computers should be less friendly

In Scoble’s blog Why enterprise software isn’t sexy, he asks a simple question, “Any of you have any ideas on how to make business software sexy?”  A lot of my fellow Enterprise Irregulars have taken Robert to task about this, saying that it is in reality sexy:

“[B]eauty and sexiness is in the eye of the beholder… [seeing] UPS give each one of its drivers a DIAD - and they did it years before the recent wave of personal gadgets - with GPS, wifi, scanning and other technologies. And with a battery that lasts all day. Can our iPhones do that?”

Vinnie does a great job showing how underneath the ugly exterior enterprise software is amazing and sexy.  Most of these posts are all missing the important comparison Scoble is making that Nick Carr picks up on here:

perpetuating a false dichotomy between the friendliness of consumer apps and the seriousness of business apps, all that Krigsman is doing is giving enterprise vendors cover for continuing to produce software that’s difficult and unpleasant to use

The post from Michael Krigsman(which although Nick beats up on chooses not to link to) talks about, how all this isn’t relevant because enterprise software is “intended to “enable core business processes” with a high degree of reliability, security, scalability, and so on.”

Enterprise vendors need to be keenly aware of the consumer market but, SAP’s customers don’t pay them to run around like Scoble and chase every new technology/website that comes out.  They pay them to make measured, smart choices with what they create and how they spend their R&D money.  Their customers do indeed expect the software they create to have a “a high degree of reliability, security, scalability.”

Enterprise vendors have an advantage – they can ride on top of the frothy startup market cherry picking things that work well and will deliver value back to an enterprise’s bottom line.  In the consumer tech industry, the invisible hand of the market is addicted to crack and has the attention span of a two year old.  The consumer market is chaotic, jumpy and prone to fickleness.  Online companies/ideas are created and destroyed everyday, and it is up to Scoble and other followers of tech to survey what’s out there, they need the thousands of readers.  The two industries have totally different business models, Twitter needs millions of users to monetize their software, SAP is very profitable on about 40k “users” world wide.

This shows the Enterprise software market is much more focused and so is their advertising.  Dan Farber does an excellent job of handling this topic and refocusing the discussion on what Gates actually said:

The business computing market, which is way bigger than the consumer computing market, no one pays attention to it. Even in the Wall Street Journal, and you think, oh, this is the paper they’re going to tell me about business computing; no, it’s all about consumer computing

LiveSide.net - Bill Gates, Mix n Mash, and the future of Microsoft

Dan goes on to point out why ZDnet covers enterprise topics:

We recognize that in the 21st century you cannot easily separate the two, given technology is deeply embedded in work and personal lives… [T]he financial equation is not just about page views or number of readers–more important is the quality of readers we draw into the ZDNet orbit

Who am I to contradict Dan when it comes to the determination of advertising revenue — after all he is the Editor in Chief of ZDnet.  In the advertising arena you can also point to things like SAP sponsoring golf stars, tennis pros, formula one cars, etc.  Who watches these things?  CIOs, and other TLA execs who make these decisions.  If SAP cared about CPM they would advertise with NASCAR.  Let’s just give SAP the benefit of the doubt that they understand their market more then Scoble.

I couldn’t agree more that Enterprise vendors need to make things easier to use and an all around friendlier experience but, they need to be smart and measured because that’s what their customers want.

I want a Life Hub.  Don’t worry I still want a phone/PDA, iPod, camera and computer.  I’m one of those people that believes a device that does “everything” doesn’t do any of them particularly well.  I want something that I can carry around that plugs me into my or your devices and shares my data with them.

When I sit in my car, I want my Life Hub to connect up to my music interface device which connects to my car so the controls are mapped to the steering wheel and the music comes out the speakers.

When I go to the office, I want my Life Hub to connect to my work phone and register my cell number so my work phone will ring with calls placed to my cell phone.

When I take a picture with my camera, I want it saved on my Life Hub.  I want to be able to browse those pictures on my smart phone and email them to my friends.  Kind of like Dave’s social camera.  If I so chose my Life Hub can broadcast to others the picture I just took, without or without the tagging my camera added.

Why do I need 97 different syncing programs to get my Outlook Calendar, Google Calendar, and iCal Calendar to line up!  Aren’t these just visualizations of the same data set?  If I had my calendar on my Life Hub, I could just access it from there.  Who cares where I’m sitting, at my home machine, work machine or at the Library.

So, what is a Life Hub, basically a high capacity solid state memory drive ( Intel is looking to get up to 160GB in the next few years ) with a very high bandwidth wireless connection.  It has a UI that lets you “allow” devices to connect for a period of time and access certain types of data on your Life Hub, read and/or write.  The idea is that this thing should eventually be small enough to fit on a key chain, think thumb drive on crack — in reality it could be your key chain!  Ever seen someone unlock and start their Prius without taking a key out?

If it had strong encryption you could store your X-Rays and patient files on the drive.  What if you could allow your doctor to review a certain set of them for a period then when they are done zap the records back to you?  Why should Microsoft control your health records, or even Google for that matter?  Today Adobe PDFs can be locked so they are only viewed for a period of time.

Is all this possible today?  Some of it — some of it is also hard, standardizing the wireless protocol for instance.  Currently, there is no wireless standard that rivals Firewire for throughput sending a RAW image from today’s DSLR cameras, BlueTooth just won’t do.

I have no idea how to solve these problems or “the chicken and the egg problem” of this only being useful if there are devices out there that can connect to it.  I do know that I want one.

At SAP TechEd Las Vegas I wanted to bounce some ideas off the RedMonk Gang( Michael Cotè and James Governor ) about what I think the new Developer will look like instead I somehow got roped into a full blown interview on Synthesizers.  So, I’ve frantically spent the last few weeks solidifying my ideas in this area.

The new Synthesizer will have a few required tenets, listed in order of importance, underneath are a many “optional” components.  It’s okay if you don’t exhibit these characteristics — you might still be able to get a job flipping burgers:

Code

Sorry, namby-pamby non-coder types need not apply.  A real understanding of programming concepts is required.  However, I’ve found that Synthesizers are generally not language Nazis.  They are more opportunistic in their choice of language, they know a lot about probably one language but, also know when it’s not a good fit for what they are doing.  For instance, why would write a screen saver in ABAP?

Community

This is the area that allows Synthesizers to move faster then anyone else.  They know what is going on, they’re “plugged in.”  They know who is doing good work and they know how to stick those disparate parts together in order to get something better.  Doug Mccune ( my model synthesizer ) has put it best in a post about TileUI:

…how badass [the] open source community libraries for Flex are. I was able to grab these open source libraries and within a few days have something pretty sweet to show for it. A big thanks to everyone behind the PaperVision project, and to Alec Cove for the APE engine. You guys make this stuff easy. [ The making of TileUI ]

What else is in this quote?  Attribution, “A big thanks to Alec Cove for the APE engine.”  Promoter, you can tell from Doug’s tone how much the open source community helped him write this application.  Collaboration, without giving back to these communities you end up looking like a strip miner taking all the best out and not returning anything back.  A example from a totally different world is Thomas Jung, SAP geek and ABAP coder #1.  Thomas has built a ton of innovative stuff in ABAP from Matrix Screen Savers to a full replacement for the delivered web rendering system, changing it from HTML to Flex, named Flob.  At TechEd this year he released Flob, built using my library AJS, which he mentioned he had a few fixes for functionality.  This back and forth consumption and production allow open source projects to grow organically as need.

Communication

This is an obvious one, but again has a similar ebb and flow characteristic.  The most effective Synthesizers have a blog or are really active in forums.  They produce not only code but content, documentation, opinions — they care about what’s out there and what they are putting out there.  They probably read RSS feeds from dozens(at least) of different sources from many different areas.

Broad Knowledge

Underlying all these is less a tenet and more an obvious prerequisite.  Synthesizers want to understand stuff, they want to know about many areas not just Coding.  They might read about other sciences or be super into music.  Samuel Agesilas Pastel is great example of someone with groundings in music and design who also happens to be a sick programmer.  His UML modeling tool, called Saffron UML, parses actionscript libraries and generates great looking UML diagrams.  Just read his blog of a bit and you will see the diverse view he takes to software development.  That diversity allows Synthesizers to keep an anything goes mentality that enables them to see connections where other people see chasms they will never cross.

The funny thing with this set is maybe if you replace the first tenet with “industry analysis” or “accounting” you might get some other folks that are producing new Synthesizers — but I’m just a programmer what do I know.

Thanks to Synthesizer, maverick for the images.