Innovation in Software

On the GeekUp mailing list, some business development advice was being asked for in terms of growing revenues and finding sales channels.

The advice being offered was to specialise: choose a niche and excel within it. Good advice, but the recipient started talking about the problems that come with specialising in CakePHP – a technology framework for rapid development of web applications – and I felt compelled to chip in with advice I think might be worthy of putting to a wider audience:

Don’t get caught in the trap of thinking specialisation means technology specialisation.

Business people don’t know about CakePHP. They know about e-Commerce, or customer forums, or customised marketing emails, or intranets where employees share knowledge.

Talk in their language, not yours.

When I go out and do sales, I talk about using Agile methodologies, iterative development, growing the technology base as revenue and budget allow. We use methods that ensure desired behaviour is captured and tested against cheaply, so changes in business assumptions are cheap to re-factor in the code – i.e. we reduce the cost of change to as close to zero as possible.

They couldn’t give a stuff what I’m actually saying is “we code Ruby on Rails with Cucumber, Culerity and RSpec tests”, because that doesn’t mean anything to them.

So, follow the market specialisation, not the technology specialisation when you speak to clients. Sure, choose the tech you like working with, but talk to your clients in terms of eCommerce stores, bold new ideas, e-mail marketing or super-slick brochureware sites as part of marketing campaigns.

Same as with selling anything: you sell benefits, not features*

All the big agencies I’ve seen thrive have chosen this style. The small guys seem to bang on about technology (or even worse “we only use GNU/Linux tools in production of your website”), and being able to do “anything” and get frustrated when people aren’t lining up at the door – the clients who like those shops generally aren’t the ones most of us want anyway.

* Before somebody points out that some gadgets “sell” on feature lists, that’s not what’s happening. When I say “this camera has triple 15 megapixel CCD sensors”, you might think I’m selling a feature. I know though that a geek who is into this price niche will likely transfer that feature in their head into “I can take really sharp pictures with good natural colour definition pictures with that camera”. I sold you a benefit via your own knowledge of the possibilities of the feature. :-)

It seems obvious, but most people miss it. Talking in the language of technology and features is a mistake I made for several years and am still struggling to deal with as I develop my new marketing material. The simple truth is, if they knew what all this BDD and Agile stuff was and why it was so good, they probably wouldn’t need our services. Now all I want to talk about when doing sales is business problems, issues and ideas and how to address them. Take heed, young grasshopper.

Whilst it was announced by the conference itself a week or two back and it appeared via @vagueware, I realised today I’d not mentioned it here: I’m speaking at ThinkVisibility on the 12th September.

It’s the first scheduled talk I’ve done in a long while – perhaps the first I’ve done since I started attending/organising BarCamp conferences – so it’s a bit weird actually planning it all this far in advance. I am however looking forward to it, as my talk for online marketers is focused on a subject area I’ve not been able to discuss publicly for the several years I’ve been learning it.

Whilst I’ve sworn to the organisers that I won’t discuss Kagtum per se, a lot of my talk will focus on techniques and technologies that underpin it. My abstract reads like this:

Why do marketers exert more effort trying to convince people who have never heard of their companies – whether it be through SEO, CPC campaigns and building social media audiences – to spend money, than they spend using technology to understand people they already have a relationship with?

Do you know how many of your current customers or site visitors are pre-disposed to buying a particular type of product online? Do you have statistics on cross-selling opportunities at checkout? Do you even know where to find that data? Or how to use technology to make sure your e-commerce platform does?

Applied software engineering, advanced data sets and a little bit of lateral thinking means your website can do your customer’s searching for them, before they know they need to search for something themselves. All you need is a little bit of knowledge, a friendly developer or geek and a leap of imagination.

In a talk tailored for people who are more curious about what’s possible rather than studying the status quo, we’ll briefly cover how centuries old mathematics can help your online presence as much as it has helped your inbox stay junk-free, touch on collaborative filtering and the possibilities unlocked in your software through just one or two key pieces of information about a customer. Finally we’ll touch on how software can constantly learn about your customers and automatically work to increase conversions.

An abstract – and hopefully intellectually stimulating – talk, you might leave wanting to learn some maths and computer science to understand how your website can serve your customers better, even if the thought of such a prospect appals you right now.

I’ll be tweaking it a little bit as I always do when developing a talk properly, but that’s the main gist of it.

A short/cut-down version will probably get done as a screen-cast for some time in later September or early Ocotber, but if you want to hear the full thing or discuss what I talk about in detail in person, I’d suggest you go and register now. The focus is around online marketing and SEO, and my talk will of course reflect the audience who will be there, so if that’s your bag there should be plenty of other talks to grab your attention and make the fee worthwhile. I hope to see you there.

Vagueware Ltd is just over 3 years old. In all that time, there has only ever been one full-time employee – myself. I’ve sub-contracted work occasionally before but I’ve resisted hiring because the amount of work I’ve been doing has been enough that I’ve not been able to invest as much time needed in sales to secure somebody else’s salary.

That now needs to change, as the amount of work is growing and the number of products due for launch is increasing. Revenues for the next six months will exceed the total for the previous three years combined, and it’s all getting very busy.

Before I go on please do not contact me if you are a recruitment consultant, because whilst I know you’re different from all the rest and I really should give you a chance, I really am not prepared to work with any agency or recruitment consultant. I want direct approaches from talented individuals only. Sorry, and good luck with your continuing search for employers.

Now, with that out of the way…

Who am I hiring? For what positions? And how much am I paying?

Well, quite simply: you tell me.

This might seem like a joke. It isn’t. I am deadly serious in my approach, and the fact that somebody is prepared to respond to this kind of a call for CVs shows they have jumped over a mental hurdle that makes them a good fit from day one. I’ve wanted to do this for years.

The Philosophy

Around eight years ago I read the story of Ricardo Semler and knew immediately that was how I wanted to run my business. It works like this:

• Everybody in the company can see the accounts at any time they want
• They can ask for any salary they want
• They mostly – with management guidance – dictate their own job role
• Rather than managers hiring staff, staff hire their managers
• Everybody in the company given the above information (including other people’s salaries), police themselves into making a good company a great one

Mix into that the principles of W.L. Gore & Associates where everybody has the same job title and the structure grows into a lattice, I think you can see where I want Vagueware to be five years from now:

• Completely flat in terms of management structure (UK law requires there to be a director, and I’m currently sole shareholder, but we can think through a way out this if what I propose begins to work)
• A meritocracy where the quality of your work is what counts
• Staff choosing their own hours
• Staff choosing their own salary
• Staff choosing their own input into each project
• Everybody is accountable to everybody else in the company, not to a boss who doesn’t understand what you do (even if in the early years I have to pretend I do).

Yes, it’s a little radical. However, I wouldn’t want it any other way. When I talk about R&D I want it to mean “Radical & Daring” as much as it does “Research & Development”

What can Vagueware offer you?

Vagueware has for the last three years focused on developing bespoke software solutions for a range of clients including government departments, charities, trendy companies staffed by guys too cool to go to school, and beyond. The Vagueware Blog (you’re reading it right now), gets thousands of readers a week and is about to be restructured to engage with multiple audiences in a deeper and much more meaningful way within the software R&D communities. I personally am known across the region and within the industry as an opinionated and engaging thinker who works so hard, he never seems to get anything done (except behind the scenes, beautiful things happen daily).

Vagueware has delivered a range of services in the past: Ruby on Rails development; infrastructure planning and deployment; training; analysis, reporting and management reviews; quality assurance assessments of development projects; project management; technical writing, columns for papers and trade magazines; and on one occasion Vagueware was retained by a client to “argue” with their ideas. That was fun.

In the next year projects are likely to include overseeing delivery of an amazing tool for training, a logistics application for a trendy niche sector and oversight & assistance on a project that has major influence in central and local government departments.

Other client projects that are further away on the sales pipeline involve big information architecture issues, research & development using some of the coolest technology around, and migration of many projects to cloud services and the building of tools and services to give clients the best combination of flexibility and scalability in the sector.

In addition, we’re looking to launch Kagtum and a set of associated tools around some collaborative intelligence algorithms, a new project management tool that makes life easier for everybody involved in producing outputs, and in the long run a whole boatload of projects including many ideas coming from our peers, colleagues and clients.

It’s also planned that work concerning industry analysis, training and research will increase dramatically.

Over the next 9 months the company will need to re-invent itself in a few areas to fit around a changing economy and marketplace, and there’s a good chance there will never really be a true “head office” unless you want to build it yourself: if you want to work in a provided office, great. Otherwise work where you like.

In addition to choosing your own salary, work location, job role and hours, Vagueware will provide an annual equipment budget to furnish yourself with work equipment of your choosing. We won’t go out and buy you an Apple laptop and sit you in an Aeron chair against your will just because it sounds “cool”, but we’ll allow you to buy them yourself on our account if that’s what you feel you need to do your job.

You can find out more about some of the things the company does from the laughably-in-need-of-an-update-and-redesign-and-restructure website

What do we want from you?

Vagueware is looking for people who think they have something to offer to come and spell it out.

Skills I’m personally interested in hearing about include:

• PR, marketing and sales people who understand relationships and why Vagueware is a little bit different
• Developers – we’re currently 100% RoR, but all languages and frameworks considered
• Designers with lickable portfolios
• Project Managers/Account Managers who can beat the drum in such a way people dance whilst they work
• Analysts/researchers/writers who are interested in people, technology and the industry because it’s interesting not just because it’s profitable
• Technology Philosophers. No, really, thinking is important to what the company does.

Ideally you should be interested in doing something in more than one of these areas, simply because silos can’t really exist in this marketplace any more and people who like to be pushed into new skills are ideal fits for the culture Vagueware hopes to grow.

Ultimately, you should love technology, society, their collective potential and spend your time dreaming of what your place in the industry could be a few years from now, and be prepared to act to get there.

You should be committed to the company goals I’ve spelled out above and work actively towards a flat management structure, with open accounting standards and the ability o work without keeping your salary a closely-guarded secret.

You can be located anywhere on the planet, but there is an advantage if you’re based in the EU and entitled to work in the EU. If you’re not entitled to work in the EU but want to work here, sorry but no dice for now: reconsider whether you could work where you are. If you want to work whilst you travel, that’s fine, just explain how it’ll work.

To apply, send me an e-mail to paul AT vagueware dot com with the following:

• A one-page CV
• Some links to work you’ve done if applicable
• A short covering letter explaining:
  • what you want to do for Vagueware
  • how much you want to be paid for your talents (we are not looking for cheap labour, be realistic about what gives you a comfortable lifestyle!)
  • the location you want to work from and if you need an office providing
  • the hours you want to work
  • and how hiring you is the best thing I can do for you – I’ll work out for myself if it’s the best thing for Vagueware, I’m interested in your side of the story right now.

Right now, don’t go overboard on this. Go with your first draft – I want to see you writing from your gut – and the CV you have drafted to hand (you always have a CV to hand, right?).

It may be that right now, as in today, I can’t take advantage of the skills you have and I need to put your application on file (I’ll tell you when I do), but if you’re good enough you will get a call the moment I can work out how to meet your salary demands. For now then, keep it simple and if you pique my interest I’ll get back to you and ask you some more questions.

All applications will be kept in confidence, and whilst it shouldn’t need spelling out: we’re an equal opportunities employer and do not discriminate against gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity or religion.

This might all seem a very strange, hippy-esque thing to do. In some ways it is. It’s an experiment and I’m keen to hear from the people get in touch. If it doesn’t work, I’ll be very disappointed, but I’ll keep trying.

I look forward to hearing from you, and thank you for you interest in considering Vagueware as the company where you get to do your thing.

Paul Robinson

When you first watch this, you think it’s some guy being videoed by people laughing at him for not dancing very well. Then another guy joins in and it’s two guys who are clearly drunk and probably on something. Then the third guy gets involved… and within a minute you start to laugh…

By the end I am asking myself the same question as the girl whose voice you hear asking “How did he do that?”. He understands his audience and gave them what they wanted right there and then, that’s all.

(via Seth whose blog should be in your RSS reader if it isn’t already).

Vagueware is not my only gig. My other Directorship is very low-key, doesn’t take much time, and is where I and my business partner experiment with various marketing revenue models. It’s primarily been a learning experience, and the frustration we’ve had over the last two years in getting various complex projects rolled out has meant we’ve been looking at partnering with technology companies and focusing on the marketing and customer communications side.

Our latest venture is quite a departure for us. Excuse me whilst I shill for a couple of paragraphs:

Whilst cash back websites are not brand new, we’re hoping that with a really solid technology platform underneath us, we’re going to be able to do something special in the way of helping people make shopping a little more fun – and save cash too. I do however, need some eyes and ears because I’ve had no control over technology roll-out, so I’m interested to hear of problems people might have.

As you can see, the concept is really simple. You sign up, we give you a fiver. You shop online, we give you a percentage of what you spend. You refer friends, we give them a fiver, and we give you a fiver as well once they qualify for payout. We’ll point you in the direction of freebies that pay you money as well. We’ll be launching a blog to highlight particularly good offers. Occasionally e-mails with super secret codes will land in your inbox and you will consider yourself a wise old bean for signing up with us. It makes things cheaper if you’re doing a lot of Christmas shopping online, although for various reasons we’re late to the party for that one, so our strategy is a little more long-term.

End of shill

I mention it here, because I’m interested in problems an educated audience (that’s you, dear reader), might see. We know for example that the back end systems are rock-solid and everything is nice and secure, but are there ‘quirks’ we’ve yet to spot that only a geek can spot? Maybe you just think the business model is odd, or we haven’t explained it very well. Either way, I wanted people whose opinions I respect to take a look before the big marketing push over the next 12 months, and see where we can make improvements.

Reading Wired these days is a bit like being punched in the eyeball by a lack of self-identity. I don’t really know what that means, but if you remember what Wired used to be like, you’ll get what I mean.

This month one of the first interesting articles I’ve seen from them in a while has appeared, discussing how Second Life really isn’t working the way advertisers wanted it to. Quel surpise.

Second Life is not what the hype says it is. It is not the future, it is just the latest incarnation of the MUD games those of us who meet a certain demographic once wasted our teen years trying to work out. This reality is slowly dawning on the people putting the most money into the place. From the article:

Then there’s the question of what people do when they get there. Once you put in several hours flailing around learning how to function in Second Life, there isn’t much *to* do. That may explain why more than 85 percent of the avatars created have been abandoned. Linden’s in-world traffic tally, which factors in both the number of visitors and time spent, shows that the big draws for those who do return are free money and kinky sex. On a random day in June, the most popular location was Money Island (where Linden dollars, the official currency, are given away gratis), with a score of 136,000. Sexy Beach, one of several regions that offer virtual sex shops, dancing, and no-strings hookups, came in at 133,000. The Sears store on IBM’s Innovation Island had a traffic score of 281; Coke’s Virtual Thirst pavilion, a mere 27. And even when corporate destinations actually draw people, the PR can be less than ideal. Last winter, CNET’s in-world correspondent was conducting a live interview with Anshe Chung, an avatar said to have earned more than $1 million on virtual real estate deals, when Chung was assaulted by flying penises in a griefer attack.

Just what you need as an advertiser – doing a PR launch where giant penises attack your in-World presence would make Janet Jackson getting her norks out family-friendly in the eyes of the demographic most advertisers are chasing.

What’s more, the underlying architecture can not scale – they’ve built the system so that it will never reach the potential that self-titled futurologists have envisaged for it:

One of the things you never see in Second Life is a genuine crowd — largely because the technology makes it impossible. In Stephenson’s Metaverse, corporations established their presence along a bustling, almost infinitely long street that residents could cruise at will. Second Life is different. Created by an underfunded startup using a physics engine that’s now years out of date, Second Life is made up of thousands of disconnected “regions” (read: processors), most of which remain invisible unless you explicitly search for them by name. Residents can reach these places only by teleporting into the void. And even the popular islands are never crowded, because each processor on Linden Lab’s servers can handle a maximum of only 70 avatars at a time; more than that and the service slows to a crawl, some avatars disappear, or the island simply vanishes. “It’s really the software’s fault,” says Andrew Meadows, Linden Lab’s senior developer. “Way back when, we used to say, ‘This is not going to scale.’”

There is of course another way forward: embrace the limitations and the spirit of what the World is all about. Advertisers aren’t keen on doing that though – you’re the one meant to be embracing them, not the other way around.

That leaves them with the other rather obvious conclusion: advertising in MUDs, like advertising in games, isn’t going to work. Save your money and find something better to do with it. Advertisers are loathe to do this however. They saw what happened to MySpace, Facebook and the rest and they’re convinced that this time they’re going to be ahead of the curve. They don’t care if it isn’t popular, as long as it looks as though they’re doing something interesting. However, if I were a shareholder, articles like this would make me nervous:

The Coke build is expansive, elaborate, and of course empty. But Coca-Cola has a plan. It’s sponsoring a contest to create a Virtual Thirst vending machine that it hopes will become ubiquitous in Second Life, just as Coke machines are everywhere in real life. Jaffe professes to be overwhelmed by the number of entries, which he characterizes as “well north of 100.”

Suddenly, another avatar materializes. “Ah, there you go,” Jaffe exclaims. “Someone’s just arrived! I think she’s from Japan.” As he speaks, Dapto starts air-typing in the weird way that Second Life avatars do, trying to chat up the new Japanese girl. She looks around, then teleports someplace else.

Want to know how expensive? If you hire Jaffe there to sort it out for you, maybe put a couple of staff on the case of looking after it you’re going to need a budget of $500,000/year. Just think about that. This is a platform where if you get 1,200 people turning up, you’re a rave success. When your Madison Avenue crew is defining a cost of reach at $416/head as reasonable value and the audience leave within seconds, you know somebody, somewhere, is grasping at straws for new ideas.

via Erick Schonfeld

In this article, I’ll be exploring some of the issues around creative thinking and software development. This is a theme I expect to be re-visiting a lot over the next few weeks, so these are more high-level riffs. Each of the major points here needs expanding upon, but I’m interested in seeing what people out there lock into as the most interesting aspects of this.

I believe that raw creativity is not normally associated with the development side of the software industry. This is an error that hampers development, innovation and even the core process of programming. Creative thinking should be taught to all programmers and embraced as a way of working.

Typically only the people involved in the user interface, information architecture and marketing stages of the development process get to do the “original vision thing”. Whilst this goes on, programmers are expected to behave like glorified plumbers by connecting interactions together with a logic that meets the spec and passes tests. This skews the development process towards the wrong people.

Project Managers and Information Architects are going to be aghast – Designers will be screaming – but it is the “Developers” who are the best placed to understand what is and isn’t possible. When asked to be involved in the earliest stages, or in stages they’re not normally invited into (yes, even marketing meetings) and encouraged to contribute to the creative process, several benefits are likely to occur:

1. The programmer becomes more involved in the project and is less likely to think about “those idiots” down the hall

2. The project itself will improve – programmers can often point out things that are possible that nobody else had even thought doable. Typically programmers are early-adopters and keen to produce things that impress. Mediocre software is always designed by marketing, great software by people who really understand what software can do when given a chance.

3. The project constraints will be better understood right from the word ‘go’ and proposals made by IAs or Designers who don’t understand the ‘code impact’ can be quickly managed and dealt with rather than getting in front of a client who signs off and expects to see it in the final shipped product.

Some programmers will protest, because they don’t want to go to meetings. This is because most meetings that pretend to be about original thinking aren’t anything of the sort. If you create an environment where genuine thoughtfulness, creativity and interesting ideas are produced and managed, programmers would have a different opinion of those meetings. The sad truth is, most people in the software industry who aren’t programmers are there because they aren’t very interested in this kind of thing. That’s one of the reasons why so many programmers are going it alone right now.

One argument from the other side is that programmers aren’t very good at creative thinking. Those people might be right, but that’s because they think about the process inaccurately.

The truth is, where most programmers learn their trade at first is in building algorithms. There isn’t much scope in the minds of most programmers for creativity at the algorithm level. They have been taught to look for patterns they’ve seen before – the reason why every undergraduate has to undergo at least one course in Data Structures & Algorithms during their college years – and code reuse is preferred over “reinventing the wheel”.

Knowing certain sort algorithms are better in some ways than others is certainly beneficial, as is code reuse. However, the idea that programming is something you can learn once and then just repeat over and over again is absurd.

This has been scaled up from the algorithm level into the project level over the years. It was the “building block” approach to programming: if you look at an algorithm and implement it like so, and it becomes efficient to remove creative thinking here, then it must scale up. The result is that programmers have been trained to think of projects at times in the same way they’ve been taught to think of algorithms: look for patterns, reuse where possible, don’t break the mold.

It is only in recent years that academics have even started considering teaching their students any other method than waterfall for managing a software project, and when a programmer is confronted with their team at the first job working in an agile fashion (if you can find me a team still dealing 100% with waterfall, I’ll show you an expensive team), they are going to find themselves ill-equipped for the average work day. They are going to have to find a way to keep their head above water, and what tends to happen is they hack it. They don’t have the tools – because they’ve been told they’ll never need them – to think creatively.

What’s more this problem is compounded by the fact that it’s no longer enough in an agile World for a programmer to just know how to write algorithms. All of a sudden, the information architect has become redundant as the software engineer takes the role of seeing how the whole system plugs together. There is even an argument that the information architect was always redundant.

Addressing these issues aren’t simple. If creativity is so important, why don’t more programmers engage with it?

Programmers are experts on thinking through complex problems. In theory, all that needs to be done is to teach creative and original thinking as thinking through a complex problem. Even the worst “creativity consultant” can tell you however that the enemy of creativity is habit, so they would argue this is likely to fail. The creative process looks so bizarre to an analytical mind specifically because it can’t be easily explained. This, however, is a misunderstanding.

The real issue with creative thinking is that many people are scared of failure. Programmers, especially so. This is because in real life, as in a software project, failure is expensive. Time lost is time lost – we fear doing something that we can’t take back. We look forward to our next actions in life through the lens of our past, trying to make sure we don’t make the same mistakes again. Programmers thrive on doing this – it’s what makes the analytical mind tick. This leads to unassertive caution and bashful timidity. We are too scared to put our hand up and say “let’s do something reckless” in a project meeting for exactly the same reason we won’t say it to a stranger in a bar we’re attracted to: if it fails, we feel it, and we have to deal with it.

Creative thinking is therefore not thinking about breaking the habit of doing something repetitive, but breaking the habit of doing nothing at all. It’s about doing whatever we can, over and over again, just to get one little gem of an idea out there. In the world of brainstorming, failure is cheap, and risk-taking gets the prize. It is this that should be encouraged within our industry because we are so desperate for it: brazen, reckless, failure that costs nothing, followed by the sparkle of genius that changes the World.

If creativity in programmers might help projects, or help develop programmers themselves, one question needs to be asked: Where exactly does creativity need to be applied in the software industry?

In short: Everywhere.

Software development is a creative industry, as all pinnacles of civilisation ultimately are, from stock markets to museums. The fact that we still describe the disciplines in terms of engineering or science confuses me: it may be that when a deep understanding of electronics was needed before you could begin to write software, this seemed sensible. But in the age of abstract languages like Ruby or Python? Dare I say even Java?

At the core of this is how we go about deciding what software to write in the first place. This is an area, which you may be surprised to hear that there is little creativity.

In fact, nearly all software is a derivative of a previously-available software. Even open-source, where you would expect creativity to thrive is often a collection of re-writes of commercial software which in itself is nearly always a derivative of a new way of making a quick buck. Firefox might be swell, but it is rooted in Netscape which in itself was just a way of making some money out of somebody else’s bright idea. Tim Berners-Lee might have had an original thought once, but don’t think that anything you’ve seen since then around web servers or web browsers has been original.

Then there is the implementation of the software. Programmers like code reuse. They love libraries. They would marry their preferred framework if it were philosophically sensible or legal. However, it is producing a generation of software that is derivative.

Right now, developers are in a “group-think” position that we follow the principles of doing things the way they always have been done. Sometimes this makes sense: windowing systems, cryptographic libraries, etc. However, whilst Rails and Django sure are swell, is it really the case that what is needed in the World is more CRUD-interfaces to relational databases? So often you see projects that could have been implemented more elegantly in less code, but rarely are. “_why the lucky stiff” is a notable exception to this trend: learning from watching him is recommended.

This brings us to the marketing of software. Right now you can sell your time, sell the code, or find a way to incorporate adverts. Sure “monetisation” is important: critical if you want to keep in your XXXL shape. That said, are there really only 3 ways to making money? Of course not, but whenever a new product is thought up, it’s always put into one of a few different silos. Try this: think of all the ways people are able to make money legally in the world from commissions to referrals to services, and then try and find a way to get your ‘great idea’ to fit each of those silos. You might end up inventing something completely original.

Creative thinking isn’t hard – there are thousands of ways of doing it. The question is: why aren’t we programmers doing more of it?

Last night, a story on MacRumors.com grabbed my interest. It was grabbed for two reasons:

1. I could land a booty of 10 apps from MacHeist for the iBook that would normally cost me $400, but for just $49
2. This, apparently, is highly controversial

Now, most of the apps are OK, but not the type you would run out and buy as if your life depended on it. I already have and use Textmate, so that didn’t add value. I’d been meaning to grab copies of DEVONthink and RapidWeaver for a few months now and $49 for those two alone is a saving. The fact I was able to get Delicious Library, FotoMagico, ShapeShifter, Disco, iClip, a Pangea game (I chose Enigmo 2, which is already sucking me in), and NewsFire as bonuses and for no extra money, just made it a bit more interesting for me.

Now, here’s the thing. The blogosphere is on fire about this, not because of the remarkable value, but because the developers providing the software are apparently being ‘ripped off’ by MacHeist and despite going into this with both eyes wide open, are obviously being conned. Here’s some examples:

for MacHeist to call it “The Week of the Independent Mac Developer” and to practically give away the software… well, that’s just a fucking insult to me and all the other hard working developers out there.
– Gus Mueller

My understanding is that the developers taking part in the bundle are getting a flat rate for participating. That means that the more bundles MacHeist sells, the more money MacHeist makes, while the developers will get no additional money. Each new user adds support costs, so the more bundles they sell, the worse off each developer may be.
– Paul @ Rogue Amoeba

The argument is not that MacHeist are being underhand. Rather it is that the developers are only making a fixed fee and MH are making a bundle on the back of them.

So are the developers idiots? Have they been conned? If you read Gus Mueller’s fiscal breakdown, you see that MacHeist are canny businessmen if nothing else. Here’s some of the comments from the developers who got involved:

Gus has strong opinions and I love him for that, but none of us who are bundled with MacHeist were forced to do so; we knew ahead of time what the price would be and how much we’d get, and we decided it was worth it for us.

I think events like this get a lot of publicity, so they bring in new customers that I wouldn’t reach on my own. So I’m not really sabotaging my sales; I’m supplementing them. Seriously, if you came to me and said, “I’m going to resell Delicious Library to customers on the moon, who you’ve never met and can’t reach, for $1 a copy,” I’d say, “Go for it!” I don’t care if I only get a penny if it’s a penny more than I would have gotten on my own.
– Wil Shipley of Delicious Library

Let

[UPDATE: looks like Mephisto didn’t like that. In fact, it’s proper broken. Will restore order shortly.]

I have been engaged in a discussion over on a mailing list recently about the relative worth of Search Engine Optimisation. I realised that it may be worth sharing one of my responses here as well, because I think it sums up a big way of how I think online business should be conducted.

Simon Wharton, complained that my eariler assertion that SEO was ‘Snake Oil’, was unfair:

As a business that does SEO/SEM I have to take you to task slightly on your statement.

In that case I’ll back it up. :-)

[He continues]

Yes there are a lot of cowboys about but there are some pretty damn good firms out there. Same as in any business. It is a very necessary function as without sales, there’s no money to pay geeks to do clever geeky things

There is no reason any company should have to pay several hundred dollars an hour for page optimisation that doesn’t actually do anything.

I might be a geek first, but I’m also a businessman. I understand sales. You don’t need to tell me how important sales is. “Cashflow is King” has at various points been the first thing I think in the morning, and the last thing I think at night. It dominates my existence.

That said, there is zero, and I mean ZERO value in hiring an SEO firm – SEO is about taking something dull and tricking search engines into thinking it’s interesting.

Want to increase PageRank? Produce something interesting in the first place.

SEO companies saying that they can turn a crappy little shop web site into the Next Big Thing by changing the meta tags, going around leaving links on related blogs and taking a pile of cash for it deserve to be taken out and shot.

The firms that hire them think of web sites as being nothing more than online copies of sales brochures. The conversation is then try optimising that material. If SEO firms were doing their job, they’d be ignoring that crap, and telling them how to develop a blog, engage customers via wikis, use social networking sites, start mailing lists or web forums, etc., etc. Marketing is about conversations, not about tricking Google to increase your PageRank.

If you want to increase sales, there is so much more that can be done, for so much less money, than SEO.

For starters, if you just want to throw money at it to make the problem go away, bid on related keywords and go for the top spot in the search engines. It’s quick, easy and has measurable results. SEO firms’ work generally can’t be measured accurately – buying ads can. Thing is, when you do that, you’ll still realise the futility of trying to ‘buy’ attention whether it be through ads or SEO: if you want attention, you quickly learn you have to earn it the hard way.

I think the first time I saw an SEO company must have been 1995 just before Google started getting traction – Altavista was Daddy then – and in the decade that has passed, I have never seen a good value SEO package. The ethical companies’ offerings amounted to increasing word density and ‘related word’ counts, and finding people in the same business who had blogs and spamming their comments section – and it *is* spam if the intent is to increase traffic, it’s not spam if the intent is for your customer to show they know what they’re talking about.

Interestingly, having met customers who are keen to use SEO firms, I’ve never met one who actually really gave a damn about doing something interesting with their site beyond sales copy either, so perhaps they all deserve each other. :-)

Note URL in my sig [it points here to this blog]: I eat my own dog-food. I could have produced a standard “we’re a software development company specialising in X, Y, Z” site but nobody would have cared. As it is, that blog got 5,000 pageviews in its first month on-line. It also got me two jobs. I expect tweaking the meta tags might not have produced results that interesting.

At this point, I signed off by saying I’d post this little rant up here, but thinking about it, there is more that needs to be said on this.

Expanding on the point, I think it’s easy to just say “let’s take our sales brochure and make it optimal for online consumption” because companies tell you that can work, it can produce results. They’re lying. It can’t. It will allow people who already know about you, to find you online, it’s true. It won’t allow new people to discover you. If your website is about keeping existing customers happy, and not about finding new customers, SEO is definitely the way to go. If you want to do something to get people interested in you though, there is absolutely nothing worse you can do in damaging your reputation.

You have no idea how much of a difference just putting a forum on your site can have for traffic. Or using a blog format and allowing customers to comment on what you’re doing. When doing a plan to produce a new product, why not put it on a wiki and allow your existing customers develop the product with you?

It not only has an effect on your online presence, it has an effect on how you go about your business. It is far more profitable in cashflow terms, and it can fundamentally change your attitude to your customer and business in a positive way.

”I don’t really think, I just walk.” – Paris Hilton

It’s been knocked around the web a little bit now, but here is one take on why Paris Hilton is Marketing 2.0 compared to Madonna’s Marketing 1.0 (or whatever).

I have to say, I get the point. I don’t really know who Paris Hilton is, what she does, or why I should care about her. But I recognise the name. And now I know why. Actually, no, not true, I heard her name when that video was all over the web and in every spam inbox you could imagine, but I didn’t know if she was meant to be important or something.

The idea of trading attention is of course, the reason why the blogosphere works. If I point to chartreuse there in that link up top, that blog gets attention. If a story I post gets voted up on reddit, I get attention. As a result, we have all become keen to harness attention and make the most of it. I use it to help develop my reputation as a… well, whatever it is I am… other people use it because they want to make money, other people do it because they’re lonely. What Hilton has done is turn this into a real-World business game where designers and hairdressers and car manufacturers want her attention because like an A-list blogger, she can divert our attention to whatever she is talking about. It’s a brilliant business model, and she’s either very, very smart or the people using her are.

There are, as ever, drawbacks to all this though, ones that are pertinent for us web application developers and engineerscraftsman. As the article above points out, Paris has become a platform for marketing and therefore can never really market herself. She can sell designer clothes, she can sell cars, probably even burgers. But she can never sell herself (unless there’s another video I don’t want to see out there… ). She is trapped in a corner of audience expectation. If she were now to attempt to host a game show, say, it would fail. The audience doesn’t want her there. Nor, if you’re thinking of using her as a marketing vehicle, do they really want her on your video site because they have expectations of you as well as her.

Sometimes, this can be known as ‘captured by customer expectation’ and refers to the fact that when you’re successful for something, it is virtually impossible to transfer that success to something else. Think how hard it would be for McDonald’s to transfer their success into say, high-street banking, for Apple to buy out Wal-Mart or for your web development company to transfer success into the field of say, farming.

When you are a product/service company, you can always have a fall-back if you’re careful: facebook will always have college kids even if high school kids and corporate bods hate them; McDonald’s will always have the Bic Mac even if their next venture fails; you will always have the desire to move onto the next project if this one doesn’t pan out.

When you’re known for one thing and you can only have the resources to handle one market at a time though, things can fly back in your face. Whilst the article above is astute and funny, the ultimate truth about marketing like Paris Hilton is that when she fails she’ll fail for the same reasons we might: ignoring audience expectation because we want ‘growth’. And we will all make that mistake eventually as it will become a very miserable existence to be thought of as nothing else other than that person who makes other people famous.