Day: 10 August 2007

…that’s a quote from a delicious article by John Siracusa available on Ars Technica. Headlined Stuck On The Enterprise, it looks at a number of reasons why Apple doesn’t seem to do well in the enterprise space. [I must confess a very personal interest in this topic, having more than once tried to introduce Apple into the enterprise and, shall we say, not succeeded…).

Here’s a morsel to get your taste buds going:

The “dream phone” for the enterprise looks quite different than the iPhone. It works with the corporate VPN. It does Exchange. It supports device-wide encryption and remote deletion of data on lost devices. It’s available in several compatible forms from multiple manufacturers. It has a well-defined public roadmap for hardware and software. It can be backed up and restored en masse, preferably over the network. If it has a camera, it can be disabled. The battery can be removed and replaced. And on and on.

Maybe around item two hundred in this list there might be a bit about the people who will actually use these enterprise dream phones tolerating the things. Really, as long as they don’t openly revolt, it’s fine. The people you have to please in the enterprise market are the ones purchasing and supporting the products, not the poor schmucks who actually have to use them.

And if that doesn’t get you salivating, here’s another taste:

Listen again to Steve’s final words on the subject. “We put ourselves in the customer’s shoes and say, what do we want?”

This is why Apple does not compete in the enterprise market in the traditional sense. This is why no other company created the iPhone. This is why most desktop PCs are pieces of crap. When you don’t focus on the user, the user gets shafted.

Go on, read the whole article, traverse the links, it’s worth it. It makes me think again about the sheer importance of Doc’s VRM.

As enterprise people, we have to stop building things designed explicitly to get past IT governance and procurement processes, and start making things that customers want. Maybe VRM can play a role in that.

My thanks to Bill Barnett for bringing this to my attention.

Some of you have asked me to share my reading habits with you, so here’s my current ten-in-parallel:

The Black Swan: Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Fascinating, eminently readable, gentle and easy and unusual. Second pass.

Science, Faith and Society: Michael Polanyi: My regular Polanyi “fix”. Not for the faint-hearted. Third pass.

Comedy by the Numbers: Hoffman and Rudoren. A little bit of McSweeney’s goes a long way. Oddball but fun. First time.

The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe: Elizabeth Eisenstein. A giant of a book, my third read through. A must.

The Accidental Investment Banker: Jonathan Knee.  I like accidents. Not yet started it.

Blood Thirsty: Marshall Karp. I loved The Rabbit Factory, so I thought I’d try Karp again. Unread.

What’s So Funny? Donald E Westlake. I’m fanatical about Westlake, particularly the Dortmunder series. Unmissable.

Crooked Little Vein: Warren Ellis. Trying him out, just because William Gibson said it was worth it. Unread.

Silence: Thomas Perry. I’d walk a mile for a new Thomas Perry. Ten miles. As with Westlake, I’ve been a fan for decades.

Bad Monkeys: Matt Ruff.  I judged this book by its cover. Never heard of him, but liked Christopher Moore’s comments.

I guess I was younger and more hot-headed not that long ago; I remember being quite irritated when I heard that Microsoft had bought MongoMusic, as reported here. Until that happened, I’d nurtured real belief that we were on the verge of a breakthrough related to search, albeit rooted in music in the first instance.

Some of you may be aware of Shazam, particularly if you live in the UK. It’s a great service, you use your mobile phone to call them, stick the device near where there’s some music playing, the service samples the sound for 10 seconds and then texts you with details of the track and artist and so on. I love it, because it solves a simple and common problem for me. Say I’m in a car, listening to the radio, and there’s a song playing that I’ve never heard before, but that I like. Now I tend to listen to radio stations with very little talking, so what used to happen was that I was out of the car long before anyone announced what the particular song was. With Shazam, I could find out. Most of the time.

What MongoMusic tried to do went one step beyond Shazam; Shazam could only deal with formal recorded sound, “official” tracks. MongoMusic had a Sounds Like facility that allowed you to sing or hum or whistle the tune, and it would try and match it. So Shazam looked for exact matches, while MongoMusic looked for patterns, the sort of distinction that’s been driving image recognition experts crazy for some years now (in terms of database size and seek time and accuracy).

That was then. Now, reading a post in Smart Mobs, I see green shoots of recovery.  Take a look at this: Sing To Your Computer to Find Music, as reported by Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends, quoting Dr Sandra UitdenBogerd.

I look forward to hearing more, and to keeping all of you posted. I tend to think that this is really where search needs to head: where I can say Sounds Like or Looks Like or Feels Like or Tastes Like or It’s Somehow A Bit Like, and get a set of options to narrow down to what I want. I guess it’s what IdentiKit experts are used to doing.

Once we have something like that, imagine how we could help design things for customers. Identikit design backed by multimedia “It’s Like …” search.