Wednesday, July 30, 2003

I don't want to spend much time on this now, but there's some good links for me to see later.... ----- Quick, name a person (who doesn't work at Microsoft) who has done the most to change Microsoft's culture and development practices lately. I come up with one name: Alan Cooper. Why do I say that? In many buildings I've visted lately, I see personas posted on the entry halls. Pictures and bios of real (and sometimes fictional) customers. Who was the first person I saw talking about using personas to develop software? Alan Cooper. Quick, look at Outlook and what is one feature that isn't there today that every app in 1990 assumed users needed. A save button. Who was the first to tell the world to get rid of save commands? Alan Cooper (I remember when he first started saying that, too. He was widely derided as a lunatic). Quick, look at Visual Studio. Do you know who came up with the toolbar along the left side that could have things added into it? Alan Cooper. These are things that Alan Cooper pushed long ago. These are things that we almost take for granted now. That said, Chris Sells is one lucky mofo. He got a flying lesson from Alan Cooper and he has a killer video from Alan's son (with help from dad). I gotta say, there aren't many people I'd rather hang out with for a day than Alan Cooper. His outlook on life, and his uncanny ability to find a simpler way to design things, has always inspired me. Not to mention his unbounded joy of talking about software. But, Chris Sells, I got one to make you jealous. I had sushi with Jeff Prosise tonight. The founder of Wintellect, and the nicest software developer you'll ever meet. We have had a deal for years that whenever we're in the same town together, we'll go out for sushi together (our wives hate the stuff, and we love it). Anyway, Jeff told me one thing you might all appreciate. Turns out Jeff writes all his code in C#, but some of his speaking clients want him to also give VB code to them. So, what he does is write in C#, but then he uses Lutz Roeder's Reflector app http://www.aisto.com/roeder/dotnet/. What does that do? Takes the Intermediate Langugage (IL) that .NET produces and turns it back into whatever language he chooses. Jeff says this works very well. So, he has a nice little language translator built into .NET. [The Scobleizer Weblog] Comments3:31:08 PM

K-Log Productivity Measurement:  Time to find and availability. [John Robb's Weblog] Comments10:54:05 AM

Russell Baker. "Is fuel efficiency really what we need most desperatelly? I say that what we really need is a car that can be shot when it breaks down." I know that feeling.  Sh'up, Dallas. Comments7:11:49 AM

Customer Service and K-Logs.  What customer activities have shifted to the Web (based on a Forrester study on the sales of complex goods): Researching product information (90%) Comparing product features and prices (58%) Contacting customer service (56%) Locating a store or distributor (42%) Checking product availability (36%) Which of these activities could be enhanced by corporate use of weblogging? A weblog, built and maintained by a product manager, could provide customers with an active resource on the products they are deciding to buy.  This could be accomplished by building a spreadsheet comparing (feature by feature) several different products, and publishing to a weblog as an additional page accessed by the navigation system.  Additional comparison info could be presented in a weblog format for easy consumption. Contacting customer service on most sites is painful.  Additionally, the FAQs and resource databases seem put together by monkeys (albeit highly paid ones).  A simple way to generate an extremely valuable and organic customer service data is to have each rep publish a weblog.  The question, including keywords, is the title of the post.  The answer is the response.  Not really applicable, but for many companies the local outlet doesn't have an effective Web presence (not even for coupons, specials, etc.).  A simple weblog with a corporate template would suffice. New poducts should be hyped via a weblog.  Features, improvements, etc would all factor into the weblog's posts.  A simple countdown clock would track the days or hours to availability. [John Robb's Weblog] Comments7:11:08 AM

© Copyright 2005 Rebecca Schwoch. Last update: 2/8/2005; 2:13:01 PM.