from OneStat.com, but this is the first time I've seen someone mention that there is something magical about a 10% share.

What is so special about 10% in the browser marketplace?

• Does 10% put you into the realm of the post-chasm pragmatists?
• Does it signify a tipping point in market reach beyond which word-of-mouth begins to accelerate adoption?
• Does it mean you're big enough for larger competitors to take seriously?

In the case of Firefox, a product without a big marketing budget, no direct mail, no journal advertising, none of the "traditional" marketing you'd see in other products, I'm wondering if the 10% share really matters. Other than the obvious lovely feeling it gives the Mozilla people, and the agita it gives the MSFT people (though they'd never admit it, naturally).

Firefox is already growing by word-of-mouth. People who are in a position to choose browsers (and this isn't everyone) use it and love it. I use it because I appreciate the experience it gives me - tabbed browsing, an easy plug-in model and update function are tops on my list. I also value that there seem to be fewer security issues associated with Firefox.

So while I think a Firefox share of 10% is cool, I'm not sure if it is as meaningful as capturing 10% share in other software spaces - because not everyone is in a position to choose what browser they use, especially the home user. Let me explain.

If you're one of the millions of non-technical home computer users, are you going to know about Firefox, much less go to the effort of replacing your existing browser? You have to have some measure of computer fluency to be able to reach out, acquire Firefox, install and use it.

If the folks at Mozilla can get over that hump - to make Firefox available on more and more hardware by default - then they should blow by 10%. Seems axiomatic, but what the heck.

voiceover: I love residuals

"I got a check in the mail yesterday from my agent."

Never were sweeter words written than those, but they're all the more sweet because it was a residuals payment.

The Very Nice People at the National PTA, in partnership with the Very Nice People at J Walter Thompson (cool website), elected to reuse a radio spot I recorded last year ("Poetry Club") on the Internet during 2006.

Thank you, PTA and JWT, and thank you Debbie.

I've not written a lot about voiceover acting yet on ack/nak, but I will over the coming weeks. If you have any questions about it, let me know.

article: tracking net (and software) usage

In an ecommercetimes.com article from this morning titled "How to Count Clicks on the Net", reporter Sarah Lacy describes a project called "the Nomenclature Project" being conducted by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), a "trade group that sets guidelines and standards for online advertising".

The goal of this project is to establish standards for determining exactly how many people visit a single website.

A quick leap over to the IAM's homepage reveals:

IAB General Membership is open to companies that sell any form of interactive advertising, including online, email, wireless, interactive television or other emerging platforms.

IAB Associate Members are those companies whose business supports the sale of interactive advertising and marketing. Associate Members enjoy similar benefits to IAB General Members, including involvement in committees, research and events.

Makes sense to me. IAB's members are the people who are spending money. They want/need some standards around how to define the key metric used to set pricing: discrete clicks.

To its credit, the Nomenclature Project seeks to establish "who is looking at what", which is different than just counting hits.

This is, obviously, a critical piece of intelligence, complicated by the wide variety of ways in which content is now being distributed.

I'm asking myself: if this is possible for web content, why can't I get the same information about my software? Replace the word "content" with "software" in these articles, and you get an interesting perspective.

Who wouldn't love to get detailed metrics on what elements of your software product are actually being used? How about details on what versions are active in the field, and how often they are used? Wouldn't it be cool to get details on what parts of your help system are hit most?

Once you had this data, think of all the good you could do with it. You could actually focus on the features your customers value, the use cases that reflect their real-world needs, and focus less on the "bloatware" features that look good in the requirements but which don't translate into real customer value. You could document the adoption rates of new products, and help fine-tune end of life planning based on actual utilization numbers.

And perhaps most importantly to the product marketing guy, you could correlate outbound marketing to actual product usage in order to see if your messaging works (or doesn't).

Tracking usage using a consistent set of definitions, and reporting on them in a consistent way, is the first step. I'm hopeful that the Nomenclature Project can get it right.

sigh: overheard at the gym

"Look at how crowded it is today. This place is packed, and it's never packed this time of day."

"Yeah, it's all the new years resolution types. It'll be back to normal in a month."

For someone who resolved on 12/31/05 to go back to the gym on a regular basis in 2006, this hurt a bit at first, then it made me angry, then I realized that they're right.

The same thing could be said for mature, well-recognized software brands. They are what they are, and attempts to change them are destined for failure. Best to not bother.

I've got one of these mature brands in my bag in 2006, and figuring out how to get it to the gym on a regular basis is going to be as challenging as doing the same myself.

observed: value innovation @ yotel

If you missed them the first time around, three of the product marketing gospels are available together via a (paid) PDF download from the Harvard Business Review, which introduces them like this:

To spur new growth, stop competing the way your rivals do. Instead, rewrite the rules of the game and stake out new market spaces. Focus on satisfying consumers' most pressing needs in radical ways, asking what your customers really value. Then ask, "How would we provide that value if we forgot everything we know about our industry's traditions?" Combine the advantages of several industries' offerings to provide quantum leaps in value. And serve customers your industry has neglected.

"Value Innovation: The Strategic Logic of High Growth" by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne (HBR reprint R0407P) is the one I really want to call attention to, because you can see one of their examples in action today with Yotel (article, homepage). It's a beautiful illustration of value innovation in action.

You can almost hear Mauborgne and Kim's voices in your head when you read the folllowing from the aforementioned article from CNN.com:

...while easyHotel cuts costs by stripping away luxuries such as televisions, Yotel bosses say their creation will squeeze high-end amenities into rooms.

Each soundproof cabin will contain a sofa that converts into a double bed, a pull down desk, closet space, adjustable mood lighting, a shower, wireless Internet, an iPod connection and a flat-screen TV.

Check-in and check-out will be automated, but food and drinks will be available.

Now that's value innovation.

metric: RSS brand recognition = 4%

Not great numbers, but not unexpected.

Break out your copy of Crossing the Chasm and consider the marvel of the bell curve. The current level of RSS brand recognition is consistent with the percentage of the marketplace occupied by the enthusiast and visionary cohorts.

What does this tell us of the maturity of RSS, and by association, of the "Web 2.0" meme which counts the rise of RSS as its most precious indicator of relevancy?

RSS is an early step in the journey toward a web-based browsing idiom that can echo the same experience you get in a newspaper. The Kierkegaardian leap of faith required to see this potential in an unsorted, flat ASCII listing of topics is the typical purvieu of . . . enthusiasts and visionaries, so no big whoop that brand recognition is only 4%.

Moving from early-adopter to pragmatist consumers doesn't mean diluting or dumbing-down the technology - it means you have to clarify the value proposition and simplify the consumption of this new technology.

Think about how you consume a newspaper - I'll use the copy of the New York Times that lands at the end of my driveway each morning as my point-of-reference:

1. It delivers information using a consistent, predictable meta-index (section 1 = top news, section 2 = business and sports; last 2 pages of the front section are op/ed) and slightly less predictable, but not inconsistent, content-index (world news dominates the first half of the front section, followed by national, then local).
   
2. It employs a variety of structural points-of-reference to signify "urgency": is it a two-column headline? is it below the fold? is it buried under an ad? does it use a big font? is it all capitals?
   
3. It is consistently worth reading, even on off-days. This speaks to the high quality of the writers and the editing.
   
4. It offers content drawn on from wide variety of subject areas
5. It offers content written to the same reading level
   

Now compare this experience to your garden-variety RSS feed:

1. There is no way for you to differentiate the urgency or relevance of the content you're reading in an RSS feed based on visual cues, even from the New York Times' feed
2. RSS feeds offer no predictability (when will the blogger write on trends vs news vs opinion) with regards to the content delivered
3. Feeds are a single-media (text) versus a multi-media (text + pictures + tactile cues) experience.

RSS feeds deliver an index first, content second - print media deliver content first with an implicit index.

To drive RSS feeds as a preferred vehicle for content delivery, they'll have to embrace what the collective brain-stems of readers are programmed to respond to:

1. Multi-media
2. An implicit content index
3. Consistency

As a student of letterpress, I realize the written word can be delivered in a richly visceral way. The web is a great vehicle for multi-media, but it has yet to capture the imagination of the masses when it comes to delivering what individuals need as much as their daily bread:

News.

Embrace the simple beauty of the hyperlink - engage more of the senses - enable the pleasure center of the brain that loves unstructured wandering inside the structured framework of a news "container", and RSS may take off.

If all RSS enables is a way to deliver a content index festooned with ads, consumers - who are smarter than anyone gives them credit - will reject it 96% of the time.