Hey, You!
Maby you want to create a more productive work environment. Maby you are astounded by the volume of applications created for systems like facebook, the iPhone, Unity, Flash.
Maby you are just disgusted by the volume of flash games out there compared to the volume of apps that actually help people be more productive, accomplish goals.
Maby a new mental model will help.
Think of these systems as a riverbed, and the applications in them are like water.
and everything that has gone before is like Henry Ford’s factor pumping out Model Ts.
HUH?
Is this just meaningless new age drivel? This blog author hopes not.
How can there be 10s of thousands of apps for the iphone, facebook etc. etc. without having thousands of programmers in huge buildings managed by an army of MBAs? The average iPhone app looses money. How can this be? Has everyone gone crazy? It is not sustainable!
Well, I believe there may be a “philosophical” description that sets Facebook, Flash, iPhone, apart from what has come before.
These new systems are more like a riverbed, which allows water to, easily and quickly, flow toward it’s own natural and desired destination.
Is a riverbed a thing?
What if we can not know, ahead of time, what people’s expectations will be? How do we make products and services that will exceed something we can not know before we begin product development?
Well, don’t make a thing, do not make a product. Make something that lets other people make products and services. This is not a new idea. Many names have been given to these type of things: Platforms, Enablers, Frameworks. Regardless of the name, they are systems for allowing the mass production of NON identical items in an environment DEVOID of requirements. “It must run on the iPhone” and purchased through the app store is NOT a Functional requirement.
Apple and Nike are not cool
They “enable” cool.
I know I’ll take a lot of flack, but I say even Apple and Nike do not make cool. It is the people, the community, especially the prosumers that make Apple, Nike, Burton, all the rest. Snowboard, skateboard, marketeers have know this for decades. It is what prosumers do with produce that makes something cool. That is how Apple and Nike get to be seen as cool.
The tyranny of requirements
“You find a need, and you create a business to fill that need” the old saying goes. It is the basic, fundamental, notion behind traditional business development. If someone has defined a need, that implies there has already been a situation that has been unresolved, or not satisfactorily resolved. “I needed to do X and I couldn’t” or “Y took me 7 hours which meant I could not do Z”. If we just look at needs we form requirements that make what we do faster and easier.
Pot scrubbers where invented to make cleaning faster. Dishwashers where invented by someone who answered the question “I expect someone to invent a machine to do it for me”. This is a well known, understood and discussed result, many texts on usability and design make this point.
Exceeding expectations would be inventing an eating method that does not require cleaning (Do paper plates qualify?)
It has been discovered that discovering underlying expectations, and exceeding them, leads to not only new products, but whole new industries.
Don’t touch that
The simplicity and rich feature sets provided by platforms such as Facebook, iPhone, Unity, increases productivity, and lowers the barrier to entry for all developers. Just like the PC had a much lower barrier of entry compared to Mainframes. This benifits internally developed apps(from the developer of the platform) as well as externally developed apps. The focus on simplicity also allows for high levels of automation. For apple, facebook, myspace, xbl, mixi, content is more like a river that flows through the streambed they have built.
I would compare it to a more traditional model that treats content more like cars through a factory. A factory produces a large number of individual items, all of the automation touches every part of every car made. The automation allows for a large number of cars to be made. Industrialization allows for a lower barrier, and higher volumes than building the products one by one. But it has it does have its limits.
In an industrial model, the creation of individual products is highly automated. This insures consistent product quality, and a relatively high rate of production. As long as each object is identical, and the requirements of each object is known ahead of time. Even with high levels of automation each individual component of each product is touched by the automation several times during the process. This inherently limits the potential output as well as limits the ability for external collaboration(Since the producing organization has to own and centrally house all the automation).
Don’t Require anything
As mentioned above, product produced through an industrial process have to be specified up front. Each component of a product must be completely understood so it can be manufactured. These specifications stem from Requirements. Every industrial process produces products or components “To customer specifications” or “conform to customer requirements”.
How many social iphone apps, do you think, where developed based on requirements? Did someone say “I require an application that lets me make shooty noises with my mobile phone”
Conversely how does the legacy industrial system deal with requirements like “I want it to be cool”?
So What?
So if you want to replicate what Apple, Facebook, or other like companies have done, there are some things you need to do:
Realize you are enabling others to achieve their goals and desires. What you create is something that enables others to achieve their goals, not yours
It has to be simple, from every angle. Simple to use, simple to develop for. Don’t bind it up in corporate IP protection contractual obligations
It has to be compelling. People have to want to user your system to achieve their goals. if they don’t want to use your system, they will do it some other way, or not at all.
It has to be automated. Armies of people can not create and operate these systems, the model just breaks down. Every time someone involved with your platform has to touch something, like 3rd party content, it reduces your ability to scale, as well as limits everyone ability to contribute.
it has to be focused on the public. This does not really mean a public web site, but that the development and operational environments are focused on the end user/end developer, the public. Having individuals and organizations striving to meet internal goals are actually counter productive. (A great example is having an Entertainment companies IT department report to the CFO rather than report to the producer or the head of product development)
