I ticked the wrong box

I was listening to a Redmonk Podcast on the train on the way home from work today, and James from Redmonk said something that struck a chord with me. The quote was…

How many customers really have the requirements of Charles Schwab? That is an edge case and sometimes large software companies treat these edge cases as if they were the most sensible source of requirements.

This just really gelled with me. I’ve been working for the largest global mobile telecommunications company on earth for 8 years now, and we battle with vendors every day on requirements, features, architectures and roadmaps that we’d like them to build into their applications. What I take from that (and other things I’ve been reading and listening to) is that you have to be acutely aware of who your customer base is. If you are serving the top 5-10 companies in a particular sector in the world, then you can clearly afford to bend to their requirements, because that’s what they are paying you for. If you are trying to hit mass market, don’t try and emulate the big boys. Keep it simple. Keep the minimum. Keep the maintenance down.

I guess this aligns well with the philosophy that 37 Signals use with their rails apps, and also with the way I tried to create Got the GiST. That was an exercise in taking a painful and complex activity (tax preparation) and simplifying it so my mother could use it.

This is also something I need to remember when I start my new job in just over 1 month. Moving to the vendor/consultant side of the equation is going to be a real eye opener. I won’t always be working with very large enterprises.

The episode was only podcast 2 (very old!), I’ve only recently been introduced to these guys by a colleague. I say give them a listen if you’re keen for an alternative analysts take on IT and the industry.

Sun, what are you up to?

Install java to experience the power of java? What is that supposed to mean?

wtf?

Someone needs to check the grammar rules in that thing.

Boots! What are you doing?

I’m a dude. I don’t want to look lovely.

This really irks me. As part of my day job I perform IT system selections. One thing I know a little bit about is BI/campaign management/analytics software. It isn’t too hard to run a marketing campaign, and choose your messages based on the gender of the person you are trying to entice to purchase your products. Another option is choosing a subset of customers to market to – SELECT * FROM customers WHERE gender = ‘f’ might have excluded me.

Companies that don’t utilise their data well are just wasting an incredible important resource, and potentially creating a bad customer experience.

Woohoo! I got PayPal IPN integration working. Now you can register with my application, make a payment via PayPal, and PayPal will come back to my web app and let me know that you’ve registered. Clever stuff.

I used the PayPal IPN GEM from http://dist.leetsoft.com, and integrated it with my own Payment object. I don’t really have the need for a full “ordering”-type system with my application. There is only ever 1 line item per order, so only a single payment object is required. I could have implemented an order, with order_line_items, and shipping and billing addresses, and tax and handling calculations, but I don’t need them.

I need to look into the IPN integration a little more tho. When I say I’ve got it working, I mean I’ve had 1 payment through that successfully updated a users registration details. PayPal seem to be pushing the transaction to me twice – I handle that correctly (checking for unique transaction IDs), but I think I need to respond to them in some other way. I better re-read those docs.

I’m quite pleased. Maybe a congratulatory coffee & and an apple are in order.

There is a windows equivalent of Dashboard. It’s called Konfabulator. And before I get any mac nerds telling me how different Dashboard is, and how dare I compare it to Konfabulator – I don’t care.

And it has a family guy RQG – well, at least it has Stewie – but he’s my favourite character anyway.

You can download Konfabulator here.

You can download Stewie RQG here.

Enjoy!