Innovation in Software

In my post on GeekUp Revisited I closed my points with the following:

P.S. there was something else brought up last night: some of you have been pulling my accounts from Companies House. Save yourself some money, and next time just ask me, I won’t be offended and I won’t even ask you why you want them – as a member of the public you’re legally entitled to them on demand.

What does irk me slightly though, is the conversation I had suggested some of you had been discussing said accounts between yourselves and picking holes at my 2-year old accounts (2008 hasn’t been filed yet), behind my back. That just seems a bit rude. I’m sorry if I’ve offended or upset you in some way to the point of you wishing to find chinks in my armour in any way possible, but if you have something to say to me please just say it to me. I know my style can come across as arrogant and patronising to some, but I genuinely would prefer to have an open discussion with people rather than you spend time questioning an ancient business model of mine behind my back.

It was at the end of a long post, I just wanted to say “hey, come on, let’s find chinks in my armour together”, but some people got a little upset I was accusing them of something in private correspondence with me.

I’ve now had an apology from somebody who had pulled my accounts and discussed them with others. I’m not sure they were the only ones, but I don’t care. I didn’t want a witch-hunt, I wasn’t looking for somebody to blame. They apologised for any hurt felt on my part, and in future I hope we’ll have a much more open dialogue.

I’m committed to running as open a business as I can. All future recruits will see a full set of accounts (and be trained on how to read them if necessary), before being offered a job. Accounts and cashflow projections will be viewable internally, live. I’ll publish submitted accounts here at the same time they’re submitted to Companies House. I will happily discuss with anybody who wants to discuss them what they mean.

My business isn’t perfect. I’m not perfect. But we’re both getting better at what we do. It was the fact people were referring to 2007 accounts as current – and therefore potentially confusing recruits who thought the business was pulling in less cash than it is – that concerned me most. I’m 70% convinced I lost one programmer as a recruit because of the confusion circulating in the game of Chinese whispers that circulated. It’s easy to see how it happens:

Potential recruit: I’m thinking of working for Vagueware
Person A: Yeah? I pulled the accounts. Doing sod all money.
Potential recruit: What the latest accounts?
Person A: Latest ones, yeah, from Companies House. Think he’s only doing a bit of revenue really. Can’t see how he can hire!
Potential recruit: He told me he was doing £x a year!
Person A: Well, he must be lying then…

It’s not hard to see how Person A’s mistake in thinking the latest accounts from Companies House are the latest trading accounts (despite being nearly 18 months old), and how that might make the potential recruit feel Vagueware is not the company for them. That is what upset me: losing talent – precious, rare, irreplaceable talent – because of miscommunication. If everybody concerned had just asked me to explain those accounts I could have cleared it up in 30 seconds. Alas, Chinese whispers seems to have taken precedence…

As I’ve had an apology though, the subject is closed. What’s done is done, so, we’re done, let’s move on. Next time, talk to me – I really don’t mind talking about money, assets and how (not?) to run a business. In 2006 and 2007 I excelled at running a business badly. There are lessons in there I want to share, and one day will.

In my last post I said something some may have raised an eyebrow at:

“… I think this year is going to be perhaps the biggest shake-down in the sector we’ve seen since the crash in 2001, but I remain confident that recessions are when the foundations of the greatest businesses are made. Crisis is in the eye of the beholder, as is opportunity. The next few years are going to be incredible for those adequately prepared.”

It seems counter-intuitive to look at the economy right now and see opportunity. Specifically, the software sector seems to have rising costs (in terms of multiple platform delivery), and a general stagnant/tired air to it in 2009. We’ve all seen it before. Investment is harder to get hold of. Loans and overdrafts don’t exist. It seems the situation is made worse by a skills shortage.

This is all a distraction. The simple truth is, what we thought was shiny and new and amazing last year – from easy credit through to slick user experiences – actively worked against innovation.

Yes, you can do more of what you think is important with cheap and easy money to hand. But you really innovate when there is little money about and you have to do more of what your customers think is important.

It’s true that the first time you see it, a web app that responds like a desktop app is interesting. It doesn’t make you produce good ideas and then execute great business strategies though. It just makes you follow what everybody else is doing, it stops you carving out your own niche.

I’m going to be a hypocrite here and offer advice I rarely take myself on my own projects (but hope to buck the trend this year): release early, release often, refine, find out what customers want and need.

The last part – focusing on customers – is always important, but this year is more critical than ever. Just because it’s a recession, it doesn’t mean there is no money around, it just means the spending priorities have changed. There is a near infinite demand for tools that save time and/or money, you just have to create the right value proposition. Historically this has meant people have produced todo list manager. I think there is opportunity for so much more.

Maybe it’s hubris, but I refuse to expect the peak of this decade in the software industry is “Web 2.0” (whatever that is), or an obsession over hosting applications and data with a bookshop (albeit a good solution). Something good is in the air. Watch this space.

I’ve been thinking more about building windmills recently.

I know quite a few musicians. Some of them are mildly successful getting regular royalty cheques and making a living. Some run nights at clubs or bars that supplements their main income, steadily building their profile. Others are failing at making money and struggling to work out what to do to fix it. The difference between them is what they hear when somebody talks about “the music business”.

The successful ones hear the word “business”, the struggling ones the word “music”.

It’s the same in the software business. We grow up as developers, loving the experience of writing code and learning how to do incredible things with nothing more than our minds and a piece of commodity hardware with a free language compiler or interpreter installed. It’s liberating, it’s creative, it’s what we decide we want to do with our lives.

Except the software business is a business. It’s there to serve client needs, not the needs of software or artistic expression. Not enough people seem to grasp that – they seem stuck in the mindset that by producing code, they’re running a software business. It’s taken me several years of running my own company to finally see this for the lie that it is.

Imagine an architect firm where all the firm produced was building designs that nobody wanted or needed. Imagine a firm that only worked on concepts that nobody had asked for, or on receiving a client brief they threw it in the bin and just did what they felt was “better”. Right now, that’s what a lot of software firms are looking like: and like that fictional architect firm, they’re going to struggle to pay the bills.

Client need, user expectation, it’s all this industry is about. It’s the main thing we should think about. We’re not in a university lab playing with data structures and algorithms any more. In the same way architecture is about understanding a brief and imagining solutions rather than drawing, so software development is about listening and understanding more than it is about writing code. Sure drawing is important to an architect, and writing code is important to a developer, but they are an output of the real job not the job itself.

I’m not arguing there isn’t a place for understanding better code, or producing beautiful projects, merely that such activities either need to take place outside of an industrial setting or should at least not conflict with the business needs. It’s OK for an architect to produce beautiful buildings that are also functional, so it’s OK for a programmer to produce beautiful code that also meets client needs: it’s just that client needs should come first on both occasions.

And if you like the idea of development as akin to architecture, or you are struggling to see the parallels, you may want to read this article written nearly two years ago. We should look to the architecture industry way more than we do right now, and we should all use Ruby way more than we do.

Fellow Mancunian geek Simon Wheatley had a little tweet this morning that made me think about a few things.

Best start thinking of things to make with the remnants of a banking system I guess… when the wind blows, build windmills.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been looking around the scene locally, nationally and further afield and tried to work out what is going to happen next. Here’s my general gut feeling:

1. A lot of firms are going to go bust. During boom times, mediocrity, a lack of professionalism, no real need to sell and develop sales skills, all bound up with something shiny and slightly interesting can actually pay its own way. No longer. A lot of people have lucked out with poor business skills and zero-thought business plans. That is now going to bite them hard. If you’re running a business without a real business plan, cashflow forecast and a way forward in times of recession, you’re in trouble. If you don’t have sales skills, you need to find them.
2. What survives, thrives. Those who work out how to serve needs of users – and more importantly right now, the needs of their own cashflow – will actually grow at paces that will leave many people boggling. This won’t turn into an investment bubble though, because there won’t be much in the way of investment going on for a little while. When the market liquidity improves and money starts to become cheaply accessible again I doubt people will make the same mistake of investing in just an idea – execution is going to be more important than ever before.
3. You don’t need investment to survive – in fact, you never did. You just need sales. Whatever it is you think you’re about to do, it has to be focused on sales. Right now is a bad time to set up a property website. It’s also a bad time to get into loan websites or sites that offer credit card deals. If you have the capital to buy an existing site that does those things, right now might be a cheap time to buy though.

I’m still working out my next moves. I have the opportunity to take on some more public sector work which feels sheltered from the storm for the time being, but I’m also trying to work out what the current “windmills” look like in the software space. Low-cost, high-yield projects are hard to come by so it could take me some time to work it out. Watch this space.

With changing what it is Vagueware does for a living, I’ve found myself having to change the processes around how I do business. For the last two and a half years, I’ve tracked my accounts in a spreadsheet reconciling manually with bank statements, produced invoices in iWork Pages and done CRM pretty much through memory and Mail.app’s search function. I occasionally gave clients access to Trac, because being a developer that made sense.

I’ve recently moved all of my clients onto Basecamp so that we can better handle projects – we don’t need integrated svn repos any more, and a todo item seems clearer to some of my clients than a ticket. I’ve been considering other functionality I need. Digging around this morning I was evaluating:

E-commerce systems

It would be nice if I could sell services (and products I’m announcing soon) directly online. Here’s the thing – every single open-source solution sucks. I don’t just mean it’s a little nasty around the corners: I mean it’s horrendous. Yes, I’ve looked at OScommerce, and Freeway, and modules for Drupal, and even plugins for Wordpress. Every one of them is awful. I’m not even going to mention the others.

What surprises me is that so many businesses are able to operate with this poor software. Sure there is Shopify if you’re a products-based business and its feature-set suits, but I am genuinely amazed that so many businesses are able to operate with the dross out there. No wonder so many UK SMEs are struggling to get online.

Accounts system & CRM

I need to upgrade from using a spreadsheet, especially as there is a 60/40 chance I’ll be hiring before the end of the year, going VAT registered, and it would be nice to make invoicing a 30-second job. Thing is, I see accounts and CRM as part of the same process – knowing that your client is happy, and understanding what you’ve done before for a client when creating a quote is all part of the same process. I want to be able to hand that out over to a new employee without having to explain the back-story every time.

Nothing exists that fits the bill.

What’s more the current group of open source CRM packages are hideous, and 37signals’ “Highrise” doesn’t integrate well enough with the sales process for me.

There is a project I’ve been working on with another client that could potentially help out here – I wrote the core in the Spring, and the last bugs are being ironed out this week and next, and that has Paypal integration and is open enough to consider building some CRM functionality on top. Not ideal, but if the client allows it, it could be this is the way forward for me.

Why is nothing out there?

What puzzles me is that these are standard business tools that even those with the open source community must have encountered. Somebody out there must be running a small business and decided to produce a decent, joined-up, services-orientated CRM, project management and accounts system. Heck, even if we just get to the point where we can integrate with a COTS accountancy system like MYOB or SAP I’m going to be happier than I am now.

As a software developer myself with a serious itch here, the solution seems obvious: but I don’t have time. Instead I find myself incredulous that this sector of the software market – a sector that has a potential user or customer in every single business on the planet – has so little innovation. Solutions exist that look ugly, or cost too much, or are too inflexible, or require your business to work the way everybody else’s does.

Why? Why isn’t this changing?

There is a chance that with Thingamy it might just change. However I smell Java with high license prices – it might just be the jolt we need to open up the innovation in this space though.

I bumped into somebody last night on the way home from the shop, and the conversation was an interesting one for me.

The person concerned – Ikem Nzeribe – did a presentation at BarCamp Leeds last year about mapping that blew me away. It was clear he’d thought through the problem he was trying to address and he’d come up with a social, interesting, useful solution. After the talk I handed him my business card, and suggested we sit down and talk at some point.

So we did. Between then and now we’ve regularly met up and discussed plans either directly or as part of a larger group Ikem pulled together from his networks.

I hadn’t spoken to Ikem since The Vision Thing got rolling, and he clearly hadn’t seen it. I basically summed it up like this:

“There’s a chance I’m going to quit the industry in the next six months”

Two things struck me about that sentence. First, that’s the first time I’ve been completely upfront about where I was heading when I wrote the original rant. His reaction was incredulous, he thought I was winding him up: “You? You are going to quit? YOU?”, etc.

Yeah, me. I’m now thinking the change might not be that dramatic because I can now see ideas forming that address my concerns about how screwed we are right now, but I’m leaving it that open until something more tangible forms.

The second thing that struck me was the word “industry” in there. Which industry did I mean? Web development? Consultancy? Internet business development? Open innovation? Kagtum? Writing blogs and the occasional article?

A very good first step to me trying to stay in the industry is to start saying “no” to proposals, invitations to events, opportunities to comment, and so on. I’m fortunate that so many people want to work with me right now, but it’s stopping me from servicing my current clients and working out how to build great applications that don’t ultimately get monetised through “raising brand awareness” for soulless multinationals who want 75% profit on every unit of sugarwater they sell.

Ikem understands. I hope other people do too. For the record if it’s not one of these or doesn’t directly help one of these, I’m not doing it any time in the next six months:

• Accounts software with Adaptavist (coming to a close soon)
• The “Florida project” (I’ll explain more later in the year).
• My local consultancy project around corporate social responsibility
• The “open innovation” thing with Guy Dickinson and Simon Wheatley
• Kagtum
• Blogging
• BarCamp Manchester
• The occasional co-working day

That’s more than enough for me right now. Please don’t feel offended if I say no to an invitation to get involved in your great idea.

On the back of my business cards I have 10 quotes which on discovering them the first time, I found to be something that resonated with me, and that I hope might resonate with potential clients, business partners and friends.

The first of those is a famous quote by E.W. Dijkstra that for me sums up the reason I got into the industry in the first place:

“Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes”

I also recall Ted Nelson’s talk about Transliterature at OpenTech 2005, where he also summed up why computers fascinated me as an 11-year old learning to program the first time:

“I studied Computer Science to help change the World, not to automate trivial crap”

There is something bigger here in our industry we refuse to acknowledge. There is something deeper beneath the surface that all the talk of social networks, long tails and user-generated content doesn’t get anywhere near.

This ember of a notion has been inside me for a while now, and it’s starting to turn into a small fire. I don’t know where it’s going, but what I do know is that I’m now getting more and more passionate for “big picture” stuff. The kind of things that need investment and great people.

I’m rather pleased then, with all this “big picture stuff” going on in my head, that this year’s Turing Lecture is being held again at Manchester University and that it has just been announced as being given by James Martin, producer of the film Target Earth – note, not the 1950s B-Movie, alas! However, it’s big in its approach, and I’m looking forward to watching it just before Dr Martin gives his talk.

I still haven’t decided what 2008 is going to be about for me professionally, but I do know it’s going to be less about me and finding ways to reconnect to that Dijkstra quote in my work. The Turing lecture will be a timely reminder of some of the issues facing us – and maybe sometime this year those of us in Manchester can start thinking about how to work out some of the solutions. Maybe.

I’ve just decided “Maybe” is my new favourite word.

Happy New Year.

I’ve spent the last few weeks re-appraising my business plan in advance for 2008. Next year my business will pass its second birthday and I want to change the focus in a few places. I also want to bring other people on-board either as equity partners in specific products/services or as staff, and that all needs planning in detail.

The problem is, most business plans are dull to write and dull to read. I always felt that the inherent wordiness of them made them difficult to deal with, and they only made sense if you were looking for investment – you wrote them for people who didn’t know your business. I started thinking about what might be useful to write for people inside the business (i.e. me), and how it could help me make sure I was on track and doing well.

This morning my RSS reader threw up (via a Technorati sub to ‘business innovation’ a post called The Canonball Business Plan over at Seeds of Growth

The idea is quite simple. There really is a Canonball run (raced illegally), in the spirit of the film. The participants are attempting to break the record for a coast-to-coast drive, and produce a Driveplan that highlights key milestones en-route, fuel stops, timings, major risks from weather to what the ‘safe’ limit is to breaking the speed limits without ending up in jail in each jurisdiction.

What if we had something like that for a business plan internally? What if those of us who need to get a bit of focus sat down and thought about key milestones over a period, the risks and hazards, and the eventual goals. What if we updated it with real data as it comes in to see how we are faring against our guesses and predictions? On one screen we immediately see what we need to see.

It’s an interesting idea, and the only reason I can see anybody having to object against it is that it is inspired indirectly from a pretty cheesy film about bootlegging booze. The core idea seems sound enough though.

When I started my business, I didn’t do things the way you’re “meant” to. I didn’t go out and get a nice office, or spend money on a brochure. To this day I don’t own a printer, and I send all my invoices electronically. For the first 18 months I worked on creaking hardware. My website was nothing more than a blog and I concentrated on just trying to get customers and pushing code out of the door – the shift into working for myself was big enough that it kept me busy without worrying about letterheads.

And at meetings, people politely laugh when I make a joke about “being too Web 2.0 and signed up to the digerati to bother with business cards”. Except I need business cards for all sorts of reasons these days. A year ago, I didn’t. Today, I do.

Last week a long-standing friend (and occasional colleague) launched Doddle, a printing service aimed at designers needing plain, simple, easy printing at low prices. It’s not true that I modeled for his logo – “Mr Doddle” – however I concede the resemblance is uncanny.

With a bit of prepped artwork – I needed help getting it into CMYK, because I don’t ‘do’ design packages – I went along, uploaded a zip file with the front and back graphics in there in TIFF, and filled in my billing and delivery details. It took about 5 minutes. That was Tuesday, and 10 minutes ago my new cards arrived.

I have to say I’m really pleased with the result. My cards are a little ‘unique’ in that they have a large block of text [1] on the back in quite small print, so I was worried if that would become a splodgy mess, but thanks to them being litho-printed, I’m pleased that it’s perfectly legible.

If anybody is looking for business cards, I’d challenge you to find a comparable quality at the price (especially for double-sided). I’m pleased therefore that recommendation of my friend’s business isn’t down to a form of nepotism, but because the product is actually worth the money.

[1] If you want to find out what exactly that block of text is, you’ll have to ask for a card. :-)

I’m currently reading Wikinomics and finding it incredibly engaging. I’ll write a fuller review when I get to the end of it sometime later this week, but I’m that enthusiastic I had to give people a bit of a heads-up before the weekend. The full review is likely to be long. This post won’t be.

To date, the only truly successful wiki has probably been Wikipedia – it’s probably the only one that the mythical ‘man in the street’ can name. In Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams document an emerging trend and show that it’s not just wiki software that is describing the new spirit of collaborative development, but blogs, UGC sites like YouTube and social networks. It is the interactive element that adds value into the business, not the technical definition of what a wiki actually is.

Where the really interesting things are going to happen though are where collaboration happens between end customer and producer, and the middle men who connect half a dozen businesses to a single customer desire.

Outsourcing has reached a point where an industrial designer and a marketeer can design a product over coffee, firm up designs overnight, have prototype units being developed by a Chinese company within a matter of weeks, and support provided by an Indian company the day the unit goes on sale. The flexibility of this kind of out-sourcing is allowing start-ups to get very big, very quickly.

Some are beginning to realise they can even outsource the product design to the customer. It’s not just small companies either – major companies are seeing the value of a porous membrane between internal R&D and the rest of the World.

Vagueware obviously has a vested interest in this model. I haven’t quite worked out the dynamics, the money side of things and how we go about making developers take notice, but I’m hoping that others who like the idea of open collaborative design in the software industry will help work that out with me. I’m currently toying with ideas on how to reward those outside my business who directly add value to it. If you have ideas on how that can happen, you know what to do

I’m not alone. We’re about to enter an era of real businesses with real products being built this way. The knowledge economy is going to be very flat, with each of us having the ability to act as independent agents working on the ideas that interest us. Economically, this is going to be fascinating.

From what I’ve read so far, Wikinomics is a good introduction to how this new World is starting to unfold, and I think if you’re interested in these new models or if you’re interested in what the next 2-3 years of web application development is going to look like (if you’re a bespoke developer or designer, your future clients are either reading this book already or will do soon), you need to grab yourself a copy.

You can buy it from this link if you’re in the UK or this link if you’re in the US. Enjoy!