Just as Microsoft seems at last to be struggling out from under the weight of it’s own mediocrity, and is finally, albeit under palpable threats to it’s survival, starting to put usability and desirability at the forefront, Google appears, in turn, to be reaching that tottering, preponderant level of product-portfolio obesity where corporate arrogance begins to seriously outweigh business sense. (more…)
Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category
Is Google the new Microsoft?
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010All-new Iforma brochure for Q1!
Monday, January 11th, 2010
To freshen everything up for the new year, we proudly present our new products and services brochure for your perusal.
The draft is going off to the printer today, so we should have hard copies available within a week or so. If you’re not on our mailing list and you’d like us to send you a copy, please use the contact form and drop us a line. You may download the PDF here.
Product management as rule of law
Monday, October 19th, 2009
Implementing product management methodology within a product team doesn’t always bring about product success. This can be due to a variety of external factors, but I believe it is more usually due to a lack of understanding of what product management actually is than it is any failure of the methodology itself.
Sure, the guys over at Pragmatic Marketing have been doing their bit to help clear up the mystery over the years, but, ultimately, they are just telling you what to do – they’re not there to help you do it successfully. (more…)
Writing useful requirements
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
I’ve been researching and writing software product requirements for over a decade. Through sometimes costly trial-and-error, I’ve learned that writing useful requirements of any kind is extremely difficult. Frankly, anyone who tells you otherwise needs a good clonk on the head – and should immediately be isolated far, far away from the product team.
Good requirements are one of the biggest success factors for a product development project. Take the time, get them right, and everyone involved knows what the goals are, knows what the product should be, and who it’s for. Get them wrong, you fail to articulate the product clearly, and each member of the product team will ultimately follow his or her own agenda, more often than not designing and developing whatever is most interesting to them at the time.
Agile may not be what you think it is.
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009
For several months, I have been planning an article on Agile methods. I was going to talk about the importance of design, or even Design, to the product process, and how, in my professional experience, many Agile teams are making at least as much of a hash of their products as the Waterfall victims that preceded them.
I was going to make the point that, while iteration is immensely useful, there’s no point iterating until you know what your objectives are. (more…)
Will there ever be a 3D asset interchange standard?
Friday, July 3rd, 2009[The following is slightly edited and reproduced from a post I made to a 3D discussion forum on Wednesday 1st. I think it may be of interest to readers]
Regarding open 3D asset file format standards standards, major CG tools vendors tend to have little interest in 3D asset interchange – it’s hard to make any money out of them per se, and it makes it way too easy for competitors and new market entrants to get in on the game. The major vendors would like nothing more than to lock you in whenever they can, or try to force you to use proprietary file SDKs/APIs (typically with restrictive licensing agreements) when they can’t. (more…)
The Design Vacuum in Software Development, Part 1
Monday, June 29th, 2009A personal soap-box issue which my colleagues and friends are certainly tired of me ranting about is what I call the ‘design vacuum’ present in many, if not most, software vendor’s product teams. So I figure it’s high time to rant about it here!
Traditionally, the majority of software companies have been culturally engineering-centric, by which I mean that for the vast majority of software developers there is no tradition of Design as a distinct discipline on a par with Development. This is in stark contrast to virtually every other product-oriented business in existence – CPG, automotive, white goods, consumer electronics and entertainment media nowadays all place at least as much emphasis on design as on engineering, more often than not with dedicated design departments at least as large as their engineering colleagues. (more…)
Excellence Is The Best Policy [Picture Imperfect]
Thursday, June 18th, 2009There’s an interesting post over on Picture Imperfect here that gets into how product companies can no longer scam customers as easily thanks to the power of social media, and the conversations that allow people to share their experiences more quickly than companies can pull the wool over their eyes.
Alain seems to be into the idea that only really excellent products (and their vendors) will endure, and that companies need to listen to creat those great products. There’s some truth in that idea, but … it feels a little utopian. I think weight must also be given to companies’ increasing ability to manipulate; better packaging, sohpistication, pricing models, channel lock-ins, and so on. I think it’s still an arms race with no one side (vendors vs. consumers) ever getting the upper hand for long.
Becoming a Platform [Product Beautiful]
Friday, June 12th, 2009There’s a great new post over on Paul Young’s Product Beautiful blog covering the pitfalls and success factors of creating a platform-style product. Paul notes that “Platform programs are dangerous because they are usually under-stated in time and resource commits – they have the potential to touch every part of your existing spaghetti code. The urge in the development team to re-architect during a platform build is irresistible. “ I wholeheartedly agree, having played a lead product management role during the development of the Softimage|XSI SDK and having designed several versions of the 3rd party developer program.
In the case of XSI, the SDK was initially intended as a way for customers to integrate it into their production pipelines and more easily develop their own automation and deploy versioning / asset management into the application. For that reason we initially felt that the APIs could be quite limited in scope and didn’t need to be a true reflection of the (somewhat squirrelly) internals. How wrong we were. As soon as they got hold of it, customers wanted to hack the app, and add their own tools and features. It took a further ten man-years of development to bring the APIs into line with customer needs, and involved signficant internal cleanup to get it there.
Our mistake was to rely on the needs customers that screamed loudly in the assumption that they offered a set of requirements that were valid across the industry – and also that these customers knew what they wanted and would ask for it. We should have invested more time in planning the SDK based on a better market sampling, observation-based data (as opposed to customer requests) and more thorough analysis.
Wild App Store hyperwall blows developers minds [Apple Insider]
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009I just saw this article over on Apple Insider featuring Apple’s amazing visualization of Apps being downloaded from the App Store. Although it’s not quite live (the article says it is delayed by 5 minutes), each and every App icon from the store is apparently represented, with a ripple spreading out form each icon as the App is downloaded. I can’t think of a more impressive way to convince developers of the opportunity the App Store offers. Pretty damn cool.
Check it out here.