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‘iPodify’ My Software Now!


By Chris Stone
January 15, 2006 — 
Why can’t all software be like an Apple iPod: simple, elegant and fashionable?

It’s time that software vendors follow the lead from consumer electronics. Hide rich functionality in an intuitive design. Give me tremendous value for the cost. And above all amaze me with your innovation.

Software has gotten boring, but this wasn’t always so. Those of us with speckles of gray on our heads (or nothing on our heads) remember when new releases, whether desktop or server, were met with high anticipation (yes, even Windows 3.1, OS/2 Presentation Manager and TopView).

New products almost always delivered on the promise of innovation, power and simplicity. These applications focused on value over hype. Advancements in underlying software plumbing were always secondary to the functionality provided.

The Great War
The enterprise software industry, though, continues to muddle through the Great Infrastructure War. Venerable scribes devote their air time and ink to every skirmish, espousing their beliefs in the True Way. These hostilities are based on differences in dogma (open versus proprietary, open source versus the world), while fundamental technologies, such as J2EE and .NET, and vendor and consortia standards drive the development of things such as Web application servers, middleware and portals.

Vendor battles are heating up, including the conflict between Microsoft’s Metro and Adobe’s PDF and the new OpenDocument formats. Well, it’s not new technically, but new to the hype. With IBM, it’s all WebSphere, all the time. But wait, there’s NetWeaver from SAP. Oracle wants you to use Fusion and 10g. And then there’s Linux, Windows Vista, “virtual” everything and the mainframe and AS/400 (like COBOL, they will never die).

As any user would rightly ask: When did it become about the vendors and their specifications and standards, and not about me and my needs and my users? Am I just an extra in this movie?

Sure, I care about how things are engineered. I care about standards. I care about interoperability. But at the end of the day, I want a great application that meets my requirements, whether I am a manager, developer or analyst.

And in business, make it easy for me to understand how it helps me work better. Make it easy and painless to install. Don’t leave me feeling like

I had a root canal without Novocain.

In the electronic document market, where documents are created with input from any enterprise software applications and output to any device—users complain that the infrastructure-level standards discussions miss the point.

Apps,Not Infrastructure
Users don’t buy infrastructure. They buy technology that solves a specific problem or meets a specific need. In other words, they buy applications. The technology industry lost sight of this fact in the supply-side-rich late 1990s and paid the price.

Let’s learn from our mistakes. It is time to move from infrastructure to “How the hell do I increase revenue?” to let users focus the discussion on what companies are trying to do with the data they present to customers, not on the infrastructure they use to do it.

For example, one of the largest private banks in Europe turned to EDP software to aggregate data from different sources in one customer-facing document and present it in a compelling document that is delivered in any format the customer wants: e-mail, snail mail or online. It’s the software application that helps them create a brand and boost customer satisfaction.

A national postal service that handles 20 million pieces of mail every day needs to integrate a Tower of Babel group of systems into its ERP environment so customers get their mail on time. The customer isn’t saying, “Get me another Java programmer!” Instead, the people are asking for an application that takes what it needs from all their systems and lets them expand their services as customer demand grows.

I’m not suggesting that innovative standards-based trends such as XForms and Metro versus PDF aren’t important issues. But let’s keep these discussions within the context of the applications they will enable.

If a vice president in a large retail bank has to increase and cross-sell more products in a dozen languages to thousands of customers, do you think he’s saying, “I know: Use XML”? Of course not.

If a large electronics retail chain needs to synchronize six different data sources onto shelves where 78 million price tags can be changed in real time to react to competitors, do you think they say, “If we just use SOA and Linux, we’re there”? If I dig a really deep hole, when will it stop?

If you learned a language like COBOL or PL/1, you can pick up most others. SOA and Web services? We called them FTP and CORBA 15 years ago. PDF, XFA, ODF and Metro? We called the underlying technology OpenDoc a dozen years ago. Not to be outhyped by Apple and Taligent (remember that IBM joint venture?), along came Microsoft with OLE (which it really got from HP’s NewWave), Sun with JavaBeans and a host of other components that fueled the debate but never really developed a solution.

I have always been amazed at how much attention, time and money has been spent over the past 30 years on plumbing when what businesses really wanted was to flush a toilet and make ice.

In the end, isn’t it all about creating, editing, storing, deleting and presenting via multiple channels (such as print/fax/e-mail/SMS/Web/hologram)?

The world of computer science is filled with smart, sophisticated people trying to prove it. It’s not really science, its math.

If you want a software project to be successful and productive, you hire a bunch of like-minded developers who are fanatics in a language, infrastructure or service. It doesn’t matter what they use. Successful software is either a category creator or a simpler process.

It’s time to focus the discussion on what companies are trying to do with the data they present to customers, not on the infrastructure they use to do it. Customers should always write down the business requirements of the problem they are trying to solve.

Ever read a requirements document from a Global 2000 company? It looks as if it were crafted by 25 computer science grad students who just poured through 15 computer trade publications. You need a Wikipedia to figure it out.

Now What?
It’s all about unlocking the data locked up by ERP, CRM and ECM. Okay, I’ve input it, stored it, archived it, managed it and looked at it—now what? How do I present it to somebody to attract more business?

That is the most important question of all.

Chris Stone is president and CEO of StreamServe, which provides business communications management software.


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