I went to an blogging event a few weeks back that was organized by a computer, I got an invitation from http://blog.meetup.com/ to go to a social gathering of local fellow bloggers. I was curious - mostly because I was looking for free technical advice from some more experienced bloggers, and also to see if how the actual beings compared to their blog sites - so of which were quite hip and trendy. So I went to http://blog.meetup.com/ and RSVP to the meeting, voted online for which local venue I want go to. I picked the Jupiter Cafe just off Davie because it was the closest to my domicile - and then for the next 3 weeks I got little email reminders to show up for the event and even a request to post a graphic on my website to advertise the blessed event - which I the html-challenged one managed to proudly insert in the blog template after a few misguided attempts...on the http://blog.meetup.com/ site there was (and still is a list of about 30 Vancouverites and links to their blogs)..I visited most just to get a sense of who was hanging around the community. And then on the appointed day I moseyed over to the Jupiter Cafe - with a copy of XML & Web Services Magazine in hand so that I appeared suitably geeky and searched the cavernous lounge for fellow bloggers. I even arrived on time. I'm not one to hold to that social thing of arriving fashionably late..

And to my chagrin, no one showed. Not a single blogger was sighted. I was needless to say quite disappointed and a little miffed that I had been so completely suckered by an automated computer-driven event coordinator. I emailed to a few of the local bloggers to find out if I'd miscued on the time/location, these were folks that were listed on the http://blog.meetup.com/ attendee list - which it turns out was simply a list of all Vancouver-based bloggers - not RSVPers - everyone returned my emails and I had a couple of nice bits of technical advice from a few of them as well. And one of them even said that two bloggers did actually show up and chatted with each other and that I must have missed them.

I am still completely flabbergasted that http://blog.meetup.com/ managed to create the look and feel of a real physical occurrence without involving a single human interaction and I fell for it. Http://blog.meetup.com/ sets up these events all over the world and claims that for this upcoming meetup events which occur worldwide. So far, 2812 bloggers have signed up. I have no idea how many venues that is - but one of them is Vancouver and one of the 2812 is me cause I've signed up again and I'll give it another whirl, but this time I'm emailing around to try and get a few other local bloggers to confirm that they'll show up.

posted by Gorilla ;*) at 10:12 AM

 
{If 1.4 million Canadian homes are wired for high-speed access and more are on the way, that means that outside of the corporate firewall, at least 1.4 million people exist with the capability to easily host a blog or at least have an internet presence if that becomes as simple as AOL to do, why is this important? Because whomever facilitates this process (i.e produces the software, the hosting environment and the branding/marketing/desire) for tools is posed to make a mint..Think of it, if Yahoo/GeoCities can make 30-40 US dollars a month per hosted site, with the crude software tools they have produced, companies that produce tools that are either complete environments (aka AOL-like SDKs) or add ons to sites like Blogger (which can also be seen as a site builder of sorts but really needs a rich-feature set to be consider such) - even theCounter.com are poised to make a mint}

Here's the article that got me going this time:

Tuesday, September 03, 2002
OTTAWA (CP) - More Canadians appear to have been speeding down the Internet highway in 2001, a Statistics Canada survey indicates.

Just under 1.4 million homes subscribed to high-speed Internet by cable as of Aug. 31 last year, up 77 per cent from 2000, the agency said. "This strong growth continued in the latter part of 2001 and the number of subscribers surpassed 1.7 million at the end of the year." The agency also said that while access to high-speed Internet by cable increased substantially, smaller communities were still behind their larger counterparts.

"More than 70 per cent of homes with access to cable in small communities did not have access to high-speed Internet by cable," the agency said.

However, "the rate of adoption of cable Internet also progressed rapidly in communities of all sizes. Overall, almost 15 per cent of homes with access to cable Internet had adopted it as of Aug. 31, 2001."

There were signs that the Internet gap between large and small communities was closing.

"Investments in cable systems serving small communities amounted to $88.5 million in 2001, up from $74.8 million in 2000," the agency said.

By the end of August last year more than 9.4 million homes, or about 85 per cent of those with cable, had access to broadband service, up from 70 per cent a year earlier.


posted by Gorilla ;*) at 9:32 AM

 
September 2, 2002
By BOB TEDECHI

WHEN Saks executives greeted investors with better-than-expected results last month, they made it clear that e-commerce initiatives deserved part of the credit.

But this was not a case of Internet retailing finally catching up to the exaggeration of years past. Rather, it was a testament yet again to the slow, quiet progress of new business technology, which is transforming entire industries one mundane task at a time, far from the view of consumers.

For Saks, one of the accelerants is a system that helps merchants set prices across different stores, or stores in different regions. Like all retailers, Saks faces the problem of deciding when to start marking down items, and at what price, so the company can glean as much profit a sit can, without discounting so early that the company sells out and alienates customers, or so late that the company looks like a museum for unwanted merchandise.

Using systems from a handful of small but fast-growing technology companies, retailers like Saks, ShopKo and Meijer Stores are now making price decisions more scientifically and less by gut instinct. And while this technology has been known to make merchants initially uncomfortable, senior executives are greeting it with much more openness as they see the effects.

"We're excited about this," said Bill Franks, Saks's chief information officer, referring to the system, which he called price optimization technology. "It's not going to change the world, but we've seen very positive results from it."

Mr. Franks said Saks started testing the system in earnest early this year, using technology from Spotlight Solutions, a software vendor based in Cincinnati. That software analyzes sales data from past years and the current selling season, then determines which goods to mark down, at specific prices, and at specific stores. Notably, the system, which delivers its recommendations to merchandising managers over the Internet, also suggests the timing of the markdowns.

"All retailers have a cadence to their clearance process," Mr. Franks said. "You take the first markdown on merchandise, then the second, then you dispose."

The new system, Mr. Franks said, works on the assumption that Saks can achieve a better average sale price across all of its stores if it discounts at different times in different places, depending on Spotlight's recommendations.


Mr. Franks would not quantify the effect precisely, but he indicated the new system is already partly responsible for the improvements in Saks's gross margins and excess inventory levels for the first six months of this year. He said the company would begin rolling out the system – now in a limited, but undisclosed, number of stores. – across all its stores in the near future.

As will others, eventually, said Carrie A. Johnson, an analyst with the technology consultancy Forrester Research. Ms. Johnson said that fewer than 10 percent of retailers were using this technology, despite the fact that they could improve gross margins 10 percent with such systems.

Ms. Johnson said the retailers' sluggishness was not unexpected, given how reluctantly the industry usually approaches new technologies. But she said that as more prominent companies report successes, retail executives would face increasing pressure to look into the software.
This is particularly probable given the softness of the retail market and because clearance goods represent about one-third of a typical retailer's sales, up from single digits in the 1970's.

Price optimization technologies also hold promise for companies that do not mark down goods with the same rhythm as apparel retailers. Companies like ShopKo, Winn Dixie,
Longs Drugs and others are in the midst of rolling out technology that helps them price thousands of different items in their stores on a continuing basis.

But Brent Lippman, chief executive of KhiMetrics, which supplies the pricing software to ShopKo and Winn Dixie, said the technology could, among other things, help set prices on complementary goods - for example, tortilla chips and salsa - and determine how a discount on one item would affect demand for the other.

By tweaking the prices and adjusting for demand, merchants can anticipate profits on products in the system and plan sales accordingly. Mr. Lippman said that one unnamed KhiMetrics client - a food retailer with billions in annual sales - increased gross margins 5 percent in a test last year.

Given the potential savings available to big retailers, technology vendors in this category have been able to extract a premium for their services, with fees ranging from $1 million to $5 million to license and set up the software, depending on the size of the retailer. Those fees also speak to the years of research most of these technology companies invested in their software before attracting their first customers.

David Boyce, vice president for marketing and strategic initiatives of ProfitLogic, which provides pricing software to J. C. Penney and Meijer Stores, among others, said the company developed sales algorithms for retailers like T. J. Maxx and Ann Taylor for 14 years before realizing in 1999 that it could create software from that work and license it to multiple clients.

No matter how much work went into these technologies, though, retail merchandisers have not been quick to cede control over the price-setting process, retail executives and analysts said.

Take Meijer Stores, a closely held general merchandise retailer and grocer with sales of $10 billion last year, which this month begins rolling out pricing technology from
ProfitLogic. One senior merchandising executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said ProfitLogic "really had to make believers of all of us."

The Meijer executive added: "The attitude is, `I'm the buyer. I bought it. It's a great product, and it's got to sell. The weather's got to get colder.' Or pick one of the
100,000 other reasons in your mind not to take a markdown."


Like other retailers using this technology, Meijer gave its merchants the option to accept or reject the system's recommendation. If, for example, the merchant knows a cold wave is about to hit, he would delay marking down warm-weather apparel or discounting soup too drastically.
Such second-guessing aside, Meijer's merchandisers relied on the pricing system enough over a year-long testing period to glean 10 percent in gross margin improvements.

Mr. Franks of Saks said entire categories of items would be exempted from the price recommendation system since, for example, "a lot of the designer merchandise" is so unusual that it would be difficult for the software to accurately predict pricing and demand. But, he said, a "significant portion" of the company's merchandise would be covered.

While pricing technologies have worked well for mainstream and discount retailers, "This hasn't really been tried in the upper end of the marketplace," Mr. Franks said. "We proved it works there, as well."

Meanwhile, consumers need not worry that the trend will result in fewer bargains to pick through. Although the technology could, in fact, lead to fewer racks of clearance items at the end of a season, executives said their customers might see discounts earlier than usual – and bigger discounts, at that.

from the nytimes

posted by Gorilla ;*) at 9:30 AM

 

I had some further confirmation from a series of articles that appeared in the New York Times this week on my theories about the importance of building communities for your products and on the power of language to move a market. All products should come from a community need, do your market research before building with your so-called great new technology widget, make sure somebody wants what you are building and is willing to pay for it. But as McKean points out, a Big Mac is no longer just a hamburger, it is a piece of McDonalds corporate culture, and lives in the community of McBabys that feed on it. The Fringe built the internet, the rest of us are just exploiting it - to build communities for our McBabies. Got to love how Watts Wacker manages to make a living telling us what we already know..

Neologizing 101
By Erin McKean
Words failing you? Why not create your own?
Click here visit Nytimes.com and read the whole story
The Fringe Is Full of Ideas
By William J. Holstein
How business ideas move from the edge to the mainstream is
the subject of an intriguing new book, "The Deviant's
Advantage: How Fringe Ideas Create Mass Markets."
Click here visit Nytimes.com and read the whole story
Watts Wacker, co-author of "The Deviant's Advantage," argues
that top executives can build corporate cultures that are
open to innovative ideas.
Click here visit Nytimes.com and read the whole story
or read the book The Deviant's Advantage: How Fringe Ideas Create Mass Markets
posted by Gorilla ;*) at 9:00 AM

 
{ To learn more about the origins of blogging, check out Our Blog Focus Area Resources

{The article is promoting a course taught by the author's boss Jonn Batelle, co-founder of Wired magazine - talk about using the medium to promote yourself, eh? }

By Noah Shachtman for wired.com

Click here visit wired.com and read the whole story

June 6, 2002
One of the country's most respected training grounds for professional reporters has become the first school to offer a class on the 21st century symbol of do-it-yourself journalism.

Next fall, a handful of students at the University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism will convene weekly to learn about blogging from John Batelle, a co-founder of Wired magazine, and Paul Grabowicz, the school's new media program director.

Students will create a weblog devoted to copyright issues, from "deep-linking" to online music trading. They'll also debate whether blogs are "a sensible medium for doing journalism, and what does that mean?" said Grabowicz, who contributes to the Poynter Institute's online media blog.

(A blog is, to oversimplify, a constantly updated combination of diary and link collection.)

The Berkeley class on blogging is the latest in a series of signs that the media establishment is starting to warm up to what was long seen as legitimate journalism's loud-mouthed kid sister.

MSNBC, for example, recently joined Fox News, Slate, the San Jose Mercury News and others by adding blogs to its website.

"This means that professional journalists aren't just poking at bloggers like creatures in a zoo cage -- they're in the cage themselves," said John Hiler, editor of Microcontent News, a site keeping tabs on the blogging world.

But the new embrace is making many bloggers squirm.

"Mark my words, this (Berkeley class) is going to be the Altamont of the blogging movement," Sean Kirby posted on the Daily Pundit blog.

He added in an e-mail, "Teaching of blogging in journalism school signals an end of an era, a movement from blogging being separate from the old media, to it being appropriated by the media establishment."

To Jonathon Delacour, this establishment treats bloggers like a "vast pool of unpaid researchers who do a lot of leg work while the journalist gets the kudos in mainstream society and gets paid."

Added Delacour, whose site covers, in a single day, everything from the World Cup to XML to Mahayana Buddhism, "It's a master-servant relationship."

For some in the mainstream press, the sour feelings are mutual. To these traditional reporters, like the Boston Globe's Alex Beam, blogs are an "infinite echo chamber of self-regard," as he wrote in a recent column, "(a) medium where no thought goes unpublished, no long-out-of-print book goes unhawked, and no fellow 'blogger,' no matter how outré, goes unpraised."

Despite this, a number of schools, including USC's Annenberg School for Communication, will include blogging in their online journalism classes in the fall. And senior bloggers, like Dave Winer and Ken Layne, have recently given talks both Cal and Stanford.

Teachers at every level from elementary school to MBA are trying to bring blogs into their classrooms. They're finding the most success when they use the blog as a "classroom management tool" ­-- a way to broadcast homework assignments, keep parents informed, and provide links to research materials, said Sarah Lohnes, an educational technology specialist at Middlebury College in Vermont.

But efforts to get students to participate in classroom blogs have, for the most part, fallen flat.

Contributing to the blog will be required in Grabowicz's Berkeley class.

And students won't be allowed to just submit "a list of links that some bot could generate." Nor can it "degenerate into 'my personal feelings,' which is not professional journalism," Grabowicz said.

The intellectual-property issues the Berkeley class will try to sift through are particularly important to the blogging community, because a weblog site's combination of liberally used links and off-the-cuff commentary make it a juicy target for corporate lawsuits.

"We're probably only six months away from seeing a blogger served with a libel lawsuit," Microcontent News' Hiler said.

But despite the timeliness of the issues, many bloggers are wondering whether their craft can be taught in journalism school at all.

Ken Layne, blogger and veteran Los Angeles journalist, said the course "sounds useful," but "it will have to be the complete opposite of the J-school learning process, which works at a snail's pace. You can't sit around talking ethics before typing a line."

Will Richardson, who runs a website chronicling the use of blogs in the classroom, added, "Do they need it to train professional journalists? I don't know about that."

posted by Gorilla ;*) at 2:35 PM

 
Click here to go to an online Glossary of New Product Development Terms

Acknowledgment: Some of the definitions for terms in this glossary have been adapted from the glossary in New Products Management, by C. Merle Crawford and C. Anthony Di Benedetto. Terms, phrases, and definitions generously have been contributed to this list by the PDMA Board of Directors, the editors and authors of The PDMA ToolBook for New Product Development (John Wiley & Sons, 2002), the editors and authors of The PDMA Handbook of New Product Development (John Wiley & Sons, 1996) and several other individuals knowledgeable in the science, skills and art of new product development. We thank all of these volunteer contributors for their continuing support.

posted by Gorilla ;*) at 4:04 PM

 
Fortune - because you gotta keep up

strategy+business - Booz Allen Hamilton's magazine

the NY Times Sunday Edition..read it all week long..

The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive by Patrick M. Lencioni - an easy weekend read, with a few nuggets of wisdom..read it in 3 hours while tanning on the deck..then give it to your CEO

posted by Gorilla ;*) at 11:27 AM

 
Safire on Blogging

ON LANGUAGE
Blog
By WILLIAM SAFIRE


In an upbeat Independence Day column in The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan, the incurable optimist, wrote about all ''the lights that didn't fail'' America -- from cops and firemen to peach-growing farmers and cancer-curing scientists, from local churches to TV comedians to blogging.

Blogging? She explained the word as ''the 24/7 opinion sites that offer free speech at its straightest, truest, wildest, most uncensored, most thoughtful, most strange. Thousands of independent information entrepreneurs are informing, arguing, adding information.''

Blog is a shortening of Web log. It is a Web site belonging to some average but opinionated Joe or Josie who keeps what used to be called a ''commonplace book'' -- a collection of clippings, musings and other things like journal entries that strike one's fancy or titillate one's curiosity. What makes this online daybook different from the commonplace book is that this form of personal noodling or diary-writing is on the Internet, with links that take the reader around the world in pursuit of more about a topic.

To set one up (which I have not done because I don't want anyone to know what I think), you log on to a free service like blogger.com or xanga.com, fill out a form and let it create a Web site for you. Then you follow the instructions about how to post your thoughts, photos and clippings, making you an instant publisher. You then persuade or coerce your friends, family or colleagues to log on to you and write in their own loving or snide comments.

''Will the blogs kill old media?'' asked Newsweek, an old-media publication, perhaps a little worried about this disintermediation leading to an invasion of alien ad-snatchers. My answer is no; gossips like an old-fashioned party line, but most information seekers and opinion junkies will go for reliable old media in zingy new digital clothes. Be that as it may (a phrase to avoid the voguism that said), the noun blog is a useful addition to the lexicon.

Forget its earliest sense, perhaps related to grog, reported in 1982 in The Toronto Globe and Mail as ''a lethal fanzine punch concocted more or less at random out of any available alcoholic beverages.'' The first use I can find of the root of blog in its current sense was the 1999 ''Robot Wisdom Weblog,'' created by Jorn Barger of Chicago.

Then followed bloggers, for those who perform the act of blogging and -- to encompass the burgeoning world of Web logs -- blogistan as well as the coinage of William Quick on the blog he calls The Daily Pundit, the blogosphere. Sure to come: the blogiverse.


posted by Gorilla ;*) at 12:18 PM

 
Nothing but Net
Future Tense: 802.11b Wireless Networking Technology

by Alison Overholt
from FC issue 51, page 136

Dan Meiron was online from his Sony VAIO notebook computer when I walked into his office. Nothing unusual there -- as an associate provost at the California Institute of Technology, Meiron oversees everything from student Internet connections to the networking of the campus's libraries and research facilities. One thing about his laptop was noteworthy, however: There were no cords connecting it to the Net.

"This administration building was one of the first places that we networked with 802.11b wireless coverage," says Meiron. "It has made an enormous difference in meetings and conferences. Someone will say, 'I wish I could show you my data,' and they'll realize that they can."

802.11b -- also called "Wi-Fi," for "wireless fidelity" -- is the networking technology that is making the promise of ubiquitous Internet connectivity seem close at hand. Universities have been early adopters. And such companies as Starbucks and Starwood Hotels are implementing projects to network customer areas for Wi-Fi access, with several airport lounges and frequent-flier clubs soon to follow.

The attraction of Wi-Fi is its simplicity. Any location that is already wired for Ethernet access can be turned into a wireless area network simply by plugging a Wi-Fi network-access point into the existing jack. Obtaining the hardware is as easy as driving to a computer superstore: Apple Computer, Cisco Systems, IBM, Intel, Lucent, and Texas Instruments all produce Wi-Fi products. As prices for components continue to fall, Wi-Fi will become more accessible. Meiron estimates that Caltech spent around $2,000 per installed access point. Using approximately 15 access points to cover a building, Caltech would be able to network all of its 100 campus buildings for no more than $3 million. "There is so much that teachers and students could do if they could access real data right there in class," Meiron says.

Business users are discovering the same thing. Although many companies may decide that people don't need roaming Internet access within and around their buildings, some employees are taking things into their own hands, purchasing individual network-access points and cards and creating their own Wi-Fi networks. Frequent travelers who depend on easy access to their corporate networks will welcome Wi-Fi access in airports and hotels. Free agents, long accustomed to using the local cafe as an office, will welcome Wi-Fi Internet access alongside their morning lattes.


posted by Gorilla ;*) at 9:31 AM

 
Building Strong Brands by David Aaker
Strategic Brand Management
The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding:How to Build a Product or Service into a World-Class Brand
The End of Marketing as we Know it by Sergio Zyman
Kotler on Marketing: How to Create, Win and Dominate Markets
Customers.com: How to Create a Profitable Business Strategy for the Internet and Beyond
Eating the Big Fish : How Challenger Brands Can Compete Against Brand Leaders

from Careers in Marketing: Product Management > Overview
posted by Gorilla ;*) at 5:12 PM

 
Product Management: Overview
Product managers are responsible for the marketing and development of products such as sports cars, insurance policies, and sporting goods. Product managers are both strategic and tactical.
Strategic because they responsible for positioning a product, assessing the competition and thinking about the future.
Tactical because they are in the field developing appropriate promotional campaigns, talking to reps about what customers want and think and doing the day-to-day sales tracking that's required for any major product category.
Product management professionals are excited about their ability to manage and strengthen brands. They are at the vortex of company life because their decisions directly affect the success of a business. from Careers in Marketing: Product Management > Overview
posted by Gorilla ;*) at 5:08 PM

 
Yawning is incredibly contagious. I made some of you reading this yawn simply by writing the word "yawn". The people who yawned when they saw you yawn, meanwhile, were infected by the sight of you yawning--which is a second kind of contagion. They might even have yawned if they only heard you yawn, because yawning is also aurally contagious: if you play an audio-tape of a yawn to blind people, they'll yawn too. And finally, if you yawned as you read this, did the thought cross your mind--however unconsciously and fleetingly--that you might be tired? I suspect that for some of you it did, which means that yawns can also be emotionally contagious. Simply by writing the word, I can plant a feeling in your mind. Can the flu virus do that? Contagiousness, in other words, is an unexpected property of all kinds of things, and we have to remember that if we are to recognize and diagnose epidemic change. from gladwell dot com / books / THINKING ABOUT YAWNS

buy the book The Tipping Point





posted by Gorilla ;*) at 10:06 AM

 
A blog is a web page made up of usually short, frequently updated posts that are arranged chronologically—like a what's new page or a journal. The content and purposes of blogs varies greatly—from links and commentary about other web sites, to news about a company/person/idea, to diaries, photos, poetry, mini-essays, project updates, even fiction.

Blogs posts are like instant messages to the web.

Many blogs are personal, "what's on my mind" type musings. Others are collaborative efforts based on a specific topic or area of mutual interest. Some blogs are for play. Some are for work. Some are both.

Blogs are also excellent team/department/company/family communication tools. They help small groups communicate in a way that is simpler and easier to follow than email or discussion forums. Use a private blog on an intranet to allow team members to post related links, files, quotes, or commentary. Set up a family blog where relatives can share personal news. A blog can help keep everyone in the loop, promote cohesiveness and group culture, and provide an informal "voice" of a project or department to outsiders.

posted by Gorilla ;*) at 6:20 PM

 
I'm blogging because my website lacked any relevance to what I preach. I read dozens of books, articles, web-zines and sites everyday; I distill them into rants that I then preach to my clients and help them implement. I actually do more than rant, I implement these things that I preach - like creating effective websites, using every low-cost means to reach your existing and potential client base - and BLOGGING is one of them. So here I am after trying out several blogging possibilities - I've settled on using blogger pro - and I'm recreating the content from my old website and moving into the land of Blog. It allows me to post articles, news, references quickly and adds a level of currency to my website that didn't formerly exist..

This is my idea - if I can run my site from a cheap host (yahoo) and use blogging to create a professional-looking website that people actually read and that I can feel comfortable represents who i am and what i do - and that this web site causes other people to be inspired to use my services (i.e. revenue) - then 'blogging' will be added to my list of effective techniques for building a web presence and creating brand recognition..so let the experiment begin...
posted by Gorilla ;*) at 5:06 PM

 
UserLand Offers Headlines From NYTimes.com

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 10, 2002--NYTimes.com announced today that it had reached an agreement with UserLand Software to distribute content from NYTimes.com to the network of Radio UserLand 8.0 desktop content management users. This new feature allows New York Times links to flow, with reader annotation, through the growing network of "Weblog" sites published with Radio 8.


posted by Gorilla ;*) at 3:40 PM

 

Blogging. The 24-7 opinion sites that offer free speech at its straightest, truest, wildest, most uncensored, most thoughtful, most strange. Thousands of independent information entrepreneurs are informing, arguing, adding information. Imagine if we'd had them in 1776: "As I wrote in yesterday's lead item on SamAdams.com, my well meaning cousin John continues his grammatical nitpicking with Jefferson (link requires registration) 'Inalienable,' 'unalienable,' whatever. Boys, let's fight. Start the war." Blogs may one hard day become clearinghouses for civil support and information when other lines, under new pressure, break down.

from OpinionJournal - Peggy Noonan
posted by Gorilla ;*) at 2:22 PM

 
Interesting insight into MS's Product Development approach..

Excerpt from Article in FORTUNE Monday, July 8, 2002 By Brent Schlender

:
:
When mouthed by a Microsoftie, "scenario" means not merely a real-world setting in which a software feature or capability might come in handy, but how it will change the user's life. Every Microsoft product has its genesis in a list of transformative scenarios.

"The scenario is the dream, not something defined in super-gory detail," says Mundie. "It's what Bill and I focus on more than the business plans or P&Ls. For a project as big as Longhorn, there could have been 100 scenarios, but Bill does this thing with his mind where he distills the list down to a manageable set of factors that we can organize developer groups around." Gates' scenarios usually take the form of surprisingly simple questions that customers might have. Here's a sampling from our interviews:

• Why are my document files stored one way, my contacts another way, and my e-mail and instant-messaging buddy list still another, and why aren't they related to my calendar or to one another and easy to search en masse?

• Why can't my computer protect me from distractions by screening phone calls and e-mails, and why can't it track me down when I'm out of the office or forward things to me automatically?

• Why can't our computers arrange conference calls and online meetings for us?

• Why is it so hard for a soccer mom to set up a simple Website and e-mail group to keep people informed about who's driving and who's bringing treats?

• Why can't I tap into all my stuff at home or at work from any device that's mine, and have it just be available because it knows I'm me?

• Why can't I read digital versions of magazines on my portable computer that look the way they're supposed to look?

And on and on. Gates and his technical assistant, former Stanford researcher Anoop Gupta, boiled such questions down to a final list of ten key Longhorn scenario categories with titles like People, Annotation, Real Time Communications, Storage, Authentication and Security, and New Look, and assigned them to teams of developers and managers drawn from various product groups across the company.

Gates compares all this to building an airplane--a really big airplane. "If you are designing a Cessna, you have five or six guys whose offices are next to each other, and at lunch one guy can say, 'Hey, your thing seems a little heavy. I'm not sure my wings can handle this.' You don't have to have a weight review meeting. Longhorn is more like a 747, and the wing group alone is 500 people who don't have lunch with the fuselage guys, who don't know the engine guys, who don't know the customers."

Gupta and Gates keep tabs on the progress of the Longhorn groups, meeting every six to eight weeks for a couple of hours. The June meeting we sat in on was typical. It involved six top developers of the New Look group, which is devising how people will interact with some of the novel features of the new operating system, in particular its file system for organizing and finding documents. The only "manager" present was the programmers' most direct supervisor.

They convened in a small conference room around the corner from Gates' office. The discussion leader wasn't Bill or even the group's manager, but a developer named Hillel Cooperman. Gates interrupted often with questions, observations, and suggestions like the following:

• I want to make sure that you guys are asking the right questions.You can't ever forget that the No. 1 question we're trying to solve with Longhorn is "Where's my stuff?" Right now, file space on any PC is a cesspool. The file system should be more like e-mail archives, where you can search and sort by any of a number of criteria. And it's got to be snappy as heck.

• I'll give you the philosophy: Everything is just a document, whether it be music or video or e-mail or whatever. Each will have a name and a history, and every user will have his or her favorites.

• If we can get this nailed so that I can find my stuff no matter what device I'm using, I think Longhorn will become a real breakthrough. Everything beyond that is extra credit.

What was Gates' take on the meeting? "There's no grade given. But I just happened to see [Windows group vice president] Jim Allchin later that day and said, 'Hey, this was a great session. Good energy, good thinking,' " he says. "Also, I did clue him in that I didn't need to inject any new ambition into this group."

Mundie has watched Bill in scores of review sessions like this one. Says he: "Bill has three modes in meetings, which you might describe as listening, challenging, and coaching. He's gotten better at coaching in the past couple of years.''

For the whole article goto www.fortune.com


posted by Gorilla ;*) at 9:57 PM

 
Check out this great tool for building Web Services - real-time animation and real easy-to-use - try it out for free @ www.cypresslogic.com

ObjectView™ allows you to import multiple Web services into its unique drag and drop environment with a few clicks of your mouse. Web service components are represented as graphical objects, which you use like building blocks to create complex applications and tools. Your applications and tools can then be deployed as a single Web service to a choice of different platforms.
posted by Gorilla ;*) at 3:49 PM