As well as top speakers, excellent content and free beer, there’s one more thing you’re going to get at Business of Software 2008: mild social anxiety.

We’re going to try out an idea that Seth Godin blogged about, and split people up into groups of 10. Each group will get allocated a table and a topic to discuss.

That means that we’re going to need 30 – 40 topics for people to discuss, fewer if we allow multiple tables to use the same topic.

Seth suggests entrepreneurship, shoe collectors and whining about the economy. If you’ve got any other topics you’d like to discuss at Business of Software 2008 then post them here. I’ll send a copy of Meatball Sundae, Seth’s latest book, to a couple of people who come up with the best suggestions.

Post here …

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the dangers of stories and how, if you’re unaware of the biases baked into our brains, stories and the storytellers who tell them can lure you into tar pits. In this post I’m going to write about another cognitive bias.

But first, of course, a story.

James, who manages our .NET division, is a smart guy. I grab him, and explain that I want to give him a quick test. I know he likes a good test. The way it works, I say, is that I write down sets of three numbers on a flip-chart. I have a rule in my head, which any set of three numbers either passes or fails. James’s task is to guess my rule. The way he’s got to do this is by giving me sets of three numbers. I will say whether each set passes or fails my rule. He can then guess the rule.

To get him started, I give two sets of three numbers. Both sets pass obey my rule:

1, 4, 7
9, 12, 15

James looks puzled. This is obviously a trick question, he thinks. He gives me three numbers:

5, 8, 11

These pass my rule, I say. At this point James is confident but, just to be sure, he gives three more numbers:

3, 6, 9

I tell him these pass my rule. James says he’s guessed the rule: each number is 3 higher than the previous number.

Wrong, I tell him.

Now James is confused. He guesses that it’s to do with the shape of the numbers. It isn’t. He gives 3 more numbers:

1, 2, 3

These pass my rule. James guesses that my rule is that numbers are increasing. Wrong, I say. James gives up, so I tell him what my rule is: the third number must be bigger than the second number.

This artificial experiment is an interesting illustration of a couple of human tendencies. First of all, we jump to conclusions. Secondly – more important, but also far more subtle – we tend to seek out evidence that confirms our hasty conclusions, rather than evidence that might contradict them.

James – understandably – had the hypothesis “each number is 3 higher than the previous number” in his head. He then tried to prove this by choosing sets of numbers that obeyed his hypothesis, rather than seek out sets of numbers that might falsify it. Every time he suggested a set of numbers that obeyed my rule he become more certain that he was correct. Wrongly.

My example of James and the numbers is contrived, but the principles
apply in real life too. If your software isn’t selling well this month
then you might jump to the conclusion that it’s because of a downturn
in the economy, and then seek to verify that. Instead, you should think
about how you would disprove your theory, or explore alternative
hypotheses. If two people struggle to use your software you might
conclude that they’re both idiots, and then seek out examples to prove it.
Instead, you should examine alternative explanations – the problem
might be that your software sucks. Or you might erroneously conclude that your
software sucks – and seek out evidence to verify that – when the
problem really is that the two people are idiots.

Why are we prey to this bias? Possibly, because our minds have evolved to make quick decisions based on scant data. On the savannah a hundred thousand years ago, if you’ve just seen your brother gored by a rhinoceros, the conclusion that “all rhinoceroses are dangerous” is a good one to jump to. Seeking counter-examples, or considering alternative hypotheses, would be logically correct, but evolutionarily limiting.

But we’re not in the savannah any more, and behaviour that was appropriate back then isn’t always useful now. The textbook example is our liking for sugar: a sweet tooth was useful back when food was scarce, but in an era of Coca Cola and Big Macs our instinct to grab calories whenever and wherever we can find them just makes us fat.

There are plenty of other examples of cognitive biases that sway the way we think. Over the next few weeks I’ll write some more about them and how they can help you in the business of software. Subscribe to my RSS feed to keep up to date.

If you want to come to Business of Software 2008 in Boston, September 3rd-4th, to hear Seth Godin, Joel Spolsky and many others speak then you’ve got until Friday 18th July Tuesday 22nd July to book for the special price of $1,495.

Find out more at the conference web site.

John Maynard Keynes wrote that “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”

Replace economist with psychologist, and this still holds true. Many modern management practices are constructed on an architecture that was built thirty, fifty, even one hundred years ago. Unfortunately, the architecture is often shaky, sometimes rotten.

The granddaddy of all defunct psychologists is Freud – his fingernails are still stuck in our flesh a lifetime after his death. Freud claimed that we are driven by a need for sex, or pleasure. Since Freud, the drives have changed, but the idea that our behaviour is determined by the need to satisfy a handful of simple, universal, subconscious urges has stuck. In the latest Harvard Business Review, academics claim that “getting people to do their best work” requires satisfying four drives that are “hardwired into our brains”: the drive to acquire; the drive to bond; the drive to comprehend; and the drive to defend. The path back to Freud – the man who Newsweek called “History’s most debunked doctor” – is clear.

Freud isn’t the only dead psychologist who holds us in his thrall. The behaviourists – B.F. Skinner and John B. Watson are the most famous – viewed the mind as a black box. Its inner workings are unknowable, and irrelevant. There is no room for any internal mental states – no thoughts, no feelings, no free will. Given the inputs you can predict the outputs.

It follows that to control people’s behaviour, all you need to do is to control their environment. What’s more, you can correct behaviour using the simple mechanisms of rewarding, removing rewards and punishing. We are pigeons in boxes, pressing levers for pellets of food. If the pellets are correct – stock options, performance related pay, bonuses, regular praise – then we will learn to press the right levers – shipping software on time, being nice to customers, hitting sales targets.

The problem, of course, is that we aren’t pigeons in boxes. Our mental states are important. We can be happy, or sad. We can rebel against external factors. We can say screw the pellets and refuse to peck the lever.

I’ve described a couple of dead psychologists. But how about the ones who are still alive?

Just as it can take technology twenty or thirty years to get from the laboratory to the mainstream (think of the mouse, or multi-touch devices, or electronic ink), it can take decades for management ideas to percolate from theory to general practice. Some of the most interesting research over the past 20 years has been in cognitive psychology: the scientific study of how we learn, how we think and how we make decisions.

We can learn a lot from cognitive psychology. If you are late to work this morning it’s undoubtedly because you were held up in traffic. If Bob from marketing is late though, it’ll be because he’s lazy and a poor timekeeper. You attribute external factors (the traffic) when explaining your behaviour, but internal factors (personality) when explaining that of others. Similarly, you over-emphasize the role that your skill plays in your successes, but over-exaggerate the impact of the situation on your failures. If your software ships on time it’s because of your exceptional leadership. If it’s late, it’s because of buggy third party components.

These ideas are only now making it into the mainstream. Steven Pinker started popularising them a decade ago; Malcom Gladwell has brought them to an even wider audience since. Using the mouse analogy, if the founding fathers of cognitive psychology are Doug Engelbart and William English at Xerox PARC, then Steven Pinker is the first Apple Mac and Malcolm Gladwell is Windows 3.11. When we reach Windows 95 – a few years off still – these ideas will become ubiquitous.

John Maynard Keynes – himself now a defunct economist and enslaver of modern men – was right to warn us about the ghosts of dead intellectuals. But if we squint hard enough, we can just about discern their phantom forms, and choose to avoid them, or embrace them.

There’s a Pecha Kucha session at Business of Software 2008. 45 people sent in their entries for the chance to present 20 slides @ 20 seconds a slide.

Joel Spolsky and I have narrowed down the 45 entrants to 8 finalists. How we did it will remain a mystery to everybody but Joel and me, but here’s who we’ve chosen:

Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of reddit, on How to start, run and sell a web 2.0 startup

Jason Cohen, founder of Smart Bear Software, on Agile marketing

Larry Port, founding partner of Rocket Matter, on How to launch your socks off for no money

Bob Pritchett, entrepreneur and author, on Fire someone today and other surprising tactics for making your business a success

Johnathan Mercer, founder of Xumbrus, on Turning data into profit: towards evidence based software management

Lou Franco, director of engineering at Atalasoft, on Engineering the evaluation funnel

Steve Goldenberg, founder of Interfolio, on Sales is not a four letter word

Jack Zoellner, president of Leading Edge, on It’s the people, stupid

Well done guys, and thank you to everybody for entering!

In 1877 William McGonagall, a handloom weaver working in Dundee, experienced what he would later describe as the most startling incident of his life. Divine revelation or psychotic episode, its message was clear – it was McGonagall’s destiny to become a poet.

Unfortunately for McGonagall, it was his destiny to become the world’s worst poet. In the remaining 25 years of his life, he wrote over 200 poems. They were all dreadful. Here’s the last verse from his poem Captain Teach alias "Black Beard":

Black Beard derived his name from his long black beard,
Which terrified America more than any comet that had ever appeared;
But, thanks be to God, in this age we need not be afeared,
Of any such pirates as the inhuman Black Beard.

McGonagall’s poetry is bad, but at least it’s exceptionally bad. His prose is just plain bad. The poetic constraints unleashed his creativity (pirates and comets?), and shifted him from mediocrity to magnificence.

The structure of a sonnet or a haiku forces you to think, to organise and to cut. In film, the conventions are the architecture you build your cathedral on. Sure, the hero must overcome the obstacles, his best friend will turn out to be his enemy, and he’ll get the girl in the end, but how and why, without cliché?

Structure turns poor material into middling, middling into good, and good into great. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could bring that principle to business meetings? Well, we can. It’s the premise behind pecha kucha. Get your point across in 20 slides of 20 seconds each, then stop. That’s time enough to drill one, important idea into your audience.

We’re holding a pecha kucha competition at Business of Software 2008. You’ve got another couple of days to enter. If you’re chosen to speak then you’ll get a free pass to the conference (and get to hear Seth Godin, Joel Spolsky, Jason Fried, and many others). Find out more at the Business of Software 2008 pecha kucha page.

If I like what I see then I might make pecha kucha compulsory at Red Gate. I’m also toying with forcing people to write all their e-mails as sonnets. I’ll let you know how it goes.

How likely is it that Apple buy Microsoft some time in the next 5 years? You’d probably assign a near-zero probability to this outcome. One in a million, or billion. It’d never happen.

Now let me tell you a story.

In the wake of the failed Yahoo merger and the botched Vista release, Microsoft’s board kick out Steve Ballmer. They try to persuade Bill Gates to return as CEO. He refuses, preferring to focus on his philanthropic activities. The board decide that fresh blood is needed to invigorate Microsoft. They bring in Lou Gerstner, the man who turned around IBM in the 1990s. Ray Ozzie and a number of other senior executives resign in protest. Gerstner, under pressure from shareholders, decides that something big must be done. He fires 50% of Microsoft’s 80,000 employees and splits the company up. He sells off various divisions: Nintendo buy the entertainment division, SAP snaps up the business software group, Google buys Microsoft Live, and so on. The rump that’s left focusses on Microsoft’s most profitable businesses: the operating system and Microsoft Office.

In the meantime, Apple goes from strength to strength. Apple releases a web-based office system in 2009. It starts stealing market share from Microsoft Office, just like Microsoft did from Wordstar almost two decades previously. Windows 2009 gets bogged down, and Apple’s MacOS 11 and MacOS 12 start to hammer Microsoft on the desktop. By the time Windows 2009 ships in 2012, most server-based computing is taking place in Google and Amazon’s cloud.

At the end of 2012, KKR, a private equity firm, makes Microsoft’s shareholders an offer they cannot refuse. They take Microsoft private. KKR attempt to turn it around, but fail. In 2013, they try to sell it. Steve Jobs buys it, just to thumb his nose at Bill Gates.

How likely do you think that scenario is? Maybe it’s one in a hundred, or one in a thousand. If you’re normal, with the usual cognitive biases that make you normal, then you’ll rate this scenario as more likely than the stark "Apple buy Microsoft" one.

Of course, that’s illogical. My story is only one of many possible scenarios that could lead to Apple buying Microsoft, so it must have a smaller likelihood.

But it turns out that our minds aren’t rational machines. My story is a series of concrete, incremental steps, each with a fairly low probability. To get the probability of the whole story you need to multiply all those small probabilities together. If you do that, you’ll get a near infinitessimal probability. Our brains aren’t very good at that multiplication though. Instead, we hear a good yarn, find it plausible, or at least possible, and then apply some kind of misguided heuristic to get the wrong answer.

The way we misjudge probabilities is explored by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini in his excellent Inevitable Illusions – How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Mind. He describes a study that Tversky and Kahneman, two cognitive psychologists, carried out in the middle of the Polish crisis in the early 1980s. They asked various political leaders and generals to evaluate the probability that the USA would withdraw its ambassador from the Soviet Union. They then asked the same people to evaluate the probability that both (a) The USSR would invade Poland AND (b) as a consequence, the USA would withdraw its ambassador from the USSR.

The generals said the second scenario was more likely than the first. If you think about it, that’s nonsensical: the second scenario is a subset of the first scenario. The probability of the USSR invading Poland AND the USA withdrawing its ambassador is less likely than just the USA withdrawing its ambassador. But the generals’ brains didn’t spot that, and neither would yours. They heard the story, and found it more convincing than the statement.

Stories are powerful, persuasive and ever more fashionable tools. They’re a great way to put across your point of view. Telling a story is often a better way to convince others than presenting dry facts, logic and analysis. If you’re trying to raise capital from VCs, then you should tell a story. If you’re trying to convince your boss that your new strategy will succeed, then tell a story. If you want to persuade potential customers to buy the software that you’re selling, then tell them a story.

But if you’re listening rather than telling then be careful. Stories can be dangerous. It’s easy to construct a story – intentionally or otherwise – that buries the facts and misleads an audience.

If you’re an Exchange admin then you’ll be interested in a free eBook that Simple-Talk are giving away. It’s 10 chapters, 350 pages, compiled from five of Wiley’s most popular Exchange 2007 books. It covers the following topics:

    * Exchange Server Architecture
    * Applying Planning Principles to Exchange Sever 2007
    * Exchange Server Administration
    * Installing Exchange Server 2007
    * Scaling Upward and Outward
    * Sizing Storage Groups and Databases
    * Defining Policies and Security Procedures
    * Planning a Backup and Recovery Solution for Exchange Server 2007
    * Planning Exchange Server 2007 Security
    * Creating, Managing Highly Available Exchange Server Solutions

You can download it from the following URL:

http://www.simple-talk.com/exchange/

I’ve just published the provisional program for Business of Software 2008. There are some gaps, and I might still shift the speakers around a bit, but there’s enough to give a good idea of what the conference is about.

A couple of highlights:

Seth Godin will be speaking on why marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department

Joel Spolsky will be speaking about iPod or Zune – which are you building?

Paul Kenny isn’t as well known as Seth and Joel, but his talk on sales 101 is going to be essential listening.

You can download the full program from http://downloads.businessofsoftware.org/BusinessOfSoftware2008.pdf

Cory Doctorow, an editor of Boing Boing, is coming to Cambridge, UK on July 22nd to speak about life in the information economy. It’s part of a series of lectures that Red Gate is co-sponsoring.

Here’s some more information:

We made a bet, some decades ago, that the information economy would
be based on buying and selling (and hence restricting copying of)
information. We were totally, 100 percent wrong, and now the world’s in
turmoil because of it. What does a copy-native economy look like? How
do everyone from barbers to musicians become richer, more fulfilled and
more civilly engaged in a real information society. And what do we do
about the fact that a couple of dinosauric entertainment companies are
determined to screw it up?

Cory Doctorow is a blogger, science fiction writer and journalist. He is an editor of Boing Boing,
the 11th best blog in the world (according to Time Magazine). He was
the 2006-2007 Canadian Fulbright Chair in Public Diplomacy at the USC
Center on Public Diplomacy. He founded the software company Opencola
which was later sold to the Open Text Corporation. He also writes
regularly for The Guardian newspaper.

It’s free, but you need to book on the Cambridge Business Lectures web site.

Last week I blogged about the IEEE not being able to convert strings, and how the Institute of Design at Stanford can’t design an e-mail subscription form.

Today’s ironic link is via mindhacks. The 9th annual NCRG conference on gambling and addiction is being held in …

… Las Vegas.

An ideal place to discuss the "latest developments in pathological gambling research and responsible gaming programming".

A few days ago I blogged about how the IEEE – the "world’s leading professional advancement of technology" is unable to convert a lowercase string to an uppercase one.

The Institute of Design at Stanford is the latest to shoot itself in the foot with the shotgun of irony. The d.school seems like a really great place. They "believe great innovators and leaders need to be great design thinkers". They "want the d.school to be a place for Stanford students and faculty in engineering, medicine, business, the humanities, and education to learn design thinking and work together to solve big problems in a human centered way." These are all things I believe in too.

So I try to sign up to their newsletter. I enter my e-mail address and I hit ‘join’. And here’s what I get:

Apparently my "data is about to be sent", but I can cancel if I want to. I do, and get this:

Grand visions are great, but easy. It’s the details that count, and they’re hard.

The other night I heard Rick Rashid, head of Microsoft Research worldwide, speak on the future of technology. His talk was so good that I’m going to try to persuade him to speak at Business of Software 2008 (only 24 hours until the early bird discount expires by the way, so book now).

A couple of the highlights of Rick’s talk were:

• His demonstration of Photosynth. This app takes thousands of photos of an object or a scene and then stitches them together to produce a three dimensional view that you can fly around and zoom in to. They can’t do it yet, but one day you’ll be able to upload your own photos and construct your own 3D model. You’ll also be able to take a photo of an object – the Seattle Space Needle, for example – and the software will recognise where you are and tell you more about what you’ve photographed. For now, there are a bunch of 3D scenes you can look at, including St Mark’s square in Venice and the space shuttle Endeavour.
• The World Wide Telescope. Microsoft have constructed a digital map of the sky from terabytes of data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and many other sources. You can use this virtual telescope to explore the heavens, panning and zooming thousands of light years away.

The best part, for me, was Rick’s answer to Hermann Hauser’s question about the future of the semantic web. Rick claimed little knowledge on the topic, but still managed to talk eloquently for several minutes. He said (I paraphrase, and any errors are mine) that the semantic web reminded him of research into natural language processing. For several decades, researchers have tried to work out ever-more complex grammars and rules to understand human language, but most researchers – the ones that are making progress anyway – have abandoned this avenue and are focussing on statistical, machine learning. This essentially involves dumping terabytes of data into complex algorithms and then using the results. Nobody understands the detailed internal connections that the models make, but the outputs seem promising.

Similarly, the semantic web relies on humans defining schemas for different objects. For example, Freebase has volunteers trawling Wikipedia’s unstructured data and structuring it, turning the free text of film stars’ biographies into structured tables of names, dates of birth and film titles [UPDATED: Freebase uses statistical methods as well as the community]. The problem with this approach is that the schemas, and the links between them, are man-made. Rick Rashid’s point is that we’ve just ended up with another set of bad data, but in a data structure. We may well find that computational, statistical models cope much better with understanding data than any fixed structure that a human can come up with.

Altogether it was an excellent talk: a strong mix of fantastic content and good presentation. Sign up to my RSS feed and I’ll let you know if I persuade Rick to speak in Boston.

I’ve been invited to speak on a panel of the future of IT this evening. In a moment of ego-driven weakness, and because I’ll get the chance to meet Rick Rashid, Head of Microsoft Research worldwide, I accepted. It’s not a topic I feel qualified to pontificate on, so I’ve spent the past few days booking up. Hopefully I won’t make a total tit of myself.

I feel like the British ambassador in a far-away country. The story goes that a journalist called him up one December and asked him what he’d like for Christmas. A memo had gone round the week before, reminding all staff about the dangers of bribery. The guidelines, it emphasised, were to not accept anything worth more than $50, or that couldn’t be consumed in a single sitting. With the rules in mind, he told the journalist that he wouldn’t mind a small box of Turkish Delight. Not too large, mind.

The next week, he opened the newspaper. It described what the ambassadors of different countries were hoping for at Christmas. The French ambassador hoped for world peace. The US ambassador wanted a cure for cancer. The German ambassador wanted an end to poverty. And the British ambassador wanted a small box of Turkish delight.

Over the past few days I’ve read about printed polymer displays. I’ve looked into the implications of unlimited storage, and cheap, multi-touch screens. I’ve Googled Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson. I’ve skimmed books by Alvin Toffler and John Naisbitt. I’ve watched a 3-D teleconference that Cisco held last year. Will in-car internet be the next big thing? How will programming languages change to cope with massively distributed systems? Are data-flow languages the way we’re heading? What about quantum cryptography? Are the social trends more important than the technology? Are we just obsessed by techno-fetishism?

And then, this morning, I try to join the IEEE. I enter my chosen user name, and click next. I get the following screen:

Apparently the IEEE – the self-named "world’s leading professional association for the advancement of technology" – cannot figure out how to convert a lowercase string to an uppercase one, and they think that error SBL-EXL-00151 is a sensible way to tell me their problem.

Then I log on to my internet banking system. I want to see the transactions in the last month. Of course, there’s no option to view the last month, so I enter dates from 3/5/08 to 3/6/08 (I’m in the UK). I get the following error:

Error(s) occurred

The ‘from’ date entered is invalid. (B1010-BR)

Not only can HSBC not convert my input of 3/5/08 to their expected input 03/05/2008, but they can’t even figure out that this is one ‘error’ and not multiple ‘errors’. And they insult me by claiming it’s my ‘error’ when it’s clearly their sloppy programming. But, hey, that B1010-BR number is really useful.

There’s an element of grumpiness in my griping, but there is a serious point here too. Innovation isn’t always – or evenly mainly – about the whizz-bang of nanobots and artificial intelligence. To take an idea from the lab and turn it into a usable product that people will buy can take years – if not decades – of hard, sustained effort. The multi-touch displays we’re drooling over now were first demonstrated twenty years ago. The mouse is 40 years old. Electronic paper was demonstrated at Xeroc PARC in the 1970s. The people who grind away at the job of turning ideas into products are not the same people who have the startling insights, or who tell us fantastic stories about the future of machine vision or the semantic web. They’re the journeyman software developers who still cannot figure out how to remove the spaces and dashes in credit card numbers.

So here’s my Turkish delight; what I’d like the future of IT to be. I’d like us to improve the craft of software development. To stop producing unusable, patronizing software, and to start writing well-tested, well-designed software that makes people smile.

But I reckon that’s a lot less likely to come true than machine vision, nanobots and free, wireless Internet access.

I started using my new toy yesterday. The iRex iLiad is an eBook reader. What makes it special is its use of electronic ink. It’s a reflective display: the screen behaves much like a slightly grey printout from a medium quality laser printer. It’s easy on the eye, high resolution, and you can read it outdoors.

Here’s the eBook version of Sebastian Faulk’s Devil May Care with the hardback on one side and my laptop on the other. Click the image to view it full size. Note the glare from the flash on the laptop’s screen, and its absence on the iLiad.

Here it is again, next to the hardback:

The reader is about the same height and width as a hardback book, but shallower and lighter. Turning a page takes a second or two, but not much longer than turning the page of a real book.

Overall, it’s a fantastic bit of technology. From using it for a day, I’ve drawn the following conclusions:

1) Electronic ink is the next big thing. In the next few years everybody’s going to be using a device like the iLiad

2) But they won’t be using the iRex iLiad

It also illustrates an important point:

3) It’s not hard core technology that counts. Technology can be important, even essential, but it’s the other stuff that’s important.

Let me explain.

eBooks are tomorrow’s big thing. And always will be. After a decade of hype that was the conclusion I’d reached, but when Bill Buxton showed me his iLiad a few months ago I knew I was wrong. The technology is not round the corner: it is here right now. You can go to Borders, or log on to Amazon, and buy an electronic book that is smaller, more convenient and with more capacity  than a traditional book. When I travelled to Boston last year I took the following: a bunch of academic papers about branding, a copy of the Harvard Business Review, The Tipping Point, Slaughterhouse Five and the Golden Compass. By weight, it was about half of my luggage. Next year, when I return, I’ll be carrying twice as many books in a device the weight of small paperback. Within the next few months we’ll have flexible displays too. Forget circuit boards: the electronics will be printed onto polymer sheets using ink-jet printers. Plastic Logic’s factory is being built and will be producing displays this year. By April next year, you’ll be able to buy a flexible, wireless display that you can roll up and carry around in your pocket, probably for well under $100.

Technically, electronic ink is awesome. Creating a reflective, electronic, paper-like display was an enormously difficult problem that has taken decades to crack. Printing electronics onto plastics is an equally hard problem.

But so what?

We don’t buy products because of the clever technology in them, or because they’ve taken decades to reach fruition. We buy products to solve our problems. You won’t buy an eBook reader because the display contains millions of tiny two-tone charged nanoparticles. You’ll buy it because it you’re running out of shelf space at home, or because you don’t want to lug hardback books around on holiday, or because you want to be able to read today’s edition of the Guardian from Kinshasha.

The iRex iLiad is 99% of the way there. They (or rather E Ink Corporation, who manufacture the display component) have done all the hard work. But they’ve neglected the 1% that’s important:

1) The software sucks. If it’s going to compete with a physical book, it’s got to be easy to use. As easy as a book, in fact. But there are too many niggles. The interface is full of icons that are non-intuitive and impossible to discover. The iLiad has wireless networking, but you can’t download books from the Internet. You need to download them to your computer and then transfer them across. You can’t search through eBooks. It has a pen so you can write notes on blank sheets, but you can’t annotate books.

2) The device is too expensive. At $900 this simply isn’t mass market enough. Of course, the technology will rapidly come down in price, but iRex could have subsidised the cost of device through book sales, much like the games console manufacturers do.

3) The content is too expensive. A hardback copy of The Devil May Care costs $14, little of which is profit. The electronic copy costs $17.95, all gravy. Somebody is being greedy.

4) There’s not enough content. People want the content, not the medium.

Sure, all of these problems are hard to solve. But they’re not as hard to solve as figuring out how to build a paper-like electronic display. They are design problems (creating a good interface), commercial problems (reducing the cost of the device) and licensing problems (persuading publishers to make their content available digitally).

Nobody has cracked all of those problems yet. But somebody will. Somebody will produce a device that looks so good that it appeals beyond geeks and that’s as easy to use as a physical book. They’ll persuade publishers to make their content digital, and they’ll work out a commercial business model. Who will do it? My money is on Apple or Amazon.

Take a look at other successful products and companies and you find other examples about how it’s not the technology that matters. It’s the other stuff. Google succeeded not because of their search technology but because, with adwords, they figured out how to make money from search. Microsoft succeeded, initially, not because they had a better operating system, but because they cut a licensing deal with IBM. The Nintendo Wii is a success not just because of the clever accelerometers built into every controller, but because they made a conscious, commercial, decision to target consumers who weren’t hardcore gamers. The iPod succeeded not because of its small hard drives, or its thumb wheel, but because of the way it lets consumers download cheap, legal music of their choice to their MP3 players. Digg is successful not because of a technical innovation, but because of an incremental social innovation – letting people choose the stories they like.

After only a day, I’m hooked on my iLiad. It’s 99% fantastic. But I’ll ditch it the minute somebody looks beyond the narrow technical problem and finishes off that extra 1%.

If you’re a geek, you’ve probably got your head buried in technology. Lift it up out of the sand and look around you. If you’re going to succeed – if you’re going to be Apple and not iRex – then you need to spend less time on the technology and focus on the other stuff.

Red Gate is running a competition to find exceptional SQL Server DBAs. Enter and you could win a ticket to SQL Pass in Seattle later on this year, plus accommodation, money towards travel expenses, free software and a lot of kudos.

As Claire says, "… DBAs are unsung heroes within the IT community and their companies. This award will shine a spotlight on the achievements of SQL Server
DBAs."

Find out more at www.exceptionaldba.com

If you want to come to Business of Software 2008 and get the special early bird price of only $1,395 then you need to book before June 7th.

Joel Spolsky, Seth Godin, Jason Fried and Eric Sink are all speaking, plus some other excellent speakers. You can find out more, and book at the conference web site.

Last year, 94% of attendees gave it four or five stars. Joel Spolsky called it "the best conference I went to last year". In fact, he liked it so much he’s put his name on this year’s: Business of Software 2008 is a Joel on Software Conference.

Here are some quotes from last year’s attendees:

Amazing conference. It will be tough to beat. Chris Kemp, I Love Rewards Inc.

Excellent content! Good food for thought! Matt Ruma, President, Creative Logic

Great variety of topics. There were many moments where I felt
validated or was shown our company’s flaws. I’m not a developer but it
was the right level of ‘technical’! Anon

Day one alone was worth the price of admission – great work on getting great speakers. Austin Salonen, Lead Developer, SGS Mid-West Seed Services

Very diverse, great speakers. Great variety, great logistics. Thanks! Felix Trepanier , Technical Lead, OZ Communications

Excellent speakers.  It’s what I came for and it’s what I got. Anon

Excellent overall. Great speakers, great content. Ton of opportunities to network. Scott Lawrence, Software Development Manager, APS Healthcare Inc

The combination of small, intimate size and a diverse
list of speakers made this the most valuable and provoking conference
I’ve been to in a long time. It’s a significant achievement that from
every speaker I’ve come away with either something quite profound to
consider or something concrete to do. Rob Muir, Development Manager,FINCAD

I’m glad this type of conference is finally taking place. Thanks for your efforts. Jennifer Desha, Project Manager, Numira Biosciences

Best conference! Mark Belliveau, VP Marketing, Normsoft Inc

Some really excellent speakers. Liked the mix. Anon

Thanks! Great conference Joe Crevino, Development Supervisor, LAN International

I feel like I’m a lot more prepared to do my job
after being here and will be more successful in the future as well.
Thanks a lot! Anon

Great job on the conference! The site and accommodation were excellent. An amazing experience! Bryan Dykstra, Director of Business Development, Creative Logic

If you’re coming to BoS 2008 in Boston this fall, or are generally interested in the Business of Software, then I’ve set up a Facebook group and a LinkedIn group.

This 15 second clip is from CSI NY. Laila sent me the link from John Papa’s blog:

Lorenzo Bolognini has just released a bug tracker with a twist. You use it to raise and track bugs in your country. For now, you can only track bugs in Italy. Let’s hope he’s load tested the system. According to Lorenzo, here are the top 5 bugs in Italy:

5. Scientific research in Italy – Italian researchers go abroad. In Italy the system of scientific corporations, the difficulties in getting finance, the miserable salaries of researchers, push many people abroad.

4. The rubbish collection in Naples – Naples is covered with garbage. Solutions are dimly perceptible, but late in arriving. The problem began in June 2006, almost 2 years ago.

3. Temporary work contracts – the temporary nature of work, for young people and others, is in front of everybody’s eyes. And, despite the seriousness of the problem, nobody seems to grasp it (at least not in election time).

2. There is no web site dedicates to promoting tourism – Italy, after the closure of the costly Italia.it, doesn’t have a web site to promote tourism at the level of other European countries.

1. We have built Italy, now we must build the Italian people. Everybody knows this phrase by Massimo D’Azeglio at the birth of Italy. The question remains open, but my personal judgement …

Read more at the buggato web site.

What would your country’s top 5 bugs be? Post here …