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.

Back in the Pioneer Press

I’d like to thank Julio Ojeda-Zapata and Leslie Brooks Suzukamo for the PodcastMN article in the Saturday Pioneer Press.

The article is right, a key challenge is to lure advertisers. I’m actually not confident the advertiser-publisher relationship we’re accustomed to in radio, televison, and newspapers will effectively migrate to podcasting.

As PBCliberal mentions in his recent ‘Finding my Niche’ show, the strength of podcasting is how effectively it can speak to a very small audience. The same is true of weblogs and websites as a whole.

The barrier to entry is so low with podcasting and the audience so niche, then there’s the fact that a show could be listeneded to the first time months after it was originally published. The traditional mass media ad models won’t work. Honestly, if the products of services the advertisers are hawking are actually compelling – then they should have their own podcast.

On the other hand, following the public radio model makes far more sense – I think ITConversations is setting an excellent example of how to offset the costs by bringing in donors and underwriters. Doug spells out the ITConversation business model here.

By the way, PodcastMN – the Sound of Minnesota is officially up. 14 podcasts, in a single site.

Your Attention.xml Please

If you haven’t heard me proclaim, “RSS killed the visual web designer”, now you have.

Quickly stated, RSS is a structured format for distributing text, audio (podcasting), video (vlogging), even applications in a convenient and anonymous way.

For the publisher, RSS means the timeliness of email without the worry about spam filtering. For the reader, RSS means the convenience of email with the anonymity of a web page.

The downside is metrics.

Measuring behavior on websites is always nebulous. Robots, routers, giant ISPs can all throw off numbers. For publishers RSS doesn’t really help this problem. For readers, there’s a slightly different problem – once you’ve aggregated your 200 favorite websites into a single place, what do you pay attention to.

Cody and I have been talking about Attention.xml solving the both problems.

I’m interested in how Attention.xml can tighten the publisher-reader relationship and help readers share what’s interesting to them with friends. While also giving Cody and I better numbers on our respective podcasts.

More thoughts and prototypes on this later.

Minneapolis Scobleized

Tim, Cody, Chuck and I grabbed a drink with Robert Scoble tonight. And I also met local open source CMS developer Tim Broeke from ElectricJet.

If you’re finger isn’t on the pulse of weblogs, Scoble is Microsoft’s überblogger. He was in town to start a conversation with Target. I applaud Target for this.

There are only a handful of companies people feel really passionate about. So passionate you don’t want them to get started (yeah, like me with weblogs and podcasts). These are companies that would have to do something really, really stupid for their impassioned customers to blink.

Target is one of those companies.

Jen is one of those customers. She knows Target’s different layouts. We get the Sunday Star Tribune for the Target flyer. There was a moment of silence in our house when T-1 was demo’d. I’ve talked to a number of others around the US, just as passionate.

To me, companies with a customer base this passionate are obligated to cultivate an intimate conversation. Whether this is weblogging, in its many forms, or some other community-building technique, I think that’s up for discussion and experimentation.

As always, I look forward to seeing the fruit of whatever seeds Scoble planted.

What else isn’t a crime?

On the 40 acres of rural Wisconsin farmland I grew up on, I build a skateboard mini-ramp. Southern California skateboard and BMX stunt culture was injected into my world of cows and cornfields on a monthly basis via the USPS and magazines like Thrasher, Slap, Freestylin’.

Throughout those magazines was the Skateboarding is not a crime vibe. Bumper stickers, t-shirts, all the propaganda you need. Not that I was ever going to be hassled for skating in my backyard, there was something compelling about that mantra. That despite the vandalism skateboarding can cause, it’s just like basketball or tennis. You know, not a crime.

I spent this afternoon reviewing content for a client. In it, “a speeding ticket is not a crime.” It made me compare the 2 statements. Both are dangerous, both can damage property – personal and public. Yet, one is spoken as a persuasive argument and one is a statement of legal fact.

What if the sentiments were swapped?

Learning Ruby – Day 14

Day 14 – Blocks, Procs, and the Others

I get it. Seven pages into Day 14 trying to figure out what other meant in Slagell’s examples and it clicks.

In other languages I’m familiar with (Applescript, PHP, Perl, REALbasic) variables are passed through methods. Example if we have a method that’s friendly,

function SayHiTo($name) {
print "Hi, " . $name;
}

and we tell it our name, SayHiTo("Garrick");
The resulting would be Hi, Garrick.

Fairly straight forward. In Ruby-land, not only can we pass whole objects (or close enough) we can also access the methods within those objects.

Slagell’s other is this object. Pretty cool. Pretty useful.

I say this hesitantly, Ruby is the programming language I’ve always wanted.

In other languages, when it’s difficult to do something (pass an object through a method) it’s usually because it’s a BadThingToDo. At this point, I’m a bit skeptical of Ruby’s simplicity and ease.

The Macintosh made bad graphic design real easy, the web made bad publishing real easy. REALbasic made bad programming real easy. Does Ruby do the same or is there something in Ruby preventing this?

I sure hope for the latter.

This post documents my journey through Sam’s Teach Yourself Ruby in 21 days. I’ll be joining Al Abut in his effort to learn Ruby and blog along the way.