The Heretech

All your authentication are belong to us

In my childhood, many of the bad guys in TV shows were corporate overlords. Tweed jackets and dark turtlenecks were the apparel of choice. They were ridiculously unctuous, spouting obliquely phrased threats like, "This Mannix fellow has become...Inconvenient." 

These villains were the creation of TV studios trying to capitalize on the post-60s, post-Watergate hangover, during which corporate executives were about as trusted as...Well, about as trusted as they are today. Corporate goons may be even less popular today than they were a few decades ago, after wrecking the global economy, plundering their own companies, and cackling gleefully as they collected their obscenely large bonuses. Heck, Steve Jobs even has a penchant for turtlenecks.

 Distrust of corporations is having a profound impact on an important issue in the technology industry, centralized authentication and identity management for the cloud. The more applications that go into the cloud, the greater the demand for a centralized mechanism for managing authentication across these systems. Most of the would-be guardians of authentication for the cloud are corporations like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, which poses a dilemma for these companies and users alike.

The big weapon that vendors have in this competition is adoption. Facebook claims that 60 million users per month use the Facebook Connect API as an authentication service for some other application. Meanwhile, the well-intentioned OpenID project, still hasn't cracked the one-half of 1% barrier for adoption among websites. 

What accounts for Facebook Connect's success? The fact that it's based on Facebook. People are already using the standard Facebook application to connect with friends, post status updates, and maintain their profiles. Facebook adoption sells Facebook Connect. OpenID has no comparable starting point. Instead, OpenID looks like yet another account that you need to create, yet another login that you need to remember.

Meanwhile, Facebook continues to proliferate across platforms. From your iPhone to your XBox, Facebook is there, easy to set up, easy to use. Other social applications, such as Twitter and Google are equally ubiquitous, so guess what? They're interested, too, in this authentication business. Google, for example, believes that Gmail and Google Apps provide a strong incentive for other sites to use their authentication service.

As impressive as the momentum behind these authentication services may be, the brick wall of distrust lies ahead. The companies that we've been discussing have all done something recently to increase anxieties about questions of access. Facebook keeps diddling with its privacy settings, sometimes to implement its own ideas of how people should use their services, at other times dealing with user complaints about these notions. While a single product group at Google may have been responsible for the Buzz goof, the backlash is directed at Google as a whole. Apple's decision to pull titillating content from the application store invites speculation about what other kinds of censorship it might exercise in the future. Microsoft's traditional problems getting people to trust them seem almost quaint.

Earlier this week, I argued that PM teams need a bit more security and risk expertise than they may have today. In companies that provide cloud authentication services, or use them in their applications, PMs need to deal with a complementary requirement that goes beyond purely technical details: trust. 

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

Agile mainstream flows into Collabnet

Recently, colleague Dave West and I published some research showing how Agile has gone mainstream in both the tech industry and IT departments. Here's another sign of the mainstreaming of Agile: Collabnet's acquisition of Danube.

If you follow the market for developer tools, you've seen milder indicators of this trend already. For example, last year, Atlassian acquired Greenhopper as a plug-in for JIRA. Other tools vendors, such as Compuware, have added Agile configurations to their existing products.

Collabnet's acquisition of Danube is a bigger step. Danube's core product, ScrumWorks, is a lot more than just a configuration or a plug-in. Collabnet now has a fully-featured PLM tool that's designed to model and support the Scrum process. Not only is Collabnet writing a big check to buy Danube, but it's also making a commitment in its portfolio strategy to fit ScrumWorks into its constellation of other products. That's not a trivial amount of additional engineering, support, marketing, and sales effort that Collabnet is assuming. (FYI, here's Dave West's take on this acquisition.)

Other developer tools vendors should ponder Collabnet's move. Moving from Waterfall to Agile changes more than just the checklist for completing a release cycle. Agile also requires changes in values, and even a completely different concept of what a release represents. To support this profound transformation, tools may need more than just tweaks to their functionality.

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

PM's latest annoying responsibility

The more social we get, the more we expose about ourselves. That's a fact of life that antedates social media, the Internet, or computers. From this perspective, social media are just a new way to  reveal ourselves, sometimes by choice, other times not. 

For the PM in charge of product requirements or release checklists, working on a social media product requires standing your ground on security and privacy issues. I won't beat on the unfortunate launch of Google Buzz further, except to make one last point. To avoid the sort of morass in which Google finds itself, someone in PM needs to have both the authority to insist on whatever external testing, use case analysis, red team testing—some way, any way, to avoid a class action lawsuit.

Unfortunately, very few PMs are experts in security and privacy. Historically, compliance and risk management don't overshadow the tech industry the way they figure prominently in pharmaceuticals and other tightly-regulated verticals. The section 508 requirements of the Americans With Disabilities Act, an important box to check before releasing a new product, is the closest many PMs get to anything resembling regulation.

That situation may change. Security specialists in tech companies deal with technical issues like, "How vulnerable are we to cross-site attacks?" Normally, they are not the people who think through the capabilities of the product to see if there is some way that product might compromise security or privacy. Even if they volunteered for the job, it's not feasible to bring them into the product development cycle early enough to make a difference. Nor will they be able to stay engaged to monitor how the features inevitably change over the course of development.

Therefore, it's unavoidable that security, risk management, privacy, and related issues naturally fall into the laps of PMs. Social media products raise questions about who can pry into your personal information, or how these details might become public without your permission or knowledge. Other products create different risks. For example, the Strange Case Of The Voyeuristic Laptops at a Philadelphia-area high school raises the question, is the company that produced the software used to spy on students at all liable for the abuse of the technology? Does circumventing an operating system's security features create other points of legal exposure?

I've yet to meet a PM who loves dealing with these kinds of issues. Who wants to be the person who, in a release meeting, presents the 15 potential security problems that need to be addressed before the product ships? Particularly if, just before you, someone gave a brilliant demo of how incredibly cool the product will be, if only it could get into the hands of customers. And, of course, success is defined as the absence of problems, not positive gains that everyone can celebrate. ("Woohoo! Three product releases without a lawsuit!") Sadly, I don't see a way of avoiding this responsibility.

Vote for Silicon Valley P-Camp topics

If you're a product manager or product manager on the West Coast, you should take a minute to vote for the topics you want to see covered in the Silicon Valley P-Camp next month. Here's my humble offering, how PM has become an increasingly a strategic asset in technology companies, why this shift is happening, and what you can do to convince your management of the wisdom of making these changes. That's the punchline of the research I've been doing in the last five years, and P-Camp is a good opportunity to wrap it all up with a pretty bow.

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

The machine is the message

I've just finished The Great Migration Of 2012. You're looking at one result, posting from my iPhone. It's interesting to see how much of a difference a device change can make in your attitude towards specific types of content. For example, Twitter seems more natural here than on my PC. I have far less interest in tweeting while working on the laptop, but using the iPhone to tweet while I'm sitting idly in a coffee shop feels OK.

Homonyms are not rebranding

Since a noteworthy portion of this blog's readership watches something on the network in question, I'll pass along the news that SyFy has made Time's list of 10 worst corporate name changes. It's not as bad as Blackwater's new name, Xe, which sounds like an alien overlord that you might see on the SyFy channel, but it's still pretty stupid.

Buzz as a PM failure

Google now has two recent examples of how not to launch a product. To be more specific, the launches of Wave and Buzz are unfortunate illustrations of product management and product marketing breakdowns.

The first, Wave, was clearly a product marketing failure. Whether or not Wave is a work of sublime genius is beside the point. The dominant reaction to Wave was confusion. Was Wave more an application or a platform? A replacement for e-mail, or a supplement to it? Something built for a general audience, or just techies? Google somehow fumbled the most basic product marketing: We built this product to address this specific problem, for this specific audience, in this specific way.

The Buzz launch also had its product marketing problems, but as discussed in this blog last week, it had at least one huge product management snafu: the privacy features. It wasn't clear whether the auto-generated list of followers was open to the general public or not, and whether you were helpless to deal with unwanted overtures from other users. If you wanted to check, or God help you, change the relevant settings, it took some grit and cleverness to figure it out. And then there were new revelations, such as, by default, Buzz exposed the list of your RSS subscriptions in Google Reader.

A Google PM announced on his blog that the company has implemented "some immediate improvements we are making today based on your feedback." . I would add the word somewhat to that previous sentence. Hunting down some of the options is still difficult. The Buzz UI doesn't clearly convey what the product is supposed to do, other than post updates to some group of people who already appear in my e-mail contact list. Am I supposed to continue e-mailing them, or use this tool instead? What are the pros and cons?

Google got itself into this mess because the Buzz team did no external testing. Once again, a team of very smart people are only smart about the world they know. I'm sure Buzz worked just great in the pocket universe of Google itself. Unfortunately, the domain of people who would be using Buzz was much larger.

I'm a bit worried that the mistakes may continue. Google is collecting feedback through the Gmail forum, an approach that poses two immediate obstacles: (1) knowing that the Gmail forum exists; (2) knowing that the Gmail forum is the right place for Buzz feedback. Plus, who's posting here, representative users, or a self-selected group of Google followers?

Google can get plenty of advice from social media mavens, but that may be exactly the wrong source of guidance. Anyone experienced (or jaded) enough to complain that Buzz commits all the same mistakes as Friendfeed is someone vastly more experienced with, and invested in, social media than the average Gmail user.

My unsolicited advice to the Buzz PMs? Get out of the office. Sit down with a few people who look like the archetypal user and watch them puzzle through Buzz. Then go back to the forums, the blog posts, and other sources of information for whatever good ideas they might provide. Ultimately, you also need to insist on control over the feature list.

That strategy might run against the grain of Google's engineering-centric corporate culture, but Google is also a company that prides itself on being open to new ideas. Here's the next experiment: give PM the opportunity to collect real requirements, and the power to enforce them. See what happens.

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

Google's buzzkill

Yesterday, my reaction to Google Buzz was bafflement. Today, it's frustration, and I can see why some people are finding Buzz to be infuriating.

Product marketing flubs
The Buzz roll-out was not exactly a triumph of product marketing. Starting with the "Try Buzz Now!" entry page, It isn't clear what Buzz does, or is supposed to do, or does in some other part of the Gmail UI that you haven't found yet. Is this a micro-blogging tool? A first step into something like Facebook, with a lot of other Facebook-esque capabilities yet to be implemented?

The introductory video wasn't much help. It did make it clear that Google wants to be the place you consider the center of your social media universe, the place from which you see and link to everything else. For a lot of people, Facebook is that place. For others, it's Twitter. Now, Google wants to compete with them.

Whether Buzz is going to pull users away from Facebook or Twitter, or if it's going to attract people who don't really use anything yet as their social media hub, remains to be seen. As of today, there's not a lot of functionality in Buzz, so other than it being a tool that enhances your experience using other Google applications, it's not clear what Buzz's special value is.

On launch day, Google didn't make the basic use case clear. Are we seeing a failure of product marketing, or is the Buzz development team itself unclear about how people would use this product, or why?

Today, I may have an answer to that question. It's not comforting.

Product design gaffes
Some of the people using Buzz in the last 24 hours have discovered that, in an attempt to be helpful, it exposes the list of people with whom you regularly exchange e-mail. As the Silicon Valley Insider said, "Imagine a boss discovers a subordinate emails with executives at a competitor."

There's nothing in the Buzz UI that tells you, loudly and clearly, about the visibility of the followers list that it auto-generates from your frequent active e-mail correspondents. To make a bad situation worse, even if you learn about this problem, it's hard to fix it.

It takes a lot of digging to unearth the place in Google's UI where you set this privacy flag. Here's a quick list of logical places where I looked, but did not find that option:

• The Google Buzz Privacy Policy Page. Thank you for telling me that I have options. Why not also give me a link to the page where I can exercise them?
• A Buzz post. I thought it might be here, if there were some options at the post level about the visibility of that content. Who knows, it might lead to other security options.
• Your list of followers. Nope, nothing there about the visibility of the list.

Eventually, I found the option. Here's how you get there:

1. Click your picture. Why I would ever click there is unclear. There's no hover text about this being the link to my profile, but that's where it is. Perhaps I'm such a narcissist that I always click pictures of myself, just to see what happens next.
2. Click Edit profile. The Buzz profile is another exercise in obfuscation. It includes information you've already seen, such as your picture and the list of recent Buzz posts. In a very narrow strip of small text links, there's something labeled Edit Profile. That's the right one to click.
3. Click About Me. Huh, I saw another tab with the same name earlier, but this is where I edit that information. Why I can't jump to the About Me editor from the About Me page is unclear.
4. Check or uncheck, er, something. Earlier, I peeked to see if my followers list was public, and thankfully, it wasn't. However, this page tells me that I have exposed that information. What else would you conclude if you saw a check mark next to Display the list of people I'm following and people following me?I'm afraid to touch the Allow people to contact me (without showing my email address) option, since I'm not sure what it means.

Clearly, the UI needs work. It hides the existence of a privacy problem, makes it hard to find the page where you can fix it, and then confuses you about what happens when you check or uncheck an option.

Privacy in social networking isn't exactly a new issue. Why then did Google release Buzz with a big privacy defect? Probably because the Buzz team didn't see the problem, or didn't think it rose to showstopper proportions. 

Problematic assumptions
In a post earlier this week, I discussed the assumptions about privacy (or lack thereof) that many social media companies make. If your baseline user is a teenager or twenty-something, you might build a product that makes assumptions about privacy that work only within that population segment. Relative to other age groups, young adults don't mind sharing where they are, or what they're doing, or what they're thinking, throughout the day. As you grow older, you get a bit more finicky about your personal information. The appeal of a service that splatters your personal information across the Internet drops dramatically.

When I wrote that post, I had no idea it would provide a segue into a discussion about Buzz. Unfortunately, once again, we see a product designed for an archetype of the avid social networking user, a 23 year-old with lots of friends who are interested in how good the udon is at a new restaurant near the Ferry Building. In fact, some members of the Buzz team probably fit that profile themselves. Google prides itself on its ability to hire smart, young engineers who are brimming with ideas and enthusiasm. Left to their own devices, they'll build software that makes perfect sense to them. Unfortunately, many of their users are not like them at all.

In other software companies, the development team has an ally who can tell them when the design doesn't fit the concerns, work habits, and skills of users: the product manager. Google does not have strong product management, so there may not have been a gatekeeper to tell the Buzz team that the product wasn't ready to go out the door.

There's nothing wrong with focusing on young adults as the first adopters of social media, or even the vast majority of your intended users. However, what works for them may not work for other age groups. It may not even work for everyone in that age group, since there are plenty of young adults who don't like giving out personal information. From a product management and a product marketing perspective, it's time for some companies in the social media business to grow up.

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

Mardi Gras marketing

The Cranky Product Manager is looking for the worst company and product descriptions. Oh, what a rich bounty that will produce. Here's one of her examples:

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight. Additionally, this collaboration and content management server provides IT professionals and developers with the platform and tools they need for server administration, application extensibility, and interoperability.

The most obvious problem with this summary is that it's too long to really be a summary. Try giving that elevator pitch in one breath without keeling over from hypoxia.

Where should the editorial chainsaw begin to cut? Certainly, this message should be cut in twain. If people trying to collaborate with each other receive the biggest benefits, then leave out the administrative stuff. If developers and administrators are going to be the happiest with the product, then amputate the end user stuff. You can always get to the additional benefits later.

Even if you cut down the number of sentences, the words in the sentences need improvement, too. If you were to recite this paragraph, as is, to a random stranger, they might think you were a dangerous maniac, rapidly rattling off a string of words whose meaning isn't exactly clear. If you reduce the number of words, congratulations, you've graduated from dangerous maniac to harmless crackpot. (Hmmm, yes, enterprise content management, and sharing across boundaries...Sounds very nice. I'd love to find out what you're talking about, but I think I hear my phone ringing.)

If you've worked in the technology industry, you know exactly how a group of very smart people devise this sort of rococo verbiage. You want to showcase everything that the customer might be able to do with the product, so you cram as many different facets of the product into a paragraph as you can. If the customer likes organizational effectiveness, they're going to love application extensibility!

A good term for this phenomenon is Mardi Gras marketing, which  bedecks your message with as many shiny verbal gewgaws as humanly possible. Of course, the whole point of a Mardi Gras costume is that you're dressing in a tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top fashion that would never work the other 364 days of the year. This is not the sartorial choice you want to make for your next job interview.

If your message starts with what the product can do, there's no logical stopping point in describing it, other than the end of the feature list. Instead, the first thing you should say is something vivid and compelling about the problem the technology addresses, which is the value part of the value proposition. You can get to the features later.

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

You're not the boss of me, young man

Social media start-ups often seem to overlook an important demographic reality: age. These companies bet their business on behavior that works for young adults (say, 18 to 25), but may fall apart completely for people older than that.

Case in point: Geo-location applications. Maybe the business model for foursquare, Gowalla, et al. is a-OK with the idea of sticking to a younger set. Checking in where you are, and seeing where  your friends and relations have checked in, is kinda cool. Sprinkle in some useful information about where you are, and someone probably can make some money providing this service.

Of course, the thread that runs through that use case, and the product designed to support it, and the company built around that product, is the willingness to share information about your location. Pull out that thread, and the entire fabric of the business falls apart, unless it's designed to support only a small part of the population.

The Digital Age has been around for a while
The moment you look beyond that age cohort, you start running into problems. As colleague Dave Frankland discovered, the older you get, the less information you're willing to share. The reasons are rooted more in the realities of getting older than the effects of growing up in a digital age.

If you define Generation X as the people who are now 29 to 42, they already have grown up in a digital age. Long ago, they started ordering things on Amazon.com and heard how e-tailers collect and analyze information about you. They know that their ISPs have information about their web browsing. They lived through several generations of cyber-crime.

On the flip side, they've seen the Internet grow up, becoming increasingly useful with each generation of technology and capability. They knew what it was like to have a phone without Internet access, and they saw web publishing go from a dark art to something commonplace. They've seen the risks of the evolving Internet, but they've also seen its benefits. The Gen Xers probably take the positives less for granted than the generations that follow them.

Which is why it's important to note that Generation X's willingness to share personal information is less than Generation Y's. This cohort is hardly a group of fuddy-duddies, but they are the first step in a curve of increasing sensitivity to privacy, by age group.

The digital world has yet to replace real life
It's not hard to understand why. The older you get, the more focused you get on work. Your employer already owns a big chunk of your life, so why should they have potential access to information about where you've been and what you've been doing there? Also, a great number of life's landmarks, both good and bad, depend on a degree of privacy. The skunk works project you've doing for work, the trip to assuage the concerns of an angry customer, the romantic weekend get-aways (especially the illicit ones), the consequent visit to the divorce lawyer, the time spent in rehab, the visit to a friend who doesn't want everyone to know how sick she is...All of these events demand privacy, not disclosure.

Privacy is something that people want to control. A recent study by researchers at UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon showed how clear people are on the distinction between protecting your personal information and selling it. There is no "green field" of people who haven't formed preferences about disclosing their personal information.

If that doesn't convince you, here's another statistic that should shake your faith in the "Digital Generation" argument: the older the user, they more likely that person is to use online services to interact with government agencies. A young population may be steeped in digital culture, but they also have less reason to visit the city planning agency or the local IRS office than the older set.

Social media are revolutionary, for younger and older populations alike. Still, the next time someone tells you how earth-shattering something like geo-spatial apps will be, try imagining the twenty-somethings using it today when they reach their 40s or 50s.

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

Stock photos are the Muzak of the Web

Stock photos on corporate web sites are lot like Muzak in elevators, or the distracting TVs left on in restaurants and bars. They're portions of the user experience that normally attracts none of your attention. If you do stop and think about them, they're just plain weird.

Why does anyone think I'd like to hear a mash-up of Bruce Springsteen and Mantovani? Why is the TV turned on to a soccer game, or for that matter, turned on at all? And why are all these people in the stock photos shown here so damn happy about using their computers?

Everywhere I've ever worked, people stare at the computer screen with the grim determination that befits the job they're doing. This is your job, not a vacation in Electric Lotusland. We can guess the reasons for the goofy grin on the face of the guy on his couch: he's probably watching YouTube videos of people driving their cars into ditches, or poking alligators with a stick, or dissecting The Phantom Menace as the worst movie ever made. But what about the woman on her couch? She must be happy that she'll be doing something else soon, because there's no way she can work an eight hour day on her stomach.

On a more serious note, I just wonder about the value of the investment in these photos. They feel more like the lint that inevitably collects around web pages, and less like some devious graphic cue that reaches into my reptile brain to tickle my happy centers. Me on IBM web site, me see happy people, so me am happy...

There may be no good reason. Once, when the music in a department store was cranked so loud that it was giving me a piercing headache, I asked a clerk why the store inflicted that pain on the customers. He shrugged and said, "Some woman from Corporate comes out here every once in a while and yells at us if the music is too soft." Which is the same as saying, "It's loud because someone thinks it should be loud," which is no explanation at all.

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

Design your own alien ecosystem

Back in high school, somewhere between the Triassic and Jurassic, I played around with designing an alien ecosystem. Change the conditions from earth (more or less gravity, bigger or smaller oceans, etc.), superimpose the ecological niches that might be standard across worlds, and go crazy with the types of species you might imagine. Pretty heavy science dorkdom, but it was fun.

Which is why I think this project is pretty cool. Project Snaiad brings together collaborators with the same weird interest in designing life on another planet. Not the most profitable use of social media, to be sure, but still, pretty cool.

Not all innovation needs to be disruptive

You might applaud this recent op-ed article by former Microsoft executive Dick Brass, grumbling how his ex-employer can't innovate the way that Apple does, as evidenced by the recent iPad announcement. Or, you might dismiss it as sour grapes from a disgruntled ex-employee. Both reactions are probably wrong.

Brass' op-ed completely misses a basic point about innovation: not every company does it the same way. Apple is certainly the poster child for disruptive innovation. Tom Bodett's reaction to the iPad announcement is a good illustration: at first, he thought,  "Is that all it is?" and then immediately decided that he had to have one.

With Microsoft, you know exactly what you're getting. Changes may be incremental, but their progress in the market is usually as inevitable as an advancing glacier. As Frank Shaw, Microsoft's VP of Corporate Communications, said, "For Microsoft, it is not sufficient to simply have a good idea, or a great idea, or even a cool idea. We measure our work by its broad impact."

Still, Microsoft isnt perfect. Their acquisition of NCompass was predicated on the idea that a web content management system could be positioned the same way as other back office products. The higher services requirement, not to mention the original pricing model, didn't fit the Microsoft business model as neatly as other attempts to expand their business through new capabilities.

Fortunately for Microsoft, the investment in NCompass wasn't back-breaking, and most people overlooked the blip in their product strategy. When Microsoft's failed innovation attempts are more visible — as they're likely to be with consumer products — the effects might be more dire.

The XBox is the exception that defines the rule. Microsoft made a massive investment in a market where, even if they didn't reach the maximal goal of putting the XBox at the heart of home entertainment systems, it put Microsoft into a lucrative market that was ripe for a new, alternative platform with foreward-seeing ideas like XBox Live. Microsoft won't make a similar massive investment in a new venture unless it's really, reall compelling.

Which is exactly why Brass' complaints about the fate of ClearType sound unconvincing. It doesn't matter whether the inventors were "very clever graphics experts,"  or the project presaged what Apple has done with the iPad. Not every idea is necessarily good, and not every company is the right vehicle for even the best ideas. ClearType may have been an amazing technology, but Microsoft may not have been the right company to bring it to market.

Often, Microsoft inspires fear of the inevitable Microsoft juggernaut crushing everything in its path. That's a myth: Hotmail didn't crush other vendors' webmail offerings. SharePoint took years to reach the right formula to accelerate adoption, and it still hasn't feasted on the still-beating hearts of every competitor.  Not everything they do is successful, but the succeed more often than they fail.

Brass has a very small perspective on his former employer's product lines if he thinks that the operating system and Office are the only successes. Here's another example: Microsoft continues to maintain a strong following among software developers, most obviously with its widely-adopted developer tools. We may not live in a .NET world, but .NET co-exists with Java and other development platforms in many organizations.

It takes a long time for myths to die. The myth that the only real innovation is the disruptive kind is slowly fading, particularly in the period between the dot-com bust and the current recession. There's nothing like bad economic realities to give you an appreciation of the assets you used to take for granted—such as successful forms of innovation that don't inspire people to jump out of their bathtubs shouting "Eureka!"

FYI, for a great look into the successful innovations that will help tech companies out of the recession, see this document by colleague Mike Gilpin.

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

The SAP executive shake-up

Wow, I guess it is hard to fire your founder, even when you're way bigger than a successful start-up. Founders are especially difficult to grapple with when they're sitting in some vaguely defined eminence grise position.

Facebook's fatal attraction

Once upon a time, a company named Yahoo! found its core value proposition: providing a browseable and searchable directory of the Internet. Later, it tried to cement its position as launch pad for the Internet by adding e-mail, contacts, and other handy tools.

Other search sites made it feel vulnerable, and people started talking about portals. "The [portals] future of the [portals] Internet is portals," the experts said. "Portals portals portals. And, to sum up, portals."

But what would ensure that people would come to Yahoo!'s portal, instead of someone other vendor's? "Content!" the management team exclaimed. And as a result, Yahoo! tried to position itself as a content provider, instead of an Internet directory, or the place where you got your e-mail. Yahoo's front page mutated into a confusing mish-mash of news and entertainment niblets that you didn't care about, getting in the way of the stuff you actually wanted, because Yahoo! had created a business model that depended on shoveling crap (i.e., advernewstainment) at you.

That story didn't have a happy ending.

Flash forward several years. Technorati became a successful company with name-brand recognition among people interested in the nascent world of social media. As a blogger, you could track your success at reaching your audience, and you could discover who linked to your posts.

And then, for whatever reason, Technorati decided that wasn't enough. Instead, it needed to become a content provider. Today, if you go to Technorati's home page, it looks eerily like the average Yahoo! home page right after they decided to become a content company. Technorati got so excited about shoveling crap at you that, on launcing the "new Technorati," the old tools for bloggers only partially worked. (At least Yahoo! kept the e-mail and contacts features turned on.)

I can guess where the Technorati story is heading.

Now, Facebook wants to continue accruing users who will start their Internet browsing with Facebook, and continue checking into Facebook throughout the day. Amongst their weaponry is...Wait for it...Wait for it...Using Facebook as a news reader.

Now, that idea could just stop at the point where people add RSS feeds to their Facebook pages. Makes sense: If you're going to hang around Facebook all day, you might as well use the site to read the news that interests you.

On the other hand, it might not stop there. The siren song of being a content provider may lure another victim onto the reefs. It's not hard to imagine Facebook trying to monetize these sorts of feeds, or giving you a raft full of "friendly suggestions" of content that might interest you (a.k.a. a busy page of advernewstainment). Facebook has already embraced other forms of cheesy advertising, such as the alerts that suggest you should go do some micro-transactions to keep Facebook application providers in the black.

If there's any risk of the content provider tragedy happening again, someone in the PM team at Facebook needs to speak up now. Why do people use Facebook? To connect with friends. The applications are cute ways to connect with them in more ways than just posting and poking. Anything that interferes with that activity dilutes the core value of Facebook. (And news feeds aren't the only source of potential dilution, by the way.)

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

The Heretech, episode 34: Jonathan Penn on security

Forrester analyst Jonathan Penn describes nature of security threats, and how they affect tech industry company's product strategy. Will security ever not be in the top 3 IT concerns? Does that represent an opportunity for security start-ups, or not? Plus, newly-published research on the demographics of technology adoption, and the lessons of the movie Avatar for tech industry professionals. (c) 2010 Tom Grant

Today's most overheated iPad comment

From ReadWriteWeb:

Startups and entrepreneurs will benefit immensely from the ability to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations on-the-go, allowing them to take their product pitches with them wherever they go. When they meet people at events, they can whip out their iPad and flip through their Keynote presentation right then and there.

Apparently, Apple's secret army of the night will be destroying all laptops while we sleep. You have been warned.

The iPad business model

Now that we've all had a few days to ponder Apple's iPad announcement, what are we to make of it? A revolutionary change in the computing industry? More of the same Apple technology, repackaged? A shot in the arm for the publishing industry? A new way for corporations to restrict the free flow of ideas?

Apple's announcement inspired all these reactions, and more. It's clear that the iPad strikes a nerve—several, actually. And that's what makes commentary on the iPad difficult: we're having several conversations simultaneously, sometimes confusing what we wish the iPad to be with what it is (or will be).

It's the business plan, stupid
Obviously, the iPad continues what Apple started with the iPod and iTunes, a combination that defines Apple's real market differentiation. As my colleague Tim Harmon rightly observes, tech companies now compete over their business models more than their technology (or the coolness of their physical design). Other companies developed MP3 players before Apple. What set the iPod apart from the competition was iTunes. Not only did you transfer your music library from your CD collection, but you could buy new music through the iTunes store. 

That's what makes discussions about the competing features of the iPad versus other e-Readers moot. Sure, it's annoying that the iPad won't have a USB port, but in many respects, the iPod wasn't necessarily the best MP3 player on the market. (And, as a player and organizer, iTunes is far from the best of all possible worlds.) The important question is, will consumers want the whole enchilada, buying the content through Apple's store, and then reading it on Apple's device?

At the initial price, the number of early adopters will be limited. As the price drops, however, we'll see whether Apple faces other barriers to adoption.

The difference between movies and books
All media are not alike. For example, there's the question of privacy. Apple keeps information about what music you like, so that it can make friendly suggestions about what else you might buy. But how do you feel about Apple keeping tabs on what you read? (To be fair, this concern already exists with other e-readers.)

Reactions vary when different types of content are unavailable. If you can't buy a particular album through the iTunes store, the consequences are minor. If books you need for your work, or your education, or other important tasks are not available through Apple, and it's difficult to get them into the iPad through other means, how attractive will the iPad appear then?

The difference between tablets and PCs
Jobs took a swipe at netbooks at the beginning of his launch presentation. Unfortunately, the comparison isn't perfect. While the iPad might be a better e-reader, netbooks do a much better job at other tasks. Would you rather take notes during a meeting using a netbook's physical keyboard, or the iPad's virtual equivalent?

Near the end of Jobs' demo, I started to wonder about some of the pre-packaged apps he was touting, such as the address book and calendar. Sure, I don't mind seeing my appointments on this device, but the iPad won't be where I do my work. I may not even bother to sync my appointments with yet another device, if I'm already going to look at my laptop anyway. Chalk up these sorts of details to the compulsion for feature completeness that's an unspoken assumption of many keynote demos.

The difference between appliances and tools
I share the frustration many people have with how much fussing around any laptop or desktop computer requires. Constant updates, complex interactions among components from different vendors, problems that are difficult to diagnose--computers are definitely not appliances. If there's a device that handles many of the same tasks, without these headaches, many consumers might buy an iPad for that benefit alone.

However, there's a reason why we live with the twitchy unpredictability of laptops and desktops: some capabilities are impossible without this kind of technology. If you want choices among productivity applications, video editing tools, games, and other kinds of applications, Apple's business model may not provide this range of choices. Certainly, many of these applications have technical requirements that won't squeeze into the constraints of the iPad.

As long as we applaud fast innovation and broad capabilities in the electronic place where we work and play, we're effectively asking for computers to be toolkits, not appliances. We want to be able to swap hardware in and out, at the same time that we're adding and updating software. The more the moving parts change, the greater risk that the overall machine will break down. Unfortunately, that introduces unexpected incompatibilities, security issues, performance bottlenecks, and other problems.

It doesn't have to be revolutionary to be good
As someone who bemoans the lack of good e-reader options, I'm certainly interested in the iPad. The device definitely has value, and it doesn't have to rock my world to provide it. The business model doesn't have to be "disruptive" to succeed. And we might not want some of the disruptions.

We've heard some very thoughtful responses to Apple's announcement, and some silly ones. (Topping the list: the claim that the iPad's resistance to hacking is a critical problem for its popularity.) The most useful observations have focused on the experience of using the iPad—finding, acquiring, and consuming content through this new device. That experience is the end product of Apple's business model as much as it depends on the device itself.

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]