Software, Business, and Life
A couple of years ago I attended the inaugural Business of Software conference; it was quite worthwhile. This year I’ve registered to attend Business of Software 2009, and heartily recommend it to anyone interested in the subject matter. Joel Spolsky is one of the sponsors; I had an interesting conversation with Joel last time I attended.
(Offtopic warning: my site is mostly about technical matters, not about consumer affairs.)
Well, that wasn’t fun.
We had reserved, or so I thought, a hotel stay of a few days, using Orbitz.com. Life intervened, and it became necessary to cancel. We attempt to cancel. It turns out that we hadn’t reserved a hotel stay. We had paid in advance for a hotel stay, which was 100% non-refundable. Don’t stay, still pay the whole amount anyway. (With considerable effort, including intervention by the management of the hotel in question (at which we’ve stayed a number of times before), we were finally able to get it resolved.)
While in a free world one should be able to sell such a toxic product, it generally does not make sense to buy one, certainly not as the default. One lesson to learn: read the terms carefully, there are dragons in there.
But I think that is the wrong lesson. The right lesson is much simpler: do not do business with a vendor (Orbitz) who offers such foolishness. Rather, use them (or any similar size) to find a hotel / flight / whatever, then leave their site and go make the purchase by other means, some means by which the more traditional (and sane) terms-of-sale are used.
Q: How do you know when you’re talking to an excessively enterprisey software vendor?
A: When they require an NDA before they tell you anything about what their product costs.
I’ve been down the enterprise software path; I’ve worked in companies producing it, I’ve worked in companies buying it. I know the drill. I’ve fought the battles to produce quality, polished software in spite of the forces leading toward (ummm….) overly postmodern results.
Be proud of your offerings and your value proposition. Of course we all have situation where a lot of discussions are needed to figure out what a project will cost; but if you have an off the shelf product, it’s just basic block-and-tackle execution to get to a point where you can state a few prices for a few packages as part of your sales presentation.
Alex Miller declared a Giles Bowkett talk (purportedly about “Archaeopteryx: A Ruby MIDI Generator”) the best presentation ever. I was skeptical.
Wow. “Best Ever” is an overstatment of course; but it’s worth your 45 minutes and then some.
To help create the document I mentioned earlier about the merits of custom software development, I hired a subcontract writer. The only typing I did was a bit at the start and perhaps a half-hour of editing at the end; all the rest of my input was in the form of spoken-word audio recordings, which I find fast and easy to create.
A critical factor in making this worthwhile is the categorical difference between a writer and a transcriber; I’ve used transcription services with excellent results, but a transcribed talk is far different in form and polish, than purposefully written text. The process was roughly like so:
This worked out well, in several ways. The first, minor payoff is that it took a bit less time than just writing it myself. In retrospect it was only a minor time savings; if I had just sat down and wrote it all myself in one go, I could have finished in a handful of hours.
The second payoff was much larger: although I could have theoretically done it all myself, most likely I would not have done so yet. My personal threshold to get started and keep the process moving was much lower. Engaging assistance transformed an idea for what could happen, in to a process that did happen.
The third payoff is that this process is another useful tool in my toolbox; there is a big difference between know that I could use such a tool, and having actually done so.
Thus, I consider the experiment a success, and will almost certainly use the same process on more projects.
A while back Joel Spolsky wrote about “Five Worlds” of software development. Over at Oasis Digital and elsewhere, I’ve been living in two of them:
As a result, I’ve been thinking a lot about the relative advantage of each, from the points of view of software developers and customers. A portion of these thoughts, those on the merits of custom development from the customer perspective, are in an article (PDF) on the Oasis Digital web site.
There is a story behind how that document was created, and I’ll tell it in another post.