Designing for Beausage?

One of the things that continues to inspire and intrigue me is how the marks of previous uses communicate how to use something to a new audience.

In the non-electronic, non-disposable world of say, a rural Midwestern farm in the 1980s; the wear on the barn door shows you how to open it, the path through the field leads to the cows, the best place for your hands is on the shiny spots of the tractor’s steering wheel.

The action of planning for this communciation: designing for wear.
The word to describe something with this characteristic: beausage.

A Business Model for Abundance

Heretofore, most business were founded on the idea of scarcity. Being the One and Only as Seth Godin describes.

If you’re the only vendor offering something, it used to be easy to make money. Just convince people you’re the only one that can solve their problem. Then surround yourself with huge barriers to entry while locking your customers in with fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Today, the only things remotely scarce are time and money.

Everything else, like mosquitos in August, are irritatingly abundant; news, exotic fruits, stylish furniture, spam, and reality television. Given the constraints of time and money, what you’re ignoring is as important (if not more so) as what you’re paying attention to. I’ve talked about this before in What Price Garbage Avoidance. I’m going to repeat something I originally wrote there:

“This filtering-out is why Tivo can charge a monthly subscription and why AOL is marketing themselves on virus, spam, and pop-up protection.”

As I’ve been refining Working Pathways’ purpose, ‘filtering out’ is a recurring theme.

Complete eradication (spam filtering) is one avenue. This approach keeps out anything that isn’t already known. Fine for short term, yet completely worthless for staying relevant. As I’ve written before, this is why podcasting was such a huge win for iPod listeners. It brings the unknown into a closed environment. Tivo’s recommendation engine, despite its drawbacks is a more interesting model – filter out things I don’t like, and continually and intelligently offer things I might like.

Today’s media environment is bigger than newspapers, radio, television, and magazines. It includes weblogs, video logs, podcasts, email, video games, satellite radio, DVDs, and SMS. No one can track everything that affects them all the time. Therefore, all of the messages we receive each day are worthless if they don’t answer 1 question:

  1. Why should I pay attention to this right now?

In a hotel concierge study I conducted a few years back, I learned the goal of a good concierge was to fulfill a guest’s need the moment before the guest acknowledged the need. We need more businesses founded on delivering the right information to the right people just before it’s needed.

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Review

Despite my earlier prediction, Jen and I went to the new Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy this weekend.

Being a huge Hitchhiker addict since way back, I can confidently say it was: Good.

The intro dolphin song was a wonderfully amusing touch that stuck in my head all the way through. The screenplay adaption was 80% spot on the story I could in-fact recite from heart. I suspect this is because Adams had plenty of practice (original movie, radio show). As with any Hitchhikers retelling, the divergence from the original book was both interesting and consistent with the overall HH storyline.

Two things told me I spent too much time with this storyline as a child:

  • Thinking how brilliantly Zaphod’s 2nd head and 3rd arm was handled.
  • The glee that came over me when I noticed the original Marvin and Arthur (Simon Jones).

On the way out of the theater, I was pondering the giant human-powered computer similarity between Hitchhikers and the Matrix.

Jen just reminded me in the movie, the plans were “in the cellar”, not “on display on the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard” as in the book. Belgium. That’s one of the best lines.

Setting up a Web Development Environment in Tiger

This message means the upgrade is complete.

Last week I started the upgrade Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” around the house. To my pleasant surprise, it went extremely smoothly. The most tedious and frustrating part was waiting for my newly enclosed external hard drive to copy tens of gigs of files back and forth for 2 machines.

The upgrade was an excellent opportunity to clean house and back up. Something my Powerbook was sorely in need of. After the install, the ease of copying my Home directory and a handful of required applications (NetNewsWire, Transmit, VooDooPad, BluePhoneElite, Skype, SubEthaEdit, Quicksilver) back to the laptop meant I was 85% back to normal almost immediately.

The tough part was getting the web development playground set up; I’ve still got a week left in the 21 days of Ruby, and I’m lost without a local install of PHP.

After un-commenting the PHP modules in Tiger’s default Apache install and setting the permissions on the items within the /WebServer/Documents directory to 666, PHP was working as expected.

After that, Ruby, Rails, and MySQL. For this, I highly recommend TextDrive’s About “Setting up a development environment on my Mac”. It walked me through everything and like everything at TextDrive – straight-forward and friendly. As of this writing, some of the items are specific to 10.3 “Panther” and I was able to skip over those with no consequence. Without it, I’d still be googling for a good tutorial on setting everything up. Now, I’m ready to rebuild my seemingly broken WishRSS.

Even the Almost Perfect Customer Experience Takes 15 Years

I bought a car last week. We’ve been looking for another one for some time and not been real happy with what’s available (anything under 20 mpg just seems irresponsible). My father-in-law has a fantastic, nearly 15 year old relationship with a dealership. He’s purchased every car I’ve ever seen him drive there. When Jen and I wanted to buy our first car, we went there.

Jen found our new car online. We’d been looking at imports and this was a domestic. We were looking at cars twice as expensive. This was exactly what we were looking for and it was at this dealership. She asked her dad to check it out. He calls back with the whole story, everything sounds good. All we need to do is drive the 4 hours to pick it up.

Perfect.

Then, like the story Christopher Carfi quotes, the warranty salesperson got involved.

We don’t know him. We know the car salesman, we know he guys in the shop. We don’t know the warranty guy. More importantly, he doesn’t know us.

He doesn’t know the kind of drivers we are, what we find important, or that we wouldn’t be there without the aforementioned 15 year old relationship. Then he attempted to sell us an extended warranty for a car we all knew would be fine for as long as it mattered.

Everything else about buying the car was perfect.

Consumer Software is the New Enterprise Software

Recently, a colleague asked for a recommendation on an enterprise asset management system.

Frankly, I’ve only had bad experiences with enterprise level software. My major complaints have been;

  • Too hard to use
  • Too expensive
  • Doesn’t map to existing business culture and processes

I ask what this system will be used for; sharing digital photos remotely.

There’s a requirement to annotate the photos for easy searching, there’s a requirement to alert other team members when new photos have been uploaded. The photos won’t be at high quality – they just need to be higher resolution than a black and white fax.

First, how many photo sharing sites are there? a dozen?, including shutterfly, ofoto, smugmug, and snapfish, picasa and open source projects like Gallery. Not to mention sharing is built into Apple’s iPhoto. As a happy customer, my first instinct was to recommend Flickr.

Needless to say, this problem has been solved for Joe Everyman. If we consider thousands of disparate registered customers one big enterprise, these apps have proven to be stable, reliable, on a multitude of platforms. Flickr’s pro account is $25 per year. For 10 team members, that’s only $250/year. I don’t know of a more reliable, easier to use client-server enterprise application that costs less than $250/year. Seems like a small price to pay for an application that’s continually being updated and provides the same volume of capabilities.

Let’s not even look at photo sharing, in the text publishing side there’s TypePad, on the project management side there’s Basecamp, in the email list management side, there’s Campaign Monitor (happy customer).

None of these services were build with The Enterprise as an explicit target. They were built to make a task easier for everyone. As such, there’s a better than even chance someone in your enterprise is familiar with these or similar tools. The benefit to an enterprise is clear, employees already know how to use them.

And they don’t cost an employee’s annual salary.