Innovation in Software

As ever, my business development continues to happen in the open. I thought I’d share a couple of things that have been happening at Vagueware towers:

• I’m looking for a new office. I’ve been desk-surfing at Liquid Bronze this week and last, and whilst my home office in my new pad in Chorlton is starting to take shape, I think something city centre might be a good idea going forward. I’m looking at the usual candidates, but with Fly The Coop taking a direction based on the Science Park, I’d be interested to hear more ideas/suggestions of where to take a look.
• I have retained the services of a sales consultant. If you have never done this yourself, I advise you do (and I’m happy to let you have the details of mine – he’s freelance and understands the software sector). You might think you know what your business does and how it is perceived, but there is nothing like spending a couple of hours over coffee with a guy who understands the sector to tell you how it really is. My favourite quote from his initial report: “Paul is the brand at the moment. It will take time to establish Vagueware instead”. Too true.
• We’re going VAT registered and taking the opportunity whilst changing our accounting procedures to change our accounting platform. All the cool kids at the moment are raving about Kashflow – anybody got any experience with it or others?
• Right now there are 4 sub-contractors working on Vagueware projects, and I expect in August/September for that to rise to 6. The recruitment drive has gone spectacularly well with over 20 applicants – I want to hire them all – and it’s now just a case of getting the order book in a place to be able to commit to salaries for the long-term. I’m not hiring somebody without at least 3-6 months of their salary in the bank.
• There is discussion – don’t laugh – about me writing a book. Early days. We’ll see where it goes, but I’m really curious to find out what the advantages of a publisher actually are given most of the discussions so far have focused on how I will go out and “sell” the book. I could earn more by doing the same but publishing via Lulu. The only big advantage I can see is having “published by xxxxxx” on my CV.

It seems everybody is busy right now. I can’t remember a time when the sector as a whole was this buoyant in the UK. Talk of recession seems to be passing the bespoke/boutique sector by. I hope it’s the same with you, and if it isn’t let me know as I have work I’m directing away all the time now.

Many years ago I did some freelance writing. Some of it was painfully dull (filler articles for free magazines), some of it bizarre and seedy (your suspicions about readers’ letters in porn mags are well-founded: they are sometimes written by paid writers), but the biggest lesson I got from it was that it’s hard to make a decent living with that as your main gig.

When you need to rely on artistic output to pay the rent, it doesn’t take you long to realise that unless you’re going to get picked up by a large publisher or music label, you’re going to need another job.

Recently I’ve been thinking about this problem and the related crisis in the music and film industries in some detail. At its simplest, the problem is this:

People want to consume entertainment, but they do not wish to pay for it.

Artists do not have the right to be paid whatever they feel they are worth, they must compete in a market and persuade people to hand over cash just like any other industry. Punitive measures such as taxing consumer products in order to force payment of artists is in my opinion pure idiocy. We need to think instead about encouraging people to pay for the entertainment they love. I think that requires a few things:

1. Consumers should not have to fork out more money than they feel comfortable spending
2. More of that money needs to land in the artist’s pockets rather than distributor’s, so that artists on the ‘long tail’ can make a living off a smaller fan base
3. Artists need to find new ways to grow and engage with their fan base

Thankfully, the Internet makes all of these much more practicable than ever before.

One solution to the first problem has recently been played out with mixed results by Radiohead, but wouldn’t it be interesting if we had some sort of “tip jar” system in place for all artists? You download something via P2P, like it, and you can make a donation – of whatever size you want – to the creator. Well somebody is working on that but the question is whether it will ever work.

One artist working with a non-digital medium (paintings) has given this a whirl and it seems to be working. Ali Spagnola will – when it’s your turn – paint a picture just for you based on a theme you suggest and then send it you free of charge anywhere in the World. It’s not a con. I know this, because I’m currently staring at this picture painted for me sometime last year. Payment is completely voluntary. I’m ashamed to admit I still haven’t got around to throwing some money into the tip jar, but I’ll rectify that mistake this week. The painting has grown on me. I would miss it if I lost it. Ali deserves to be able to eat for giving it to me.

Does Ali make money? Perhaps. Do Radiohead? Definitely. So, it’s a model with potential.

As for the distribution problem, well I think it’s clear now that the current relationship with artists and the distribution chain is going to die within a matter of years. A band or a writer can now distribute directly via their website, and even authors can publish books cost-effectively without the need to get men in suits and lawyers involved. There is an issue of how to manage all this and as Kevin Kelly discovered when researching this, being your own tour manager, promoter, lawyer and roadie can be a gruelling and unprofitable exercise.

And then we get to audience engagement. The Internet has blown that apart as well – artists can now have a direct conversation with their fan base via blogs, social networking websites and video sites. It doesn’t scale (how do you stay personal with fifty million fans in 150 countries?), but that would be as they say “a nice problem to have”. Most artists don’t know how to do this well – they’re musicians, writers and film directors, not PR specialists – which suggests there will exist a niche industry helping bands do this very cost effectively within a few years. The current promotion and PR industries are not a good fit for where the industry is heading, they need to change.

As for growing your fan base, I agree with Robert Rich’s words in his message to Kevin Kelly:

Companies can use demographic models and track people’s search patterns to pander to their initial tastes and to strengthen those tastes, rather than broaden their horizons. This problem doesn’t lie within the technology of the internet, but within the realities of capitalism and human psychology.

There is a problem here with collaborative filtering – it’s locking us into tastes, not broadening them. However, it can also be the most powerful tool an artist can have working for them.

Four months ago I had never heard of The Courteeners and yet last Saturday was in the crowd at their sell-out gig at Manchester Academy having paid several times face value for the tickets off eBay. That only happened because last.fm algorithmically said “you should listen to these guys, because you like James”. So far The Courteeners and their label, promoters and distributors have directly received at least £30 off me they would never have got without that technology helping them. I expect they will get hundreds off me over the next decade providing they keep doing something I like.

However, I’d like to share that music. I’d like to say to my friends “look, listen to this, you’ll like it” and give them a copy. DRM and the law prevents me. It is working against them, because I know for a fact I could recruit at least another half dozen fans for their next tour and album release. They are working against me by insisting I do not put their album up on a website for anybody to download and listen to. I will happily work as their unpaid promoter and recruit whoever I can into giving them money, but that little circled “C” prevents me. They could have licensed it under a creative commons license, but they chose not to.

This one act alone has probably cost them a couple of thousand pounds in future lost revenue just through me. Scale it up to the 2,000 people who were at that gig the other night, they’re probably losing millions. Not millions in five years when they try and break America: millions of pounds right now, this week.

So, we need to find more new ways to openly and cheaply distribute art and leverage a fan base so as to be able to make a decent living – perhaps even an indecent living – for artists and fans alike. I have more ideas on how to make that happen, but I will share those with you tomorrow.

In the very near future, things are going to be changing at Vagueware.

Firstly, the site currently at vagueware.com is going down. I’m going to release the code running the idea bank as open source and you’ll be able to also setup a free hosted version of your own on Vagueware’s servers. Think of it as a bit like wordpress.org & .com but for open innovation rather than blogging. This will mean you can create your own IdeaStorm for your company or product.

I think open innovation and getting customers or employees involved in product and service development is going to be big in the next few years, and I want to help people get involved. If you have Ruby on Rails skills, patches to the code base will be appreciated as well – it’s going to be MIT licensed so that it follows the “Rails way”.

That will of course need a new name, and given that it’s all about constantly evolving and changing what you do and how you do it, it’ll be named Fluxish.

There are quite a few major changes needed to get the current build ready for that release, so don’t expect it this week. The ideas on the current site won’t be lost: I’ll be creating a special little hosted fluxish install and moving all the data and users over – I won’t be destroying anything, just giving it a new home.

So what will go in the idea bank’s place at the main site? Well, the new Vagueware site will concentrate on selling my consultancy and development services. There will also be a mini-blog there about the business, freeing this blog up from posts like this where I discuss what is going on inside the business. I’ll be highlighting companies I’ve worked with in the past and occasionally posting a page up as a more detailed article about the process of development.

This blog will become much more focused on innovation and emerging trends within the digital sector. This is an area I’ve drifted away from in the last three months, and I’m keen to get it back on track.

In addition, I’m going to be blogging more elsewhere in partnership with other organisations.

I’ve agreed to start writing more for O’Reilly GMT to try and turn it into a more mature source of information for the technology scene within Europe. I’m still working out and proposing what kind of articles those will be, but obviously they’ll not be about vagueware, not about innovation in software in the sense this blog will be, but aimed at a tech-savvy audience.

Also, I’ve been asked to contribute articles to ‘Manchester is online’, formerly ‘The Mancunian Way’. It’s one of the most read Mancunian blogs, and I’m hoping to bring some insight to a slightly less geeky crowd than the usual readership I get to speak to here. This is more of an experiment right now, but I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops. It’s the first time I’ll be stepping across into blogging for Mainstream Media, and I couldn’t be more pleased that I’m doing it with the team at the Manchester Evening News.

In short then, I’ve got a lot of writing to get on with over the next few months, so please don’t be too upset if this blog gets neglected at times.

And we’re not talking about RESTful here, either. See what I did there? I should get my own show…

August has always been a curious month in the IT industry. It is like a calm before the storm – Christmas is, believe it or not, almost upon us. August is a month where traditionally stock has been taken and people calm themselves before the four most profitable months of the year. Or at least, that’s the case for 60% of the industry.

The other 40% – mostly B2B and bespoke development companies – find their busiest 4 months is from April through July. This is after the round of budget reviews most businesses go through in the early part of the year and they require new systems to be in place ready for Christmas.

The result is that the entire industry is at rest: the majority getting ready for a big push, and a slightly smaller minority are resting after a few hectic – and hopefully, profitable – months.

As a result, the blogs go quiet. People go on holiday. Priorities are readjusted. The news sites resort to silly-season tactics of re-printing almost verbatim entire press releases. Nobody is reading much anyway – in the Northern hemisphere evenings spent with a bottle of wine outside in the warm dusk are preferred over huddling up around RSS feeds.

My apologies then if I don’t feel inclined to write much right now. I’ll be back in the writing hot seat very soon, but in the mean time just enjoy the peace – the next 4 months are going to be the strangest we’ve witnessed for a few years in this industry. Promise.

I care a lot about innovation and creative thinking. It’s one of the things that inspired me to learn how to write software when I was just 11 years old: if you can imagine it and it can be turned into a process a computer can run, you can create it. The potential has always been amazing, but now with tools like Ruby on Rails, the idea-to-product lead time is shorter than ever before.

The problem is, most people are awful at creative thinking and forming new ideas. In the UK we seem to be particularly bad at this, maybe because we tend to be more self-concious than many other cultures about looking foolish, or being mocked. However, it’s preventing so many businesses here from flourishing that it drives me crazy. Here’s my take on it, and how I go about coming up with hundreds of new ideas a week (note: coming up with hundreds of ideas is a good thing, acting on them is something completely different).

When traditional business consultants talk about innovation they use phrases like “blue sky thinking” or they may encourage thinking “outside of the box”. It is often thought that if we are constrained by how things are done now, the best way to be creative and innovative is to throw away everything and start from thin air.

It sounds good, and it has a catchy ring to it, but it’s flawed. It’s no surprise that the only original thought these consultants had was to become a business consultant and take your money off you for repeating clichés. They are effectively selling snake-oil, and that’s hardly an original idea.

Innovation does not come from the kind of freedom that means starting with nothing. It comes from changing the boundaries of what you already have, to evolve rather than throw everything away. Throwing everything away might be the idea you come up with at the end of the process, but it’s not how you should start.

A writer’s worst nightmare is often the blank page. A blank page represents the consultant’s “blue sky” – you can put anything on a blank page. This can cause your brain to ‘freeze’ if you don’t already know what is going to happen next. Writer’s block is caused by being able to do anything, not by being unable to do anything.

You need something to work with – you need to give yourself a boundary. One exercise to remove writer’s block is to write one word – any word, just a word – in the middle of the page. Then think about another word that would go with it, contradict it, oppose it, complement it, whatever. Soon, you find your brain giving you ideas, and off you go. This is giving your brain a set of boundaries, something to work with.

Comedy writers know this better than anybody. They have to, because writing good comedy is harder than any other type of writing (trust me, I’ve tried). Take sitcoms: the ‘sit’ is obviously short for ‘situation’ and if you watch a sitcom closely you’ll often find the really funny bits come from a set of situations rather than some cheesy lines. However, there is more to it than that.

Every sitcom starts with a context. In fact, all good comedy is often about the limits of something – a coffee shop, a relationship, a bunch of weird friends, the lead’s self-doubt. Think about all your favourite shows, and you’ll realise that the first thing the writers will have done is define the situation and boundaries the comedy will be written within.

Friends: group of 20-somethings who are close friends dealing with life in modern day New York.

Yes, Minister: the battle between the politician with a desire to do something worthwhile, and the civil service who desire nothing at all to happen if possible.

The Office: the excruciating banality and confinement of working with somebody who doesn’t understand reality.

If I asked you to write a sicom from scratch, you’d find it hard unless you had already defined a set of boundaries like those above. Get the idea? Still don’t believe me? OK, try this:

Write a new joke right now. Come up with something original, a joke the World has never heard before. It can be about anything.

I bet after a few minutes you’re finding it hard. Where do you start?

OK, I’ll help you. The joke has to involve a monk and an elephant. Easier? Probably. If you’re still struggling, I’ll give you a push and suggest you must use a play on the word ‘habit’ as in an item of monk’s clothing and being an established custom. Got a joke yet? Your brain is probably finding it easier now to come up with something funny.

This is what comedy writers do – they find some boundaries, and twist around inside them. It’s not just comedy either.

So how does this relate to technology and software? Well, firstly, it explains why all commercially successful technical advancement comes ultimately from evolution of ideas rather than revolutions.

People often resist revolutions – they need to find a way of relating to something via an evolutionary step. Early-adopters are not always grabbing hold of the next revolution: it’s because they’re always adopting early, that the stuff they do now is an evolution of where they were 6 months ago. We’ll all catch them up in a couple of years when our evolutionary path catches up, but to us it might look like a revolution, but that’s just because we’re being slow.

The evolutionary path we follow in our uptake of ideas is merely us accepting the twisting of the boundaries we’re comfortable with. Some people for example, will have produced a joke about the monk and the elephant that others will have found obscure, obscene or just outright unfunny. But that’s because the way you shape your box and then push the edges is different to how other people shape their box and push the edges. This is the core of all technical advancement, selling new technologies, and ultimately, creative commercially successful innovation.

People talk about the industrial “revolution”, but really it was an evolution of ideas on how to make spinning cotton more productive, mixed with the idea that a steam engine was more efficient than a horse (and didn’t need as much care and handling), mixed again with the idea that selling goods all over the World from a factory in the North of England made more money than selling it all down the local market. Evolution, after evolution, after evolution. It took decades, a lot of pain and failure along the way, and was all driven by people who liked twisting the rules inside a set of boundaries.

It took special circumstances, and a group of people to take a series of steps that others found uncomfortable.

The other reason this relates to technology, is that if we know that innovation is evolution, not revolution, and we know that giving ourselves boundaries to push is the way to be creative, we can use that to produce something valuable. Remember at the start when I said there was no other field more open to new ideas being created than computing? Once you formulate how to be creative, it opens up the playing field completely – you can become a money machine.

Want to come up with a new super-cool Web 2.0 website? Fine, let’s see – it needs to be based on communities, it needs to feel like a desktop app, and ideally it should get better the more people use it. That’s a good start, but I bet you’re still struggling to come up with dozens of ideas. Problem is, they’re all technical boundaries, and what we want is a business boundary – we want to generate new businesses, not new technologies, so we need to focus on the right box.

That said, trying to build a business with no thought to what is possible with the technology is a dumb move, and sometimes taking an old business idea and updating it with the latest tech (cf. Shopify) can produce a great business. However, for this example let’s add another arbitrary business bounday: it needs to be based on an e-Commerce model – people should use the site to buy things.

Right now, your brain might be starting to kick into gear and you’re coming up with ideas. Chances are, if you’re still concentrating on the technical boundaries they’re just re-hashing what has been done before – adding Ajax to OScommerce clones or something – and that’s no good: we want to get a bunch of really original ideas.

First thing we could do is say we’ll do the exact opposite of what everybody else does. So let’s do a web-site that when you visit it, it’s full of people wanting to buy things, and you can sell them what they need – the 180 degree turn-around. That’s an interesting and innovative twist.

We could just as easily brainstorm how to make something bigger, smaller, easier, harder, cooler, less cool, more popular, more niche, more intelligent, less intelligent, and so on. Look at every feature of eBay or Shopify and ask yourself “How would I do that differently?”

If we built a site where instead of a list of products, it was a list of wanted ads, we could then look at it again from fresh and find an evolutionary step from there. It may be that what we actually do is aggregate specially-tagged content from people’s blogs and allow marketers to find what bloggers are after, rather than hosting the ads ourselves. We may decide to produce a version that is highly targets to a very small niche. We might want to make it something well suited to market researchers trying to produce the Big Toy This Christmas.

Then, once we have those new boundaries, we start to twist within them and we may end up turning out a whole bunch of new ideas.

When you see the World through a lens that makes every product feature a boundary to be pushed, twisted and warped, creative thinking becomes infectious. And in the new World of software development, we need all the creative thinking we can get.

These are just some of my thoughts that I’ll be expanding on in the coming weeks – I’d be really keen to hear your ideas in the comments section.