Designing Software for Your Market

One thing that bothers me is the way that many IT shops go about desginin infrastructure or shared services. The scenario I often see is that rather than defining who/what/where the market is and providing a solution that addresses that need, the approach is more often "How can I convince those people to use what I have or want to build".

To me the difference is the lack of a product development team (in the marketing sense). Once that is in place then they must work in conjunction with engineering.

It seems that even Microsoft sees the need to improve this model within their own organization. In the course of developing the next release of Exchange, the two departments wrote a book together. Bink.nu: "It encompasses everything from the market outlook to the perceived value of possible features to potential customers. At its essence, the book serves as a contract between marketing and engineering, describing what goes in and what stays out of the software."

This seems like an approach that more should model.

Can Google help Firefox?

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols in his artcile Firefox Is Heading Towards Trouble said, "If the Mozilla Foundation and Firefox friends like Google don't start spending money—right now—to hire more programmers, more project managers and more servers, it won't matter how many ads in the New York Times Firefox supporters take out, Firefox will have already reached its high tide of popularity and we can only wait for the ebb to begin." I think he has a good point. There has been much speculation about Google and the gBrowser. What there are up to is certainly not clear. But it seems a pretty good bet that they are doing something with the firefox code base. Although this may dilute the market share for pure firefox, I suspect it would help a lot with code quality, and may even server capacity.

A good overview about the benefits of workflow

I ran across this short note from George Parapadakis about workflow benefits. I thought it was a good summary. And You Know - Of Course What Workflow Is