Facing Crisis 2. Rules of Promotion

In the context of this narrative it makes sense to divide lifecycle of any company into two types: normal periods of time and crisis time periods, these time spaces changing one another more and more frequently during recent decades.

Promoting its business within normal time periods, a company behaves as usual, and “as usual” means – according to some standard rules. From the very start let us disregard deviations (liars, cheaters, charlatans, etc.) and speak only about companies practicing conscientious approach to business. Thus, I am not discussing business ethics, let’s take it for granted.

We are so accustomed to the rules of promotion in regular business, that strangeness of these rules is not noticed. For instance, the rules make me saying here and there (the more frequent the better) that my company is the best one, that it beats all the competitors in all the main items, that we provide customers with unique services using our unique experience and expertise best available at the market. Quite recognizable, isn’t it? I bet it is. Do I tell the truth? No, certainly not. So, am I lying? I would answer equivocally: all the businesses do so, and I play according to the rules. We all have got accustomed to those rules, though a great number of them are really ridiculous. It is well known, for instance, that different companies while promoting competing products of the same niche use almost the same advertising texts. Moreover, these similar texts are rather stupid very often. The heroes of commercials urge us to speak, for example, to our hair or to dirt on a carpet (“Say NO to dandruff!”, “Say NO to stains!”), and nobody seems to be surprised. Why? – Because nobody really cares: such are the rules, and you are welcome to say any rubbish since nobody really listens to you, and texts in your commercials are just signs that your company exists and is ready to serve its clients.

Thus, a client automatically translates heaps of exaggerations and oddities of your promotional stuff into just a few simple and clear signs, and nothing is lost in this translation. In fact, the resulting signs just define the layer you belong to as a vendor. Every kind of business is naturally subdivided into a few layers each of them containing companies of almost equal qualities and capabilities. Layers differ from each other in “scale”: volume and level of provided services, popularity of brand, annual turnover, etc. So, signs coded in your promos show which layer you belong to. Client reads this information and then decides whether you seem a perfect representative of the layer or not. If yes – good for you, you are chosen! If no – you hardly has a chance to change the client’s mind.

Very simple. Then why do we use so much efforts and money to code our clear signs into bizarre commercials? Such are the rules, the rules for normal periods of time in business lifecycle. What about crisis time periods, should we comply to the same rules? I doubt we really have to. For more details see my next post.

Sudden stupid decisions with grave consequences

Recently I happened to see a new Ice Age movie: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. Well done, with nice and cute characters, but stuffed with absolutely stupid jokes. What a disappointment!

They are our children who are supposed to enjoy this cartoon; and its nice and cute characters are making our inexperienced children think that the characters’ stupid and ugly jokes about farting, about snots, about genitals, are real humor. Humor is a reflection of intellect, and this implies that palming to our children such rubbish off as real humor, the cinema-guys are impairing kids’ intellect. Children’s brains harmed by a cartoon. Sounds terrific, however per se it’s true.

What’s worse is that this harmful stupidity is not necessary. It is not that “We have to provide stupid jokes because they are more natural for an average person”. No human being is by nature predisposed to stupid jokes. To nicotine, to alcohol or to drugs – yes, there exists congenital addiction to these harmful things, but for stupid humor – never; for this misfortune there can be only acquired addiction. Why cultivating it? I could now turn to the questionable path of discussing some conspiracy theories about somebody’s sinister plan to stupefy the society, but I would rather avoid it. The authors of such movies are not members of some evil organization like Ian Fleming’s SPECTRE, neither they are just silly people. Quite to the contrary, I am sure they are nice and clever. Nevertheless, once these nice and clever guys do a silly thing: They decide to produce a movie jam-packed with stupid jokes.

Unfortunately, it’s not that this situation with Ice Age is exceptional, rather not: It just shows an example of a very common thing in our life. Absolutely normal people sometimes strangely tend to show unexpected stupidity in personal life, in common life, and in business. In business such unexpected and unnecessary stupidity, exposed only once, can destroy serious deal.

For several years we used to do a lot of challenging and interesting work for our customer from Boston, MA. Project to project, task to task it was good working atmosphere: Comfortable though exacting. Such happy times lasted until one day the customer decided to hire a new employee for a newly started project. It was a challenging project about developing own BPMS from the scratch, and the new employee was supposed to be responsible for providing our team with all the necessary contacts, information, etc. Vacancy was published, several guys applied, and one of them has been chosen. He was nice and clever, no hint of evil omen, absolutely. As we are in outsourcing software development business, the guy said he needs to visit our premises to get acquainted with the developers. Okay, it was not the first time our customers visited us, so we arranged everything as usually: Meetings, discussions, sightseeing. The guy was reasonable and friendly, he was planning a lot of activities with us, and after several days he said good bye and returned back to Boston. In a few days our customer forwards me the report by this guy. Report is saying that we are a team of unprofessional developers and shameless cheaters; that the project will never be done, and the customer is just wasting his money. Like thunderbolt. I was perplexed and just answered to the customer “No comments”, because what could I comment? Best comments were our previous successful projects. The customer reacted in his own way: The guy was fired, the information about his strange behavior spread among a lot of software companies, and a lot of doors slammed in the guy’s face immediately and forever. Justice was done, but what wrong had been with this guy? Why? He had great prospects, he was moving forward, and suddenly he does something that not only closes these particular prospects, but also makes him persona non grata for hundreds of his colleagues and potential partners. I can only make a try to formulate his sudden stupid decision, it might sound something like: “The project is promising, and it is on the way. Why not throw out the current team then to replace it with my own one?...” Just my guess, but I cannot find any other more or less plausible explanation. Anyway, though explanation seems plausible, the action itself still remains stupid. Like a nice and clever guy has kind of instant brain blackout, and here we are, with all the disappointing consequences.

Unfortunately, such situations happen from time to time in software development projects: Sudden blackout of developer, or tester, or customer, or manager, or whoever, and here we are - long lasting problems for the project.

Lord, save us from such blackouts of our own and keep us faraway from blackouts-prone people, even if they are nice and clever!

Software development business essentials

I am in IT business for more than 20 years already, and since 1991 I am a CTO and one of the two co-owners of the Inreco LAN software development (SD) company. It's quite a time. One day this notion has transformed into a sudden idea: why not share my experience and my thoughts about how this business lives; what are the benefits; what are the difficulties; when and how issues tend to become problems, and so on, so on. It is interesting to discuss these ideas with people who would find my notes worth reading.

So, let's go. Where to start from? Ab ovo, i.e. from the basics, from the very beginning.

Although at a first glance SD business looks easy to organize, to manage and to make money on, in reality it is a very difficult business.

It was difficult always: from the very first days when people began thinking of software as of a product, and up to our times when software is considered just an ordinary industrial object. At the beginning, software was something weird, something unusual, and it required a lot of efforts from an enthusiastic seller to open client's eyes to the benefits that might be got after a new software product is developed.

Now all this stuff about selling SD services is quite the contrary: client is able to find an existing software product for any reasonable need. In this situation, custom-made software seems to be absolutely unneeded. Like if you want to furnish your home, you just visit a store and buy furniture. Right? Yes, but not for all people and not for all possible homes. If you have some special ideas and/or some special home, what you need is custom-made furniture. More often than not, such custom-made furniture costs more than the contemporary, available at stores, however it is worth money you pay for it: this furniture is made for you exactly, and it fits your home, your situation and your style completely.

Absolutely the same is true for software: if you just need to type texts or to send e-mails, or, say, to do simple calculations, than you will be fine with some existing cheap or even free software tool. However, a person might discover a need that cannot be satisfied by existing software. For instance, one is struck by an idea of a new promising business that requires very special computer-based activities or some computer-based backing. In this case customer undoubtedly needs his/here own software adjusted to special narrow requirements. Successfully developed, this software can become a locomotive for the entire customer's business. It is not just a theory, we have a number of real examples around us, among our clients. Take, for instance, the Better World Books company: brilliant business idea and its perfect software implementation resulted in successful business.

So, the general concept of custom-developed software turns out to be absolutely viable. At the same time, the key advantage of such software, i.e. its novelty, becomes the first serious obstacle for the supporting business activities. For a customer and for a vendor, the way they move forward from their very first meeting, is much more alike R&D process rather than a routine business procedure. All this makes custom software development so interesting, so challenging and equitably so difficult.