RE: Too easy (was FW: [pushlet] Digest Number 246)

--- Robert O'Brien <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> 1. Integration
> 2. Cooperation/Coordination
> 3. Monitoring

Wow, most excellent and cogent summary!  With footnotes even!  We're not
worthy...  ;-)

I noticed that your writeup was almost entirely focused on enterprise issues,
and we have to date mostly been interested in consumer software.  Partly this
is for historical reasons -- we were never allowed to think about consumer
stuff at KnowNow, so we have pent-up demand; and also we have found it's not as
easy to interest the enterprise in our featherweight, flexible, standards-based
solutions as one might assume.  But mostly it's because we decided to focus on
things that will immediately appeal to the widest group of developers.

Everyone can understand an encrypted chat or notifications via IM; not everyone
can understand a particular business workflow management implementation -- and
even those who do won't find it especially sexy.  For instance, we did a demo
at KN once which was supposed to model the activity of a call-center -- and
although it looked cool and showed off the product well, we found that it
entirely left people cold because the "narrative framework" of the demo failed
to grab them.

Of course, none of this is to say that developers can't or shouldn't work on
their own business-oriented projects -- just to explain why the core group's
focus is a little more consumer-facing or perhaps developer-facing rather than
having any particular big-business appeal.

I forgot the Cooperation/Coordination stuff -- or maybe subsumed it into
something else.  We've definitely talked about things like online Visio and
shared outlining -- but those are more complex apps and we're nowhere near
ready to do them yet.  JP


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