Archives for March 2007

The Key to Technology Loyalty – Think Small

March 20, 2007 Leave a Comment

A few weeks ago my good friend Jon Hodgson was visiting me over the weekend (my previous posting Visiting With a Performance Tuning Guru has more details). We spent a good deal of time getting caught up on the details of what we have been working on recently…the kind of catching up that you can only do in person regardless of how often you talk on the phone). We also spent a good deal of reminiscing about the past and how the experiences we had when we worked together at Resonate still affect us today. The keys to technology loyalty and success were one of those experiences.

Anyone who has had the pleasure of working with Jon is familiar with his signature phrase when dealing with technology features: “Someone who was raised by wolves would know better!”. He used to use this phrase a lot while we were at Resonate working on the early versions of Central Dispatch and Commander. We were constantly providing feedback to product management and engineering (sometimes you have to cut to the source to get stuff done) about the little things in the products that annoyed our customers and us [Pre-Sales] Systems Engineers. (The intrinsic link between a stellar systems engineer and customers is something that most companies tend to not understand or at least not give adequate credit to.)

We agreed that those early experiences reinforced by our experiences since are the source of our shared belief that these little usability items are what create and help sustain technology loyalty amongst users. Users can and will usually overlook small usability issues during the early stages of a product. But if those issues don’t get resolved or fixed as the product grows and matures, you eventually end up with death by a thousand paper cuts.

These small items can be as basic as user understandable configuration names instead of techie/programmer like names. Configurations that are intrinsic in nature; help that is there to explain it in detail if it’s not; or small little UI features that save time. One of Jon’s that I really agree with is that a product should be easy to install (and I add easy to configure in our new Web 2.0 world).

For most tools, if a user can’t get your product up and running within 15 minutes you most likely already lost the sale. We are all busy; what should they expect from a product that wastes their time with a bad install? Most of the time users won’t waste more time to find out. This extends into the configuration of service based applications. If I can’t get basic functionality up and configured within 15 minutes, it’s too long. Sure, there can be more advanced features, but keep them hidden until I ready for them.

In today’s social based technology world, this is even more important. There are numerous web based applications that I hear real users willing to sing the praises of because of how easy they are to configure or use. With every product out there having multiple competing products vying for attention (many of them free or open source), customer loyalty and involvement with the product is key.

It still amazes me how few technology companies really understand this.

Visiting With a Performance Tuning Guru

March 18, 2007 Leave a Comment

A few weeks ago my good friend Jon Hodgson was visiting me over the weekend. Jon and I worked together for over five years at Resonate during the startup, through IPO, to acquisition of the company (quite an interesting 5 year ride). Jon has spent the last few years, from Resonate through today, focusing on multi-tiered application performance tuning. This is a complex area that can contain all sorts of technologies within the Enterprise infrastructure (i.e., firewalls, networks, servers, web servers, application servers, database, middleware). He is currently the guy in this area at OPNET with their Panorama product.

If you have a multi-tier application (and who doesn’t today) and are running into performance issues, you need to give Jon and his team a call. He shared with me some of the work he has been doing in this area with clients, and the advances that he has been involved with in this area since we last worked together are amazing.

He showed me some of the capabilities that Panorama and the OPNET technologies have, and my jaw kept hitting the floor. With Panorama, he showed me how the tool can display the communication between each tier in a multi-tiered application, drill into the part of the communication that is causing the most latency, and then pinpoint the source of that latency within the multi-tiered environment. Like that wasn’t enough, he then combined the Panorama capabilities with ACE to then predict what would happen to the application’s performance if various changes were made to the network environment. Like what would happen if you added a firewall and only 1ms of latency between a Java application server and a database?

Jon and I were involved with building some of the early capabilities for a tool in this area at Resonate before the company was acquired and taken private. The recording, playback and predictive simulation capabilities of the tools that Jon has been involved with building at OPNET are mind blowing compared to what we were working on eight years ago! While I haven’t been involved in this space for a few years, I also know that I haven’t seen anything that comes close to the capabilities of the combined OPNET solutions.

While this tool may not work for everyone, OPNET’s Panorama is definitely one of those hidden gems of the technology world that should be considered by anyone responsible for application performance tuning.

My Coffee Cup Is Talking To Me

March 17, 2007 Leave a Comment

This morning I went to my neighborhood mega-corp coffee shop (they get enough press the way it is, so I’ll give you three guesses to figure out who I’m talking about…and the first two don’t count.) I was having a nice relaxing coffee with my wife and our dog, when all of a sudden my coffee cup started talking to me!

I thought that what is had to say was important enough and relevant enough that I wanted to share it with you. Here is what my coffee cup said to me:

The Way I See It #225 (…figured it out yet?)
“People don’t read enough. And what reading we do is cursory, without absorbing the subtleties and nuances that lie deep within — Wow, you’ve stopped paying attention, haven’t you? People can’t even read a coffee cup without drifting off.”-David Shore
Creator and executive producer of the television drama House.

I find this relevant because I have spent the past 6 months in deeper exploration and participation of the blogosphere…man do I hate that term…the world of self-published content. What I find so interesting about this world is the same thing that most professional journalists originally complained about: the lack of depth within the majority of content.

How many blogs have you gone to where the majority of the postings are just a few sentences that refer you to another posting. Recycled content with no added value. There is nothing wrong with pointing your readers to something that you find interesting, but explain what and why you find it interesting, don’t just say “this was cool…” and provide a link. I don’t even bother looking at, let alone reading or even scanning, blogs like that. That’s the quickest way to get me to unsubscribe from their feed.

This makes me think of a new social phenomenon that I have seen mentioned a lot lately…Twitter. Think of it as a micro-blogging service where you are forced to do short content with the goal of explaining what you are doing right now. Interesting social experiment, but I find it difficult to finding adequate time to write up the items that I really find interesting for here. I also am finding it harder and harder to have large blocks of concentration time to work on items. The last think I need is to break my time up into smaller chucks so I can tell the world what I just did (or didn’t do). Again, what is the value in snippets of thought or meaningless comments about “having lunch with my Grandma”? (Yes, that last one was pulled right from the Twitter website as I write this).

The English language is a wonderful tool that is full of subtleties and nuances that seem to have gotten lost in today’s world. I agree with the Professional Organization of English Majors that we are facing a shortage in this world. Did you see the nuance and subtle reference in that last sentence? As an English Minor, I put it there on purpose. I know that my co-worker would have caught it. The joy of working with him is the nuance and subtleties that he weaves into our every day interaction with clients and co-workers. Granted, being a film major I don’t always catch all the obscure references..but I appreciate knowing that their there. It’s one of the joys of the job. Something akin to the way Gail Wynand would write a world changing editorial on the fly.

I have seen comments in the technology trade rags stating that blogging will start to decline. That we have hit a wall on volume of self-publishing content. I sure hope not. I see self-publishing as a great way to leverage the true spirit and potential of the internet. The challenge that we all face is to not fall into the trap of condensing everything down so it can be easily consumed, turning it into just another puff of air into the hype balloon, and using it to drive readership for an increase in advertising revenue. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem in monetizing your self-publishing to help you pay the bills, I’m a firm believer in needing multiple streams of income in today’s world. But don’t minimize the value in your self-publishing for this return.

I hope to see us use the self-publishing infrastructure to unlock the creativity and greatness that we all have locked inside of us. As I had mentioned in a previous posting, just keep your critical thinking cap on so you can see the true greatness through the rhetoric and propaganda.

That is, unless you’ve already drifted off…