Category Archives: Product Development

Amazon: Doubling down on Kindle for Mac?

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At Amazon.com, if you look hard enough, you can get a Kindle for Mac application which includes links into their store using your Browser. With Amazon’s syncing, getting books you purchase into your app is pretty straightforward and you’re into reading quick smart.

So why oh why do they have an inferior version on the Mac AppStore? One which lacks the obvious call to action button: “Shop in Kindle Store”.

If the reason is some weird Apple iOS style content selling restriction, then I can’t understand why Amazon are even using the Mac AppStore for distribution. It’s fine for some small developer who doesn’t have the funds to manage their own distribution, but this is Amazon. You know, the guys who own EC2 and AWS?

Even if we imagine this is where Apple want to take third party application software installation on Mac OS X - and that seems like an illogical path, despite its success on the iOS – there appears to be no benefit to Amazon confusing the hell out of users with separate software distributions.

I say to Amazon: improve user experience, walk away from the AppStore. In fact I wonder why you aren’t already over the horizon.

Did the Google+ Hype ever have much Mojo?

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Geoff Livingston’s Blog claims Google Plus had lots of hype, but that hype has recently lost its mojo.

Sure, getting to fifty million users within 3 months is a pretty impressive stat.

via Leon Håland

But isn’t it fairly easy to get to any arbitary number of users if you already have a set of well used products with a large user base like GMail and Reader. Especially when Google are directly integrating Plus into them via the new toolbar.

A better measure might be how many incremental customers Google have gained thanks to Plus, and then how many of them are using the service daily.

The biggest challenge to Google plus’ growth is the number of social networks which their target audience are already engaged with. While Linked In and others appear to have attempted to directly mimic Facebook, those services at least have enough different use cases from Facebook for people to use both. Perhaps Google need to focus more on their key differentiators, such as “hangouts” in a bid to attract new users away from Facebook.

Maybe then that will attract users from the outside in and Google Plus will get its mojo back?

Instagram 2.0.1 fixes some filters, doesn’t reinstate the missing

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Looks like Instagram have quickly turned around an upgrade to V2.0.1.

Some nice fixes in there, but no sign of the return of my favourite greyscale filter which was lost in version 2.0.

The sad thing here, for me, isn’t that I was in some way entitled to the filters in a free service, it’s just there was no clear warning to me before I upgraded to Instagram 2.0 that they were going to be removed. And that many of the ones which stayed, although named the same, were going to be so completely different.

A little context for Delimiter

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“…one can understand the intense fear Apple appears to be demonstrating towards Samsung. It doesn’t want a repeat of the Galaxy S smartphone saga. It doesn’t want to sit quietly by and watch as its customers are seduced away while its products are blatantly copied in front of its eyes.”

From: A little context, for our big Apple crybaby

I need to see evidence of this “seducing away”. As far as I can tell the only customers the Android platform is “seducing away” are from Nokia and the global dumbphone market.

Though I’m happy to be proved wrong.

As for the rest of the article: Lawyers exaggerate a threat to get a result, the blinkered see that as core product strategy.

A bit like pointing to the marketing as evidence of product success.

Auditing Facebook in their Global HQ – Ireland

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Data Commissioner to begin Facebook audit – RTÉ News

Who knew that, just with so many other international Software companies, Facebook’s European HQ in Dublin is responsible for data exchanged by all locales EXCEPT the USA and Canada?

I’m sure if the Irish Data Commissioner hands down an adverse notice, and it is a revenue impact to the company, they’ll soon be on their way to pastures new.

Well it’s no wonder the HP killed their Touchpad business

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The Next Web are reporting that when HP tested webOS on an iPad. It ran over twice as fast as on the Touchpad:

before the HP’s TouchPad tablet and Pre smartphones were even released, everyone within the webOS team “wanted them gone”…when webOS was loaded on to Apple’s iPad device and found to run significantly faster than the device for which it was originally developed.

If the WebOS people knew this was going to be a dog, why wasn’t the product delayed until they had hardware they felt was worthy of their efforts? I can only imagines the Product Owners were cornered into meeting the rest of the businesses demands and these issues were sidelined in order to meet the forecast marketing and supplier plans.

I’ve written before about deciding fast and understanding sooner, but this is ridiculous.

If they made the decision one quarter sooner, HP could’ve dropped a couple of million in penalties from pulling out of Marketing and other agreements and saved themselves a whole lot of embarrasment.

And perhaps still had to opportunity to create a third platform in the iPad segment of the Mobile Computing market.

All they really wanted was the same thing in a new packet

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MacOSX Public Beta "Finder". Credit: Guidebookgallery.org

One of my favourite examples of how people hate change was back when Apple still thought geeks were worth listening to and reinstated their 20th century style menu bar back to it’s previous look and feel in the initial release of OSX.

LaunchPad in MacOSX Lion. Credit: MacApper.com

The Menu bar wasn’t actually causing problems, and the change made in the Public Beta wasn’t huge.

But following that backdown, 10 years later and after many iterations, they remain locked into the problem of last centuries usability constraints in software. Lion Launchpad bringing the iOS to MacOSX notwithstanding.

Obviously involving users and stakeholders in your product development cycle is a great one. But allowing them to dictate your decision making is flawed. This is especially true when you are attempting to re-imagine the behaviour of your products.

When newspapers translated their paper based user interfaces to online in a lemming like quest for irrelevance, they no doubt had 50 year newspaper men running or at least signing off on the projects.

Get Collaborative! credit: localworlds.org

I can just imagine the collaborative workshops where five million compromises too many were made by bright young things from this web thing. All so these change agents could get agreement from those key stakeholders who held the purse strings.

When the main outcome from a project to improve how you and your customer interact is a set of simplified designs and clearer imagery would you be satisfied? What about if that result, thanks to the input of your stakeholders, meant pretty much the same shoddy service for your customers as the current version? How about if the measurement is that slightly fewer of your customers tear their hair or gnash their teeth than before the improvement?

Do you think that on any day during or after these projects the wunderkinds who started these projects woke up and realised, as was put to me tonight:

They thought they wanted a new product, but what they really wanted was the current product with a fancy wrapper

Reset Expectations!

So all I ask is, if today was another day where you felt like going up to your stakeholders and shaking them while shouting forget what you know, remember tomorrow is another day and it can still be done!

After all if you can’t bring the key stakeholders along your journey, at least you got to slap them around a little bit.