The Holistic Web

I bumped into this oldish post on Wants make the world go ’round … saleswise.

You can’t sell the features … you can sell the feeling that will come after the purchase.

How true that is.

An excerpt from an article about the limitations of transistor technology:

Mr Rattner says that when the first 22 nm silicon chips appear - just two chip generations out - it will prompt a generation of single-system chips that make it easier to interact with technology.

“We are right at the start of the information age. We think we are so sophisticated with our hand-held devices and internet access. But we have asked an enormous amount from users to tolerate - why is it that my mother-in-law calls me up and says ‘I’ve got this error 22 message’?

“How do we soften those interfaces and make them more human? That’s a very important next step. We are in that era of technology where we start to move away from machine imposed limitations.

We seem to have so much innovation in technology, a reasonable amount in business model (eg Google Adwords is an innovative business model) and so little in usability.

I had a play with an iPhone the other day. I went in skeptical, but came away impressed. Feature wise, it’s no better than other products, but the usability is just staggering.
My Motorola phone can play MP3s, take photos and videos, etc. Yet, it only lets me store about 30 SMS messages! I’m sure some engineer from Motorola would say, “ahhh, but there’s a good reason for that” and give some very good rant about standards/technical architecture/etc. The iPhone shows all your SMSs - in a threaded conversation window! So, Motorola (and Nokia, etc), you keep your good reasons, and I’ll seriously think about buying an iPhone. I’m not a fan of Apple as a company, but with their continued UI innovations I’ll probably end up as a customer anyway.
A project I’m working on is an overhaul of a large website, including all aspects - technology, content, usability, design, process, etc. I’m test things as simple as the words used to describe things and finding dramatic changes in usability. The section called “IT and Communications”? Uhhh, how about “Computers and Phones”? This isn’t just my opinion, I have hard data that shows these subtle changes make significant productivity differences.

A lot of techies say “oh, I am user centric! I always do what I think is for the user”. This is not what’s best for the user. You are probably the single worst person to decide, as you are close to the project and an atypical user. Intuitive designs are almost never intuitive to those making them.
I once had a chat over coffee with Gerry McGovern and spoke to him about usability challenges on a site I had. I said “hey, about some surveys? Some sophisticated web analytics analysis? Rate this page function?” etc. Gerry say there and nodded slowly, thought for a second, and in his soft Irish accent said “why don’t you ask them?”

It seems pithy and not very practical, but think about it for a while. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I see truth in it.

Please, no more Error 22 messages either, ok?

I didn’t get twitter at first, but now that I have a few (not many) friends there it’s starting to make sense, and the IM integration is really nice.

So I’ve been thinking about it lately, and wondering, is anyone out there doing micro-newsletters?

What I mean is rather than the normal predictable one long email a week style newsletter, just a regular feed of information via twitter.

“Cool event on next Tuesday for developers in Sydney, come along and find out more about product X, http://somesite.com”

“Awesome - we just got the latest widgets in stock for only $20! They’ll probably sell out soon, grab one now! http://someshop.com”

That sort of thing. It’s just as trackable as email newsletters, the same principles more or less apply. It’s much cheaper as well.

Is anyone trying this, or know of anyone who is? Any stories to report?

Oh, and add me to your twitter friends if you want: http://twitter.com/markbaa.

I posted a while ago about me dumping Outlook for Gmail for domains. It’s a decision I haven’t regretted for a second, in fact, I now found Outlook really clunky to use and makes me feel “claustrophobic” for want of a better word as it’s restricted to one computer. Yes, there’s OWA and hosted exchange solutions, but they are more expensive and still not as good in my opinion.

Now, Google have launched Google Apps Premier Edition. It’s a hosted version of Google’s word processor and spreadsheet for business, $50/user/year. If Microsoft isn’t very worried then they aren’t paying attention.

The most common response I’ll get to this is “bah! They don’t have a quarter of the functionality of Word/Excel”. And no, they don’t. A book was written a few years ago called “The Innovators Dilemma”. It talked about the upstart of new technologies. An example given was steam ships. In the early days, they were slow, unreliable and generally not great. The sail ship people laughed. “Bah! They will never replace our ships”. And initially they didn’t. What they did do is find a niche, as paddle steamers on rivers. That gave them time to slowly but surely improve, and if you don’t know how the story ends take a drive down to your nearest port. There are dozens and dozens of cases like this. Google Apps in my mind is a text book example. It’s not as good, but it has some unique features - the collaboration abilities leave Microsoft Office for dead. For that niche for who collaboration is most important than features, they’ll run to it. And, over time, features will be added. There’s a good chance it will never be as good as Office. One day though, people will look at it and say “hey, that’s good enough for me”. Then, goodbye to Microsoft’s biggest cash cow, Office (last I heard, Office makes more money than Windows).

It’s not too late for them, but if Microsoft’s history is any sign, they’ll do a half baked “me too” offering too late and not pay enough attention to it.

Sorry, Microsoft, you had a good run.

It’s well known that last minute offers/time limited deals have a positive effect on conversions. It’s old news to marketers. Give people a deadline and they respond. The annoying TV ads “…but buy in the next 30 minutes and get a free set of steak knives…” are designed to compel you to buy now.

Dell have been doing this for ages. They have special deals (”buy in the next 2 days and get double the RAM”). They presumably work, Dell are too smart to keep doing something that doesn’t work. Their offers are probably genuine in that they do keep changing, even if there will be another similarly good offer next week.

I saw something which is a little more suspect recently. The site of a webhosting company (I won’t mention their name, but they aren’t small) have:

One Time $19.95 Setup
WAIVED - Offer expires end of today 2/8/2007

Here’s the catch. Yesterday they had the exact same message - with yesterday’s date. I can bet I know what I’ll see there tomorrow.

Does it increase conversions? Probably. Is it ethical to lie about the offer expiry date? I dunno.

Well, I don’t post directly about specific projects very often on my blog, but I do sometimes, and this is just such an occasion.

I’ve been working on and off for about 3 or 4 months on a little project that’s just gone live - http://techtalkblogs.com. At the risk of blowing my own trumpet, the idea was mostly mine (in a brain storm session Frank and I had), and I managed the bulk of the project, together with the wonderful Lena & Matt at Wunderman, and Nick from Procuity who did a superb job coding the aggregator under a horrible time line.

There’s a whole lotta stuff that we wanted in there that didn’t make it for various reasons (timelines & budget mostly), and a bunch more ideas we’ve had since playing with it, but maybe we’ll pull some money together for a 2.0.

Get in there, start voting! The more people vote, the better it works.

As is no doubt appearing on many blogs, I have some invites for Windows Live Messenger Beta (AKA MSN Messenger 8.0). If you want one, please let me know. I’ve been running it for a few weeks. Fundamentally it’s nice, although I think there’s quite a few UI issues to work through. Anyway, 10 invites up for grabs.

John Perry Barlow of the EFF & the Grateful Dead (what an odd mix!) reportedly once said:

The Web sees censorship as damage, and routes around it.

I love it.

So, Ray Ozzie sent a memo about becoming a services company.

I know Microsoft has transformed themselves before, but this time, I dunno. The quote that jumped out at me:

Only a few years ago I’d have pointed to the Weblog and the Wiki as significant emerging trends; by now they’re mainstream and have moved into the enterprise

The problem is that Microsoft has a lot of traditional people. I guarantee that at least half, probably more like 70 or 80% of Microsoft employees couldn’t tell you what a Wiki is, don’t know what an RSS aggregator is, and probably are only vaguely aware of blogs. Embracing these doesn’t require a new marketing campaign, it requires a whole new way of marketing, a whole new way of thinking about business.

This will be interesting to watch.

Edit: oh, and if you are wondering what “a whole new way of marketing” is about, check out this previous post for a good primer.

I generally don’t talk specifics about work, especially about previous employers. However, this is an issue which I think many people are curious about and which I have a fairly unique perspective on. A bit of background: I spent about 3 years managing http://www.microsoft.com.au, which involved a lot of interaction with the Microsoft.com team in Redmond, and also spent 2 years working for MSN, half of that as lead developer for 24 of the MSN sites globally. So, I have a good perspective of Microsoft and the web. There is no bad blood between Microsoft and me, if the right opportunity presented itself, I would consider returning, and presumably that is reciprocated as I have received numerous offers since leaving.

Let’s get the rumours out of the way: there is nothing malicious, evil or anti-competitive going on. I have never heard anyone talking about, “sabotaging” non-Microsoft browsers. The rumours about MSN deliberately sabotaging Opera aren’t true, I know that team. Opera was such a tiny percentage of visitors that it simply didn’t make the test matrix and the problem was a bug.

That said, the vast majority of Microsoft sites (including MSN) are poorly coded and have poor standards support. Why is this, especially as Microsoft has in the last week released the latest version of Visual Studio which has “…clean HTML editing, including XHTML 1.1 support”?

I think there’s a few key reasons:

• Education: the argument for supporting web standards isn’t immediately apparent, and moving to web standards isn’t a trivial job. Why do it when there’s so much else to be done? More about this later.
• Background: many of the developers come from an applications development background. Applications development is a different paradigm from web development, and many of the developers don’t have a web mentality that embraces the choice of different browsers. For them, developing on IE is like developing on Windows - it’s a platform choice. For a web developer, the web is the platform, and a browser is a different way to access that platform.
• Education: learning standards based web development is significantly different from “traditional” web coding and has a steep learning curve. Without the skills, both the willingness and ability to execute is lowered.
• Priority: there’s no perceived pressing need. When you have vice presidents, or higher, jumping on your back demanding you get project X out the door yesterday, standards development is secondary.
• Legacy: there is so much back end code which needs to be changed, and so many users of that code all using it in different ways, the task of migrating is frankly daunting. It’s made harder as there is an enormous number of people working on the site (globally, including agencies, it would be well over 1,000) and the site is essentially decentralised - making universal change on the site is like herding cats. While that is a good excuse for a slow migration, it’s not an excuse for no migration.

So, for those reading from Microsoft.com (hi Olivier), why should you bother? The reasons are both technical and political. I’ll start with the technical reasons:

• Improved maintainability: updating sites which are CSS based is a joy. It’s easy to do, quick and cheap.
• Browser support: with a standards based site, the vast majority of browsers will work. With Microsofts focus on developers and IT Pros, who also happen to be the audience most widely embracing alternative browsers (and I’ve seen the stats - firefox usage on Microsoft.com is significant), ignoring these people, or giving them a second rate experience, harms you far more than them.
• Reduced bandwidth: standards based sites tend to be smaller and load & render faster.
• Improved accessibility: frankly, I don’t know how Microsoft.com has escaped the accessibility wagon for so long. I’m not saying the whole site ignores it, but it’s certainly not given the priority that I believe a leading company should give it. Accessibility is easier in standards based sites. With accessibility starting to become a legal issue, change is inevitable.

Some of the political reasons are:

• Catching up: I’d like to say leadership, but it’s too late to be a leader. The least you can do is play catch up on the standards trend.
• Dogfood: Microsoft has a great history of eating its own dogfood. Yet with Visual Studio 2005 and it great standards support out now (and not before time!), and IE7 on the way which allegedly will have good standards support, where is the dogfood? Where are the ASP.NET 2.0 XHTML 1.1 sites?
• Being seen as a player: Microsoft is starting to embrace standards, and is certainly trying to project this image. Why not do it on your own website?

Get someone to plan it. Evangelise it. To help work it into the product plans for each product under development. To advise people on pitfalls and benefits. To develop strategies for global adoption. To make it happen. I lead a team just before I left to make the Microsoft Australia homepage an example of best practice (yes, I know about the 2 validation errors, it is a platform limitation I’m afraid), and to show what can be done (and no, this isn’t a blatant pitch for work). It was a steep learning curve, but one of the things I’m most proud of in my time there. Give yourself the opportunity to take the technical & moral high ground.

I’d love to hear from people, especially standards specialists (which I am not) and Microsoft.com people (which I am also not) about what you think about this. Am I off course? Missing a point? Inaccurate? Too preachy? Comments are enabled - let’s hear what you have to say.