A couple of weeks ago I blogged about some brilliant advertising I saw at a petrol station. The increasing petrol (gas) prices are an interesting illustration of how pricing changes people’s behaviour. Here in the UK, petrol is about £1.20 a litre. That works out at around $9 for a US gallon. How will people react? And what has that got to do with software? I’ll try to explain.

To understand people’s behaviour, it’s useful to differentiate between the short and the long term. In the short term, we’ll cycle more, drive less and share cars. There’s not much more we can do about the money we spend on fuel while we’re stuck with our current cars. In the long term, however, we have other options. If fuel prices remain high then, as we replace our cars, we’ll ditch our SUVs and buy hybrids, or more fuel efficient cars.

If you’re Shell, or Exxon, or the UK government (more than 60% of the price of petrol is tax in the UK) then these are heady days. In the short term, your customers have no choice but to buy your product. For now, we’re locked in to petrol. The costs of switching (to a cheaper car, or to alternate fuels) are too high to be feasible, in the short term. In the long term, that changes.

Locking in your customers muffles an important signal. As I’ve blogged about before, getting negative feedback is hard. If your customers are locked in then you can maltreat them and not notice their squeals. Prod them with pointy sticks and they might rattle the bars of their cages but they’re safely locked in and cannot leave. One day they’ll break the lock and escape and then you’ll have a horde of unhappy ex-customers on the loose. It’s much better to have willing customers than hostages.

I write from personal experience. A few years ago, I chose InstallShield as the installer for Red Gate’s products. Bad decision. It became apparent, quickly, that it’s a shoddy product. Each heftily priced new version introduced unwanted new features while old features remained untested and buggy. Always one to make the same mistake twice, I signed up to their hosted update ‘service’ (I use the word loosely) and had the same experience. By the time I realised I’d made a dumb decision I was locked in. Our installers all used InstallShield, and the switching costs were high. But I was only locked in for the short term: in the long term – and it was too long – we switched to Wix. Because I was locked in, it was easy for InstallShield to ignore my feedback, and they ignored it impressively actively. Presumably, sales were up and life was good. But only in the short term.

If your customers are locked in then be careful. Look after them, and keep an ear out for the rattling of cages.

I’ve just come back from a short trip to Paris. Although I enjoy Paris, the Champs-Élysées, Montmartre and the Marais are stifling on a weekend. So on Sunday morning I headed over to Bercy, crossed the Simone de Beauvoir passerelle over to the New Bibliothèque Nationale and watched Blade Runner at the MK2 cinema.

The New Bibliothèque Nationale is an impressive, but odd beast. It’s the largest of François Mitterand’s grands projets. Its four book-shaped, letter Ls, made of glass and 25 storeys high, surround a sunken garden of trees transported fully-grown from Normandy. Its 400km of shelves provide space for up to 20 million books. It cost 8 billion francs ($1.5 billion) to build. It was completed in 1997.

It’s impressive in another way too. It’s an impressive example of our tendency to solve yesterday’s problems. In this case, yesterday’s problem was how to house tens of millions of printed books, and how to store, index and access the hundreds of thousands of new books being published worldwide every year. With Google, and its ambition of organizing the world’s information, I’d call that problem solved. Or, perhaps more accurately, side-stepped. Scanning the 10 million books in the current library, and persuading publishers to release digital versions of their new books are just logistical details and utterly tractable.

Here are some more examples, from the business of software:

Windows Vista – solving yesterday’s problem of trying to improve the desktop operation system.

Sarbanes Oxley – targetted at yesterday’s corporate misdemeanours, it missed today’s.

Digital Rights Managements – yesterday, people sharing music was a problem; today it’s an opportunity.

I’m sure you can think of more examples, and better ones than I have. Post here …

I tried out a new Indian restaurant last week. The experience wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t great either. It was, well, mediocre. The waiter brought out the wrong food. My butter chicken turned out as a chicken tikka carbonara, and a poor one at that, with chunks of roasted chicken floating in a custard sauce. The naan bread was cold. When I ordered a pudding the waiter giggled and wrestled the menu out of my hands. They were good enough to bring out, unprompted, a glass of scotch at the end of the meal. Nice gesture, but I don’t like whisky. Horrible stuff.

At the end of the meal, the waiter asked how I’d enjoyed the meal. Fine, I mumbled, and smiled.

Maybe it’s a British thing, but I just don’t like giving feedback. Negative feedback, anyway. That’s a shame for me, but also a shame for the restaurant. This was a great opportunity for them to learn, to hear how poor their food was, and how much they could improve. But they missed it, because they had no way of gathering true feedback; no way of hearing anything other than what they wanted to hear.

The same is probably true of you. You’ve probably got no way of getting true feedback. If your product stank, if your management sucked or your service was lousy, would people tell you, or would they just mumble that it was fine, and smile?

There are things you can do though. As Bill Buxton points out, and as I’ve blogged about before, if you frame the question as a choice then it’s easier for people to give feedback. If I show you a single product design, you might shy away from telling me your true opinion. If I show you two or three options, you’ll be more open. It’s hard for you to tell me that widget A sucks, but you’ll tell me that you prefer widget B, and why.

You can apply this technique to other areas of your business too. Rather than ask your customers if they’re happy with your customer service, or to score it out of ten, you could ask them how it compares to other, concrete examples. How does it compare with their experiences with dealing with Microsoft, or Symantec? With their insurance company, or their bank?

Another trick is watch what people do and not what they say. I said that my meal was fine, but what I didn’t do was eat it. People might say that your product is great, but if they don’t buy it that tells you more. They might say that the design is fine, but you need to watch them to see if they can use it. They might say they’re happy with your customer service, but what do they do during those interactions?

There are plenty of chicken tikka carbonaras in the world of software. Sometimes they’re obvious and there’s no lack of honest feedback (Vista and Office 2007 are the most egregious examples), but quiet mediocrity is more dangerous. How would you know if you’re serving up chicken tikka carbonaras? And how do you give, and elicit, honest feedback? Post here …

I’m pleased to announce that registration for Business of Software 2008 – A Joel on Software Conference is now open.

This is the second year I’ve run this event. Last year’s event went down very well (Joel Spolsky said it was the best conference he went to last year and 94% of attendees gave it four or five stars; you can check out some videos and read testimonials on the conference web site).

This year is going to be even better.

If you’re not familiar with the conference, then here’s a brief summary.

It’s being held in the Seaport hotel on the Boston waterfront. The dates are September 3rd – 4th. The confirmed speakers include:

• Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek software, author of several books and the man behind the joelonsoftware blog
• Seth Godin, Business Week’s "Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age", is the best-selling author of 7 books (including Permission Marketing and Purple Cow) as well as the most popular eBook of all time.
• Eric Sink, founder of SourceGear, author of "Eric Sink on the Business of Software" and the person who coined the term "Micro ISV"
• Steve Johnson of Pragmatic Marketing and winner of last year’s Software Idol competition
• Richard Stallman launched the development of the
  GNU operating system, now used on tens of millions of computers today.
  Stallman has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award, a
  MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s
  Pioneer award, and the the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment
• Paul Kenny is one of the UK’s top sales trainers,
  consultants and speakers. He has worked with many customers in three
  continents, including IBM, Perot Systems, The Guardian and tens of
  others.
• Dharmesh Shah is a geek, serial entrepreneur, founder of HubSpot and blogger at OnStartups.com
• Jessica Livingston is author of Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days and a founder of Y Combinator
• Jason Fried is founder of 37signals (developers of Basecamp and Ruby on Rails) and Signal vs Noise blogger

That isn’t the full line-up: I’ve got some other speakers I’d like to invite too.

The early bird price of $1,395 is available if you book before June 7th. You can find more details about booking on the registration page. I don’t know how quickly tickets are going to sell, but I’d encourage you to book early to guarantee a place.

The best way to stay up to date with the conference news is to subscribe to the RSS feed. Alternatively, sign up for the conference newsletter and get a free eBook.

If you’ve got any questions about the conference, then post them here or e-mail me at ne***********@bu****************.org

See you in Boston!

P.S. I’d really appreciate your help spreading the word about the conference. If you could blog about it and tell your friends and colleagues than that would be great.

Last week I was filling my wife’s car up with petrol (gas). It’s a big car, with a big tank. Here in the UK, petrol costs about £1.10 for a litre. That’s about $9 for a US gallon. $200 for a full tank. There’s not much to do as the fuel gauge scrolls relentlessly upwards. Not much but stare at the nozzle in my hand:

I think that’s a great advert. It’s an example of how interrupting people to tell them something can work. It fulfils most of Dan and Chip Heath’s criteria for stickiness:

• It’s simple – anybody can understand it
• It’s unexpected – I wasn’t expecting to be marketed to
• It’s concrete – no intangibles here, just some solid facts
• It’s credible – do I believe it? Yes.
• It’s emotional – it made me smile, and caught me at a moment of panic
• It doesn’t tell a story, which is the last criterion, though

It’s also got a lot in common with Google adwords: it’s relevant, targeted and interrupts its audience at a point when we’re interruptable.

But is it effective? Probably. At any one time, roughly 5%-10% of us are thinking about buying a new car. That means that about one million interested, persuadable, interruptable people would see this advert a week (in the UK), assuming a decent campaign roll-out, at a cost of about 5p a hit. I’d like to see a TV ad that can do that.

Another reason that I like this advert is that it goes against the conventional wisdom. Well, the new conventional wisdom anyway, which claims that we are so bombarded with information and marketing – billboards, television, t-shirts, pop-ups and so on – that there is no point in trying to interrupt us to sell us something. We just won’t notice, and if we do notice then we won’t care.

If the conventional wisdom about interruption is wrong here, I wonder if it is wrong elsewhere too; or at least that there are striking exceptions which skilled marketeers can discover. Perhaps the right print ad, or the right banner ad, or the right superbowl ad can still work.

There are some other interesting parallels between petrol pumps and software. I’ll blog about them next week. Subscribe to the RSS feed to keep up to date.

Over a million people downloaded Radiohead’s In Rainbows album in the two months it was on their web site. In 2000, when Stephen King put Riding the Bullet on his web site, the servers crashed under the load. Seth Godin estimates that over 2 million people downloaded Unleashing the Ideavirus when he released it as a free eBook. These examples demonstrate how the internet is killing the middle man. Disintermediation is the (ugly) name of the game. That’s how the conventional wisdom goes, anyway. I’m not so sure. I think there will always be middle men: better, smarter, different middle men. Sure, traditional travel agents, book stores and music companies will vanish, but this is the first stage in a cycle of creative destruction.

Here’s an example of how the slayer of the old middle man is the midwife of the new. Say you’re buying a car. A second hand car. You can buy from a dealer, or you can buy from an individual. In the past, if you bought from a dealer then you had the advantage of choice. There were a lot of cars in the same place. Similarly, selling to a dealer was easier than selling to an individual. eBay has changed this: you can bypass the middle man and buy direct from the seller, and with more choice than a dealer could ever provide.

There is, however, a need for a new type of middle man. The used car market is famously dogged by the lemon problem. The buyer has less information than the seller, and doesn’t know if the car he is buying is a lemon. Therefore, he will assume that it is indeed a lemon, and will only pay the price of a lemon. If the price of used cars is determined by the lemons in the market, then sellers have no incentive to sell good cars (since buyers will assume they are lemons, and only pay the lemon price). Hence the bad cars drive out the good ones. This, however, relies on the asymmetry of information available to the buyer and the seller. If the buyer knows what the seller knows then this problem vanishes. This is an ideal role for a middle man. Not an Arthur Daley who trades on quantity and dishonesty, but somebody who trades on information and whose goods are expertise and trust. Would you pay a middle man to seek out a used car, verify its quality and then guarantee it? I would.

Recruitment is another example. In their attempt to cut out the middle man, sites like Monster have evolved into heaving meat markets of employers and employees. Unfortunately, Sturgeon’s law – that 90% of everything is crap – applies. This cuts both ways: 90% of candidates are crap, and 90% of positions are crap. On Monster alone, that’s something like 100 million crap applicants, and 50 million crap jobs. But there are gems buried deep in the crap, and sifting the crap is a precious skill. In other words, good middle men – recruitment agents – are now more valuable than ever.

It’s not just physical goods where middle men are becoming more important, it’s virtual ones too. The Internet provides an easy way for writers to connect with readers, musicians with listeners and artists with viewers, bypassing the traditional middle men such as newspapers, books and magazines. But the infinitely increased available data clashes with our finite capacity to absorb it. We don’t have the time to filter the infinite down to the finite, so people – middle men – who can do this are increasingly prized. The quirky, human, personal editorial judgement that the BBC, Slashdot or Boing Boing apply to the morass of information out there is more valuable, to me at least, than the lowest-common-denominator mob ‘wisdom’ of digg, or the cold logic of Google’s algorithm.

I don’t think these examples are isolated. As the Internet removes the need for dumb middle men, it creates the need for smart middle men. The producers have removed links in the chains separating them from consumers, but consumers are slotting new links back in. As we get swamped by more and more information, and more and more choices, we’re going to need more and more help filtering the data and making our choices: which cars should we buy, which holidays we should go on, which people we should hire and which news stories we should read. It’s a paradox: the more we can remove middle men, the more we need them.

The middle man is dead. Long live the middle man!

My day job is at Red Gate. Although we focus on tools for SQL Server and .NET, I’m currently concentrating on making a fledgling Microsoft Exchange tool we’re working on a commercial success. Here’s a bit of background on what we’re doing.

I think most business software sucks. It’s buggy, poorly designed, unusable and expensive. It’s sold by complacent companies who do not care about their customers. If you’ve got an iMac at home, and use Google, Flickr and iPhoto recreationally, why should you put up with crap at work?

I think we’ve found a potential niche for a tool for Microsoft Exchange. I can’t tell you much about it, but if you’re an Exchange admin then your life is going to get better. This tool will you make you smile.

This creates a dilemma, and I’d like your advice:

How much should we tell people about what we’re doing? On the one hand, the more we talk about it, the more likely it is to succeed. On the other hand, we’re months away from even a beta and we don’t want to tip off the competition.

So what would you do? Post here.

Also, we’re looking for people to join the beta program and participate in user research. If you’re an Exchange admin and are interested then drop me a line. If you’ve never taken part in a usability trial then it’s an experience worth having. Plus we pay $100 (amazon vouchers) for an hour of your time. My e-mail address is ne***********@re******.com.

A couple of years ago Antonio, a good friend of mine, decided to open a bar in Pantelleria, a small island 70 miles off the coast of Sicily. Its turquoise lakes and volcanic landscapes are persuasive enough for Giorgio Armani to split his time between Milan and the island. Madonna and Sting are regular visitors too. But if you go to Pantelleria today you won’t find Antonio’s bar anywhere, and it’s not for the reasons you might expect.

Antonio had the foresight to produce a business plan. He used the structure of the plan to feel his way around the opportunity. Who were his customers going to be? He spent time on the island chatting to the locals and to the tourists. What was the competition like? Dedicated, late night partying in the handful of bars already on the island was the only way to answer that question. How much would it cost? He found an old villa, produced plans to convert it to a bar and worked out what the running costs would be. Once he’d been through the process he could see that his head clearly contradicted his heart. There was no way he could make it work.

I count this a success. The process of creating the plan helped Antonio make the right decision. Planning saved him months, if not years, of disappointment and misery.

It’s not the powerpoint slides or the twenty page document that counts. The colourful hockey stick graphs, quadrants and pie charts do not matter. It’s the act of production that is critical. A business plan provides a framework for thought. You’re standing on the edge of a chasm, in the dark, ready to leap. You need to know that a better place lies across the gap, and that you’ve remembered to tie your shoelaces.

Here are some more reasons why it’s the process that counts:

• Helmuthe von Moltk, the chief of staff for the Prussian army said no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. You need to think about different outcomes, and understand the lay of the land.
• If you’re setting up in business with somebody else – and I recommend that you do – then a plan has another advantage too. It’s a way of reaching a shared understanding about what you’re trying to do and why you’re trying to do it. It will force you to check that you share common assumptions and goals, and that they hold true.
• Writing can be a good way to think. Putting your thoughts down on paper forces you to crystallize them.

Once you’ve written your plan, you’ll put it in a drawer and leave it there for twelve months. The next time you read it, it will be to have a good laugh about how wrong you were.

So write your plan – that’s important – and then burn it.

Bill Buxton is an astounding character. I’ve had the good fortune to chat with him a couple of times, and I always come away with my head fizzing with his ideas. Most recently, I persuaded him to join a few of us from Red Gate at the Pickerel in Cambridge for a quick pint. I’ll let some of his ideas ferment and I’ll write some more about them in the coming weeks, but here’s a quick taster of some of what I learnt.

Electronic paper is going to be huge. Bill had brought his iRex iLiad device, and the hardware is astonishing (the software less so). It’s about the size and weight of a thin hardbook book, and its resolution is way better than I’d expected. Its display is like a sheet of laser-printed paper, reflecting and absorbs light like ink on paper does, rather than emitting it like conventional displays do. Although there are niggles with the device, it’s utterly convincing that we’re all going to be carrying these things in the future. Of course, exactly which device we all end up carrying depends on factors other than the technology, just like Apple’s success with the iPod was due to software, the iTunes store, DRM, distribution agreements with record labels and so on. Amazon are on the right track with the Kindle though. As soon as they come out in the UK, I’m buying one.

Here’s Bill with his iLiad:

Here’s a close up:

Note how Bill is annotating the document he’s working on. The paper that Bill is reading is Engelbart’s 1968 Study for the Development of Human Intellect Augmentation Techniques. It’s worth a read.

Bill also talked about how people are underestimating Microsoft’s ability to design, and to innovate. Many (including me) have sniggered at the original Zune, but the latest version is actually quite good. Not as good as the iPod, maybe, but that’s not the point. Bill’s point is that you need to separate out the art of design from the craft, and that you must first master the craft before you can attempt the art. Microsoft are now mastering the craft, and they’ll soon be practising the art. Compare Bill’s original brown Zune with the sleeker one on the right and you can see how Microsoft’s design skills have evolved over just 12 months:

Bill has some other interesting ideas about innovation and invention. Just as Chris Anderson of Wired has his Long Tail, Bill Buxton has his Long Nose. The tip of the technology nose is 20 – 30 years ahead of the face. William Gibson said the same thing differently with ‘The future is here; it’s just unevenly distributed’. Take the mouse you’re holding. It’s been ubiquitous for a decade, ever since the launch of Windows 95. If you’re an original Mac user you’ll think the mouse is 20 years old. If you’re a real old-timer then you’ll know it was used on the Xerox Star and PERQ workstations in 1982. But it was actually invented by Doug Engelbart and Bill English in 1965. That’s a 30 year gap from invention to ubiquity, and it was the popularisers rather than the inventors who got the money and the fame. Similarly, if you’ve been wowed by the iPhone’s multitouch interface and the way you can stretch and squeeze photographs with your fingers then you ought to know that Bill Buxton was building multitouch interfaces in 1985. Don’t expect multitouch to hit ubiquity until 2015.

Bill also has much to say about sketching and design. For example, it’s way better to represent a handful of sketches to users rather than get feedback about a single, detailed, design. With a sketch, it’s obvious that you’ve not invested much time, so users will feel less awkward about giving feedback. Also, if it’s framed as a comparison between two designs, users are more likely to evaluate options and give opinions than if they’re focussed on a single design (‘I prefer the round widget to the square widget’ is easier for people to say than ‘The square widget sucks’). Bill expands on this in his book Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design. If you’re at all interested in product design or development you should get hold of a copy.

Finally, here’s Bill with (from left to right) me, Stephen, Marine, Dom and Tom:

At the end of 2006, Claire over at Simple-Talk put together a book of recipes "by geeks for geeks". It’s only tenuously linked to the Business of Software but it’s a cool idea, and an example of how you can give away eBooks to drive traffic to your web site.

Besides, I’ve always wanted to have a blog post entitled "It’s a cook book!" and it’s the only way I could think of doing it. Award yourself a gold star if you get the reference without looking it
up in the characteristically overly explained wikipedia entry.

Here’s the link:

http://www.simple-talk.com/opinion/opinion-pieces/the-simple-talk-cookbook/ 

And what was it?

Post here …

I recently read Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days by Jessica Livingston. Jessica interviewed a whole bunch of really interesting people (Steve Wozniak, Ray Ozzie, Mitch Kapor and 29 other entrepreneurs) and has written up the interviews in this collection. It’s fascinating to read the stories of other people’s experiences as they make it big. The book has 53 reviews on amazon.com with an average rating of close to five stars.

I tried to give away an eChapter of Jessica’s book away on my conference web site, but for various reasons that fell through.

However, Jessica has published interviews with Steve Wozniak and Joel Spolsky online. You can go to the Founders at Work web site to read them.

Jessica is also one of the founders of Y-Combinator, which is early stage venture capitalism done the way it should be. It’s one of those things I wish I’d thought of.

Jessica has kindly agreed to speak at Business of Software 2008. Other speakers include Seth Godin, Joel Spolsky, Eric Sink and Jason Fried. Registration isn’t open yet, but subscribe to the RSS feed if you’d like to be kept informed.

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)
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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!