I love it when software just works. When you use it and it does exactly what it should do. When it’s obvious.

I love it even more when software redefines obvious. Before you use the software, you have one idea of what obvious is. Once you’ve used it, your mental model has changed, forever. Your world flips, and you can’t flip it back again.

Google maps is like that. Of course online mapping should let you pan and zoom by dragging the map. It’s obvious: how could anybody think otherwise? But others – multimap, for example – failed to see the obvious.

Apple’s iPhone is like that. Of course you should be able slide your photos with your fingers, and of course your photos should rotate as you rotate your phone. But it took Apple to spot the obvious.

The Nintendo Wii is like that. Of course gaming shouldn’t be restricted to joysticks and controllers with lots of fiddly buttons.

Amazon is like that. Of course you should be able to buy a book with a single click.

Redefining obvious is hard though. It doesn’t just happen: it requires a lot of hard decisions, and a lot of hard work. It can be thankless too: once you’ve redefined the obvious, it can be trivial for others to copy.  Everybody told Jeff Bezos that one-click shopping was dumb (his developers wanted to put in a ‘Are you sure?’ confirmation screen). He did it, and then everybody told him it was obvious.

At Red Gate, I think we’ve done a similar thing with a product we’ve just released. On a lesser scale than Apple, Google, Nintendo and Amazon, but I’m still proud of what the team (David C, Lionel, David L, Ben, Marine and Heather) have achieved.

SQL Data Generator generates test data for SQL Server databases. It’s a task ripe for automation, but it’s deceptively difficult to do. Many people – including Microsoft – have tried and, I would argue, failed.

Here are a few of the things that I think make SQL Data Generator special:

• If your column is called FirstName then of course you should populate it – by default – with data like ‘Bob’, ‘Alice’ and ‘Chuck’, and not ‘QRICg’, ‘WKOlg%’ and ‘ERgaU*’.
• Similarly, columns called email probably contain e-mail addresses, country will contain countries, and so on. Of course.
• If you have a constraint OptOut =’Y’ or OptOut=’N’ then of course you shouldn’t try to fill it with As and Bs and Cs.
• You should be able to run it out of the box. Of course you shouldn’t have to fiddle around with lots of configuration details just to get going.

In their modest way, I think these features redefine obvious.

If you’re a SQL Server professional I hope you’ll download the tool (you can find out more at http://www.red-gate.com/products/SQL_Data_Generator), try it out and then think to yourself "What’s the fuss? That’s obvious."

Exactly.

My toaster caught fire a few weeks ago. I’ve been thinking about getting a new one. I’ve read the Which? consumer reports, and know that the cheaper ones are actually better than the more expensive ones. That was reinforced by one of Seth Godin’s recent blog posts, where he describes the world’s worst toaster in all its microprocessor glory. I’m not quite ready to make a decision yet though. I’ll do a bit more research, ask some friends what toasters they use, and then buy one on Amazon (I don’t like shopping and I don’t like crowds).

Hopefully you’re getting a feel for the type of consumer I am. Spontaneous is not my middle name.

So how the heck did I come back from town on Thursday afternoon with a shiny new MacBook Air?

The Grand Arcade, Cambridge’s new shopping centre, opened on Thursday morning. I was in town, and thought I’d take a peek. I wanted to see what they’d done in the 8 years it had taken to plan and 3 years to build. Besides, it was on the way to my car.

It’s an impressive place. A cathedral built of stone, glass, steel and timber. A different class to the misguided 1970s shithole of a shopping centre it abuts. Most of the shops were empty, or not yet fitted.

And then I saw the Apple store. I’m not sure what drew me in. I’ve managed to walk past Apple stores in London, San Francisco and Newport Beach without succumbing.

The store was packed, but buzzing rather than heaving. People were playing with banks of iPhones, iMacs and MacBooks. I’d already read about the MacBook Air. With its missing ports, low capacity hard drive and lack of horsepower it simply isn’t a serious laptop. Only hardcore Apple fanboys and poseurs would be gulled into paying double the price of a proper laptop for such a toy. Sure, it fits into an envelope, but who carries their laptop around in an envelope?

But seeing it – and touching it – was a different experience. It was sexy, sleek and cool. But there was more to it than that: it was a social experience too. In the same way that horror films are scarier, and comedies funnier, when you’re surrounded by strangers in the darkness of the cinema, playing with the MacBook Air in public, surrounded by like-minded strangers in the hubbub of the store, somehow heightened the emotional experience. And then there was an element of nostalgia, the evoking of long-buried memories of being ten years old, programming the BBC Micros on display in high street shops – the only place I could get my hands on them.

So I bought one. I had to.

The whole caboodle – the shop and the computer – have clearly been designed with one thing in mind. They’re built to bend your mind; to anaesthetise the rational, logical, decision making apparatus of your brain and place it at the mercy of the irrational, emotional, animal bits you cannot control. Derren Brown and L. Ron Hubbard are amateurs in Steve Jobs’s shadow.

And if Steve Jobs can perform this mind trick on me, he can weave his spell on you too. So beware.

There’s another lesson here too. Most people have already got enough stuff. They’re not going to buy even more stuff because they need it. They’re going to buy it because they want it. To stand above your competitors, it’s not enough to compete on feature lists. Provoke an emotional, visceral reaction. Make people yearn for your products.

PS I bought the 1.6GHz version. No way was I going to pay an extra £850 for 200 more megahertz and an underperforming SSD drive. I didn’t go that weak-kneed.

A few days ago I mentioned that Seth Godin’s is one of the few RSS feeds I subscribe to. That begs the question: what are the others? Here is my list:

Seth Godin (http://feeds.feedburner.com/typepad/sethsmainblog)
Simple-Talk (http://www.simple-talk.com/feed/)
Bruce Schneier (http://www.schneier.com/blog/index.xml)
Larry O’Brien (http://www.knowing.net/SyndicationService.asmx/GetRss)
Guy Kawasaki (http://feeds.feedburner.com/guykawasaki/Gypm)
Slashdot (http://rss.slashdot.org/slashdot/eqWf)
Wired (http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml)
Xkcd (http://xkcd.com/rss.xml)
Boing Boing (http://feeds.feedburner.com/boingboing/iBag)
Joelonsoftware (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/rss.xml)
The unofficial Paul Graham feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/PaulGrahamUnofficialRssFeed)
The BBC (http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition/front_page/rss.xml)

Andrew Clarke has got a great post about setting up on your own, over at Simple-Talk. Here’s an excerpt:

I knew from experience that this was something that any good programmer
had to get out of his system. There is a deep-set fallacy that if
software is well-written, and full of features, then it will sell. This
is like saying that a well-performed song will get to the top of the
singles chart by sheer merit. The analogy is fairly close, because in
both cases one has to hit the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. Quality
helps one’s chances, but is, by itself, insufficient.

You can read the rest at the following URL:

http://www.simple-talk.com/opinion/opinion-pieces/selling-software/

Geeks – the good ones, anyway – get passionate about the smallest things. Should braces sit on a line by themselves, or be next to the if clause? Is dynamic SQL better than stored procedures? XSLT – good or evil? I’m often reminded of this Emo Philips sketch:

I was walking across a bridge and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump. So I ran over and said "Stop! Don’t do it. There’s so much to live for!"
He said, "Like what?"
I said, "Well, are you religious?"
"Yes"
I said "Me too! Are you Christian or Buddhist?"
"Christian."
I said, "Me too! Are you Catholic or Protestant?"
"Protestant."
I said "Me too! Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?"
"Baptist."
I said, "Me too! Are you original Baptist Church of God, or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?"
"Reformed Baptist Church of God."
I said, "Me too! Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915?"
He said, "Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915."

I said, "DIE. HERETIC SCUM!" and I pushed him off.

When Simon and I first set up Red Gate eight and half years ago, neither of us had a clue about marketing. We had to learn fast. One of the first books I read about marketing was Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing. Here’s how Seth explains introduces it in his blog:

Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering
anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want
to get them.

It recognizes the new power of the best consumers to ignore
marketing. It realizes that treating people with respect is the best
way to earn their attention.

Seth has gone on to write a total of 7 books, and has released the most popular eBook of all time. I only subscribe to a handful of RSS feeds, but his is one of them. If you want to get ahead in the Business of Software then you should subscribe to Seth’s RSS feed too.

So, I’m really chuffed to announce that Seth is going to speak at Business of Software 2008.I’ve been wanting to hear him speak ever since I first came across Seth back in 1999, and it looks like my wish will finally be granted.

I’ve had quite a few people e-mail me to ask if they can speak at Business of Software 2008. Unfortunately, most of the main speaking slots are either full or I’ve got somebody in mind for them.

However, it would be cool to give other people the chance to speak too. Last year, we had a Software Idol contest, which worked quite well. This year, Joel suggested that we do a Pecha Kucha contest.

I hadn’t heard of this, but it’s a great idea. The rules are strict: you show 20 slides, speak for 20 seconds on each slide, and then sit down. According to this Wired article on Pecha Kucha the result is to ‘transform corporate cliché into surprisingly compelling beat-the-clock performance art.’

If you’d like to take part then follow the instructions on the Business of Software 2008 Pecha Kucha page.

The date and venue for Business of Software 2008 have been finalised.

It’s going to be held in the Seaport hotel, on the Boston waterfront. This is a fantastic, independent hotel in a magnificent location. We’ve negotiated a special rate of $239 / night for the conference. You can find out more about the hotel at www.seaportboston.com

The dates are September 3rd – September 4th.

The full price 2-day pass will be $1,795, but early-bird price tickets will be $1,395.

Last year’s conference was great (94% of attendees gave it a 4 or 5 star rating), but this year’s is going to be better. The speakers so far include Joel Spolsky, Eric Sink, Richard Stallman, Dharmesh Shah and Jason Fried. I’m hoping to announce another *big* name speaker shortly.

The conference is going to sell out quickly. If you came to Business of Software 2007 then you are guaranteed a place if you book before April 12th. Plus you’ll get a special price of only $1,195 as a token of my appreciation for taking a bit of a risk and supporting the conference last year. I’ll e-mail you separately about this in the next few days.

If you didn’t come to last year’s conference then general registration will open on April 14th.

The best way to stay up to date with announcements is to  subscribe to the RSS feed. Alternatively, you can sign up to very occasional e-mail updates at www.businessofsoftware.org

I hope to see you in Boston!

Today’s guest post is by Heather Johnson. Heather is a freelance business, finance and economics writer, as well as a regular contributor at Business Credit Cards, a site for business credit cards and best business credit card offers. Heather welcomes comments and freelancing job inquiries at her email address heatherjohnson2323@gmail.com

If you are planning on going freelance, starting your own company or investing in any other kind of business opportunity without help, you may be feeling apprehensive… and rightly so. There is no such thing as a risk-free moneymaking opportunity, so a little fear is healthy. However, you will never gain anything without sticking your neck out, so it’s best you face your fears head on and plan accordingly.

Below are the top five worst-case scenarios for solo entrepreneurs:

1. Your Business Flops – You may find that a business just completely dies right out of the starting gates. Of course, that doesn’t mean you should give up immediately. Depending on your situation, a lackluster beginning could indicate that a) you need an overhaul in your business plan or b) this isn’t going to work out and you need to cut your losses.
2. You Are Sued – Your newfound entrepreneurship could be doing gangbusters, but that success can be easily threatened when someone gets litigious. Be sure to cover your bases on the business end of things before this happens. In other words, you need access to both a trusted attorney and accountant.
3. You Lose a Major Client – Some businesses draw a majority of their income from one or two major clients. Having your eggs in one basket could be a dangerous thing for an entrepreneur, so be sure that you keep your clients happy and that you have a plan in case they ever decide to end your working relationship.
4. You Incur Massive Amounts of Debt – Everyone has debt, but a business owner can really rack up the balance when operating a startup. Don’t rely on credit cards and don’t get involved with business loans you can’t handle.
5. You Go Bankrupt – Ouch. That could be the worst possible scenario for anyone, not just those who are starting their own business venture. As I mentioned above, however, you need to make sure you don’t get in way over your head with loans and debt.

What is the best defense against these worst-case scenarios? A shrewd business sense and a practical business plan. It takes a certain type of rebel to venture on your own, but don’t be foolhardy about it. Treat your business like a business, remain honest and don’t take on more than you can handle. That way, even a substantial bump in the road can be one you will take in stride.

A cool video of Aibo dogs playing soccer, as part of the Robocup competition. The ultimate aim is produce a robotic team of humanoid robots that can beat the human world soccer team:

In The Mythical Man Month, Fred Brooks likened shipping software in time with customers’ expectations to cooking an omelette:

An omelette, promised in two minutes, may appear to be progressing nicely. But when it has not set in two minutes, the customer has two choices–wait or eat it raw. Software customers have had the same choices.

The cook has another choice; he can turn up the heat. The result is often an omelette nothing can save–burned in one part, raw in another.

I’m going to stretch, and maybe strain, the analogy. Sometimes you’re about to serve the omelette and you realise that something’s wrong. It’s not seasoned right, or you’ve forgotten to put the peppers in. Or perhaps your customer actually ordered a cheeseburger.

So what do you do?

You can serve it up and hope the customer won’t complain, at least not loudly enough for others to hear.

You can insist that it’s fine: you’re the chef, you’ve been cooking omelettes for twenty years and the customer wouldn’t know a decent omelette from his elbow.

You can cover it with a large sprig of parsley to make it look nice.

Or maybe you follow it up quickly with an omelette 2.0 which corrects the deficiencies in the first omelette.

Or, possibly hardest of all, you accept that the omelette isn’t right, slide it into the bin, and start again. That’s hard to do though. You’ll disappoint your customer, it means acknowledging that your first omelette wasn’t up to scratch, and it can be expensive in both time and money. But sometimes it’s the right thing to do.

Releasing new products is hard. Releasing major upgrades can be harder, but for different reasons. On the one hand, you want to persuade your current customers to upgrade; on the other you don’t want to strongarm them, bleed them for cash or leave them resenting you. From your perspective, supporting older versions of products is time consuming, but from your customers’ perspective there are often diminishing return to upgrades.

The more mature a product is, the harder, the riskier and the more expensive it is for customers to justify an n+1 product upgrade. And from your perspective, your n+1 version product has stiff competition: your version n.

This is truer for some products than others. It’s relatively easy for you to try out, and then upgrade to, the next version of SQL Compare, say. It’s a third party tool that you can evaluate with little impact, and uninstall if necessary. If you judge the benefits outweigh the few minutes of evaluation time and the upgrade cost of a couple of hundred dollars then you buy it. If you don’t, then you don’t. Easy.

That’s not true for other products though. The hardest are mature, server-based, enterprise-wide, critical systems. If you’re a SQL Server customer, for example, then you’ve got a difficult decision ahead of you. Should you upgrade to SQL Server 2008 when it’s released? The upgrade costs could be enormous, so the benefits need to be huge. You’ll need to retest your current applications, evaluate the software and plan a roll-out. And that’s before you even consider the direct costs of upgrading. At up to $25,000 per processor those can be significant.

Two and half years after the release of SQL Server 2005, our stats show that only around 50% of people have upgraded from SQL Server 2000, a platform that is now eight years old. So what will the adoption of SQL Server 2008 look like?

According to SQL Server Magazine, somewhere between 10 and 15% of people will move to SQL Server 2008 within about a year of its release. Somewhere between 60 and 70% have no plans to move to SQL Server 2008. Back in 2006, the top reason for not upgrading to SQL Server 2005 was because there was no compelling business reason to upgrade. If that was true for the SQL Server 2005 upgrade back then, it’s doubly true for the move to SQL Server 2008 now.

There’s another reason I think uptake will be low. A lot of us have been stung by the latest versions of Microsoft Office and Windows Vista. In Sketching User Experiences, Bill Buxton uses the example of the typewriter keyboard. Say you’re a keyboard manufacturer and you find a way of re-arranging the keys of the standard keyboard. Usability tests show it’s easier for beginners to get to grip with, and it ultimately leads to a 10% increase in typing speeds, both in novices and experts. You still wouldn’t release the new keyboard: the several billion people who are comfortable with the current, inefficient, keyboard would find it irritating, confusing and slow to use. They would never upgrade. I put Office 2007 and Vista into this category, with their arbitrary new ways of doing standard tasks.

Although SQL Server 2008 has no equivalent to the productivity-destroying ribbon bar in Office 2007, I do think that Microsoft’s recent history with product upgrades will make people wary and skeptical. It certainly won’t push them to upgrade quickly.

On balance, people will upgrade to SQL Server 2008 very slowly. Clearly, that isn’t in Microsoft’s interests though: they, logically, will be trying to persuade people to move from previous versions. In particular, they’ll be trying to persuade people to leapfrog SQL Server 2005 and move straight from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2008.

One strategy they might use is to withdraw active support for SQL Server 2005. SQL Server 2005’s second service pack was released about a year ago. Microsoft currently have no plans to release more service packs for SQL Server 2005. This  might make short-term sense for them, but it’s not the right thing to do for their customers. If I’m right, and the uptake of SQL Server 2008 is slow, then Microsoft should be looking after customers who are unwilling, or unable, to upgrade immediately. People are going to be using SQL Server 2005 for another five years at least, and they need to be supported.

I think Microsoft are persuadable – there’s a poll running on the Microsoft connect site where they’re gauging feedback. If you use SQL Server and don’t have plans to upgrade immediately to SQL Server 2008 then I urge you to make your voice heard and push for SQL Server 2005 service pack 3. Here’s the link:

https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=326575

Microsoft will eventually do the right thing. They’ll have to. Either they’ll do it now, or they will backtrack and do it later, much like they’ve had to extend Window XP’s life. They don’t even have to write a single line of code or test a single function for now. All they need to do is commit to doing it, some time in the future, to keep their customers happy.

Go on Microsoft – keep us happy.

Last October I visited the San Jose Tech Museum with some other people from Red Gate. We stumbled across a mechanical arm-wrestling machine. Here’s the twist though: the mechanical arm that you wrestle is connected with other, similar, machines across the USA. There’s a webcam too, so you can see who you’re wrestling. In California, Theo, Ross and I all cheered on as Anna slammed the arm of some jock over in New York against the table.

This is an example of a haptic interface: you interact with the device via touch, pressure and movement, rather than sight or sound. It’s an interesting example because it’s not just about you, the user, interacting with a device. It allows two people, separated by a large distance, to interact as if in the same place.

The arm-wrestling machine is a crude example of how physical gestures can be transmitted over large distances. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could transfer more complex gestures?

Well, it turns out you can. Almost. There’s a company in London called CuteCircuit who have prototyped what they call ‘The Hug Shirt’. The idea is that you buy two shirts: one for you, and one for a friend. You both put on your hug shirts. Your friend then travels off, to California, or Scotland, or wherever. You think your friend might be lonely and you want to send her something beyond an e-mail or an instant message. You hug yourself, squeezing your hug shirt. The shirt digitizes the exact form of your hug and sends the data to your mobile phone via a bluetooth connection. You text it to your friend. Your friend receives a message saying "Bob just sent you a hug. Do you want to feel it?". Her phone sends the hug to her hug shirt, and the hug shirt hugs her. Your hug – its strength, its pressure distribution, the warmth of your skin and your heartbeat – is replayed exactly the way you created it.

There are other people working on similar projects. Ben Hui at Cambridge University has a plan to send hand-squeezes via mobile phones. This is similar to a project that researchers at MIT’s European palpable machines research group were working on before the lab was shut down. Rather than a shirt, this could be built into mobile phones themselves. You could squeeze the phone and your friend would feel it, in some form, at the other end.

The value of these haptic devices is based on the idea that physical touch is important to human interactions. By transferring and replicating the physical touch you are, in fact, transferring and replicating the emotion.

I’m not sure that this is true though. The emotion you feel depends on more than just what you’re sensing. It also depends on the situation that you’re in: what your physical environment is, your mental state and your expectations. Here’s an illustration.

Also at the San Jose Tech Museum, there’s an earthquake simulator. You stand on a platform and the simulator replays the seismic data from an earthquake that’s actually happened. We re-experienced the earthquake that hit Turkey in 1999. In the real thing, 14,000 people died. In our simulation, the platform juddered for a bit and then we walked off, a bit disappointed.

Two days later, I was eating at The Grill at the Fairmont Hotel, just opposite the Tech Museum. At 8:04pm, the whole room starting shifting. It jumped left, right, forwards and backwards. The stack of wine bottles by the wall teetered, but didn’t fall. This real earthquake, an order of magnitude tamer than the simulated one, only lasted a few seconds, but it scared the shit out of me. Because of its unexpectedness, my mental state, its context, and its reality, it provoked emotions of fear, awe and wonder that the simulation didn’t and, probably, no simulation ever could.

So will the hapticon kill the emoticon? I’d like to think so, but there’s still life in the smiley face for now.

When PG Wodehouse was asked what the secret of writing was, he replied that it’s to apply the seat of your trousers to the surface of your chair.

In software, the secret is the opposite. It’s to remove the seat of your trousers from the surface of your chair. At least, remove the tips of your fingers from the surface of your keyboard. Go out and talk to users; get a pencil and paper and sketch; take a long walk and think. But don’t code.

Last week I asked why you thought this shower fitting was so bad:

You gave a number of answers, some close* and some not so close (it really is a shower, not a chocolate dispenser, Mr Flibble).

Most of you guessed how the shower works. The larger dial, mounted nearest the well, controls the flow of water. Turn it anti-clockwise and you get more water, clockwise and you get less. The smaller dial controls the heat. Anticlockwise for hot, clockwise for cold. Not a great design, but not appalling: how it functions isn’t obvious but at least it’s discoverable.

There is, however, a fundamental and dangerous flaw with the shower. The hot/cold dial is slightly loose on its bearings, and there’s friction between the two dials. As you turn up the shower’s flow, the larger dial rubs against the smaller dial and the smaller dial shudders anti-clockwise. Since the balance between pleasant and scalding is a fine one in most hotels, you get burnt. Secondly, the lever on the heat dial is too heavy for its bearing. As you shower, its weight pulls the dial anti-clockwise. Again, scalding water.

At this point you might accuse me of asking an unfair question. There’s no way, you say, you could have spotted this from just looking at the picture or even from looking at the shower itself. You’d have to watch me interact with the shower to spot the issues I was having.

To which I say: exactly.

You could look at this design for a week and not spot the obvious faults. You could even play with it, in your design or development studio, and not see what’s wrong with it. If you’re the designer, you could possibly even use it, hooked up, in the real world and still call it easy to use, claim that users would figure it out and blame malfunction on user error.

But if you saw me, a real user, try to use it in a real-life situation then its faults would be obvious. The swearing and screaming would give it away.

The same is true for software. On paper, a design can look good. Even when you code it up it can look great. You, the designer or the developer, think that it’s the most intuitive, simplest interface possible. Only a fool could fail to use it. But put it in front of a user and it could easily fail. The only way to make your software usable is to watch people using it. Or – more likely – failing to use it.

It’s slightly more complicated than that, of course. There are numerous books out there on how to conduct usability trials. If you haven’t already, then read up on it and try it out. I guarantee that it will be both fun and eye-opening.

At Red Gate we’re always looking for people to participate in our usability trials. It’s normally a fun experience for users, and it gives you a chance to influence the future direction of our products. If you’re a SQL Server professional or .net developer and can spare about an hour of your time for a worthwhile and interesting experience then send Jenny an e-mail at usability@red-gate.com.

*Since Austin Salonen got closest, he gets the $100 vouchers. Well done Austin!

For me, one of the most important things in a conference is the venue. I think this is beyond a hygiene factor – it’s not sufficient not to have a bad venue; a good venue really makes a difference. So I’m off to Boston this weekend to look at venues for Business of Software 2008. Of course, you need great speakers, so I’m working on that too. So far I’ve lined up (in no particular order) Joel Spolsky, Eric Sink, Richard Stallman, Dharmesh Shah, Jason Fried, Steve Johnson and Paul Kenny. You can find out more, sign up for updates (I’m hoping to book another big name soon) and get a free eBook at the conference web site.

I don’t like travelling but at least I can use it to catch up on my reading. One of the highlights of last year’s conference was Jennifer Aaker’s talk on branding. The insight that struck me most was the way that Jennifer had analysed companies’ brands in the same way that psychologists analyse people’s profiles. For people, this type of profiling is based on what’s called the lexical hypothesis: that the words we use to describe people reflect the attributes they have. You can look at the words we use when talking about other people, perform a cluster analysis to remove redundant, correlated words and end up with a set of independent personality factors. Depending on who you listen to, and how far you simplify, and in what way, you end up with a number of factors, generally ranging from 3 to 15. One of the most famous is "The Big Five", with the conveniently acronymed dimensions of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticsm.

Jennifer has extended this approach to companies and has come up with the five independent dimensions of sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication and ruggedness. You can plot any company’s brand against these five axes. For example, Coca Cola is a "sincere" brand while Virgin is "exciting" (although, of course, it is possible to have a brand that is both sincere and exciting since these axes are orthogonal). Your brand effects how your customers relate to you. For example, if a sincere brand breaks its customers’ trust then it is very hard to undo the damage caused, while breaking trust and then re-establishing it actually helps an exciting brand on many measures. You can find out more by googling "Jennifer Aaker" and branding.

So the first item on my reading list for this weekend is a collection of Jennifer’s papers that I’ve been meaning to read for a while. They’re not about branding, but about happiness, another area that Jennifer researches.

The second item is "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell. I’ve heard much about this book and have always been slightly sceptical. I figure I should read it at some point (although maybe I should follow Pierre Bayard’s advice in How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read and rate it as HB minus – a book I’ve heard of that I don’t think is very good).

The third item is the current issue of the Harvard Business Review. I gave up reading this a while ago when I felt that much of the content was formulaic and empty and along the lines of "We asked five companies what their key to success was and concluded that it was to have a perfect strategy and to execute it flawlessly". I’ll try again for a couple of issues and see how it goes.

For lighter reading I’ve brought along Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut and the Golden Compass by Philip Pullman.

So hopefully I’ll come back with a conference venue and better read. More likely I’ll just watch the onflight films though. I think The Bourne Ultimatum is showing.

I first read Donald Norman’s the Design of Everyday Things a decade or so ago. It made me realise that whenever I can’t use a kettle or a telephone or even a door it’s not my fault. Somebody, somewhere, made a poor design decision. It’s never user error, always designer error. Ever since then I’ve kept an eye out for atrocious designer errors.

Last week I was staying in a hotel in the South West of England. Hotel shower fittings are notoriously badly designed and every badly designed shower fitting is badly designed in its own way. The one in this hotel room was, however, the worst I’ve seen in a long time.

I’ll give $50 of Amazon vouchers to the first person who can tell me how this fitting is meant to work and why I found this one particularly bad (note you need to do both for a chance of winning). I’ll also give $50 of vouchers to what I judge is the best design critique, at my discretion.

BTW, based on a straw poll here at Red Gate I think my money is safe.

Here it is:

Post your answers as comments to this post …

Next week I’ll tell you why this design is so bad. Subscribe to the RSS feed and don’t miss out.

Last week I argued that great software companies are like horses: although we might struggle to define them, we all know them when we see them. I also claimed that we can define them in terms of their family relationships with other great software companies and not by the characteristics that they have. I then ran a survey asking who you think are the world’s great software companies. Here are the results.

I listed 30 companies and asked you to categorise them as ‘great’, ‘not great’ or ‘no opinion / neither / who?’. 106 people gave their opinions. Here is the split between ‘great’ and ‘not great’:

Here, the blue bars above the horizontal present people who voted ‘great’ and the red ones represent the ones who voted ‘not great’.

From this you can see that Google is unequivocally one of the world’s great software companies, while Macrovision is not. You might respond that this is obvious, but I don’t think it is. You could argue that what makes a software company one of the world’s great ones is subjective but there is actually a lot of consensus, at least at the ends of the scales. No matter how people choose to interpret the question, they consistently place Apple in it, and Macrovision out of it, irrespective of theoretical quibbles about whether Apple is actually a software company or not, or whether Macrovision’s financial success makes it great.

Note that ‘not great’ does not necessarily mean ‘poor’: it’s a statement of neutrality rather than distaste. Also, not everybody has an opinion about all companies. Therefore, in the following graph I’ve defined ‘prominence’ as the proportion of people who expressed an opinion and ‘greatness’ as the proportion of people who expressed an opinion who chose ‘great’. For example, if 10 people out of 100 express an opinion, and 3 of those call a company ‘great’ then its prominence is 10% and its greatness is 30%.

One interesting point here is that greatness seems to imply prominence (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon) but that prominence does not imply greatness (AOL, Symantec, Facebook).

These results confirm most of my prejudices. They confirm that, although individuals might disagree,
there is some collective understanding of what the world’s great
software companies look like.

In conclusion, I think that, unambiguously, the five greatest software companies in the world are:

1. Google
2. Apple
3. Microsoft
4. Amazon
5. Adobe

Disclaimer: I’m the co-founder of Red Gate Software, and I publicised this survey on the JoelOnSoftware forums. That means that the respondents are heavily skewed to software professionals, and that the numbers for Red Gate and Fog Creek are probably inaccurate.

Next week I’m going to trawl through your answers to “What makes a software company one of the world’s great ones?” and see if I can spot some patterns. Make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed and don’t miss out.

I’m reading "The Toyota Way" by Jeffrey K. Liker at the moment. Although it’s nominally about the car company, I’ve yet to find anything I disagree with and that can’t be applied to running a software company. One salient point is Toyota’s long term philosophy. They make decisions based not on short-term financial benefits, but on what is the long term right thing to do. Financial success is a by-product of long-term thinking, not a goal in itself.

The Toyota attitude appeals to me, and is the antithesis of much high profile conventional wisdom in the software industry. Recently, I’ve seen behaviour close to a parody of the standard practice. These may be isolated anecdotes, symptoms of a wider trend, or simply signs of provincial Cambridge catching up with the US West Coast: I don’t know. Recently I’ve stumbled across a few people whose business model isn’t to build something sustainable that provides customers with something they need, but rather to rapidly construct something for a quick sale, preferably to Google. Never mind that their product will never satisfy a single customer nor make a single dollar. That it glints enough to attract Google’s eye is all that matters.

I find this model hollow and, well, slightly distasteful. Companies judge their success by how much money they raise in various rounds of angel and investor funding, and then by how much their fledgling companies are bought for. CEOs stand up and boast about how much cash they have raised – and subsequently hosed – rather than the value they have created, the customers they have satisfied or how they have made the world a better place.

A lot of of money changes hands, and some people get very rich, but not much value, or wealth, is created. Most acquisitions subsequently fail, so all that has happened is that money has been transferred from the many (the shareholders of the acquiring companies) to the few (the original investors). This redistribution of money from the poor to the rich is not the same as creating wealth. The hungry give their portions of pie to the sated, but the pie does not get bigger.

To me, this smells like a Ponzi scheme. But I find it hard to reconcile my instincts (prejudices, arguably) with the success of the model over the past 40 years. Maybe this is because there are still some people – entrepreneurs, companies and investors alike – who take the long term view. Maybe this long term view is historically what has worked, but now people are trying to copy its form but ignoring the substance and ending up with a shallow caricature. Maybe I’m criticising this shallow layer of media-friendly froth while there is still a solid, bedrock of substance. Or maybe I’m just wrong and – although it jars with my instincts – this is the better route.

Faced with the two paths, I’d choose Toyota Way over Sand Hill Road any day. What about you?