Making Email a Better File Cabinet

Yes, Facebook and Twitter are popular, but a recent study by Osterman Research found that email remains the most important channel for business communications. The same study found that 55% of business users say that over a quarter of the information they need for work is tucked away in email folders.

Clearly, we're all still using email, and we all still need ready access to the information that's buried somewhere in email. Search tools built into applications like Gmail, Thunderbird, and Outlook are a big help for tracking down messages that contain a specific search phrase or keyword. Nonetheless, there are a few guidelines that email senders can follow to make it easier for recipients to find the data they're looking for, even if the message arrived months or even years ago, whether or not recipients are using email application search engines.

1. Make the subject line factual and descriptive.
   For example, instead of "Chaa-ching!", write something more prosaic like "Sales Order from Liberty Capital." You can add "Chaa-ching" at the end of the line or in the body of the message, if you like, but keep the first part of the subject line—the part someone notices first when skimming down a long list of titles—purely descriptive.
2. Label like messages in like ways.
   If you're sending sales orders and you title every message containing a sales order with the formula, "Sales Order from . . . ", you'll make it easier for your recipients to lay their hands on the order they're looking for, no matter how cluttered their email inbox is. When I send clients review drafts of business plans, white papers, or other business documents, I always write, "PLEASE REVIEW:" followed by the draft number and the document title. My clients are busy people, and I hope this formulaic titling makes it a little easier for them to notice that a new document has arrived that needs their attention.
   
3. When the subject matter of an email thread has changed substantially, begin a new thread or change the title accordingly.
   At the time, it might have seemed natural for the discussion on the new office printer to somehow become a discussion of the a new network monitoring feature that product management is trying to cram into the next software release, but two months from now, when you're looking for the market data to back up product management, you might not think to look at messages whose title refers to the new HP printer on the second floor.
4. Tag a message high priority only if it really is high priority.If you label everything as high priority, then 1) after a week or two your recipients will roll their eyes and ignore your sense of urgency, and 2) when they need to find that truly urgent message you sent, they'll have a harder time.
   

Paying any attention at all to email subject lines might seem pedantic, but I think it behooves all of us to recognize that we're swamped with information that's chaotically organized, and that's little things can make a difference.

Microsoft did a study a year or two ago and found that business users spend roughly one day per week just looking for the information they in order to do their jobs. That's a colossal waste of time, isn't it? One day of your week, every week, just hunting for data? That's the equivalent of showing up for work every day between January 1 and mid-March simply to tidy your office. Wouldn't you rather be able to use that time getting things done?

Enterprise search tools and improved email applications obviously help with this problem. But a little discipline in email authoring can make a difference, as well.

File cabinet photo by mrmanc, licensed by Creative Commons, some rights reserved.

Can Joyent Create a PaaS Platform More Cost-effective than Amazon EC2?

At last week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, I had the opportunity to talk to James Duncan, Director of Platform Strategies at Joyent. Joyent is a cloud computing vendor in the IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) market. They sell virtualized servers called Joyent Acclerators, which customers use for running Web applications.

The idea behind IaaS is that customers can grow or shrink their infrastructure dynamically. Expecting a surge of business, or need to crunch vast amounts of data for a rush project? No problem. IaaS lets you instantly access as many servers as you need: 50, 500, even 5000 or more. Project over? Again, no problem. Shut down the servers at once. You've managed to meet your computing needs without buying, configuring, and managing racks of servers yourself.

In January, Joyent bought Reasonably Smart, a cloud computing start-up that James and his business partner Bryan Bogensberger had founded the previous summer. First on their own and now at Joyent, James and Bryan have been developing the Smart Platform, a PaaS solution that lets programmers develop server applications in JavaScript and then deploy these applications to the cloud using Git, an open source version-control system. Now branded as a Joyent solution, the Smart Platform is ready to go into a private Beta test.

I asked James why he chose JavaScript as the programming language for the new platform. Why choose a language famous for improving interactivity in a browser, instead of a language more commonly associated with server-side applications, such as Python or Perl or Java?

He pointed out that JavaScript was designed from the outset to deliver a lot of functionality in a secure, self-contained environment (known in programming as a "sandbox"). Secure autonomy is a great feature for applications and services running in a shared environment such as a data center, where virtual servers from several customers might be running on the same machine. He also pointed out that more money is going into training and documentation work on JavaScript than into other popular languages, such as Ruby, PHP, and Python. And, of course, JavaScript is a proven language, already popular with lots of programmers, who have been using it for years to develop sophisticated client-side Web applications. Now these programmers can apply their knowledge of JavaScript to the development of fast, efficient server applications that run in the cloud.

The Smart Platform offers a couple of other advantages that cloud computing users may find attractive.

First, the platform is open source. Joyent hopes that customers will like Joyent's PaaS services so much, they'll subscribe to Joyent and pay them to run the platform. But customers and even non-customers are free to move the entire stack in-house. Running the platform in house could be helpful for developing prototypes, running private clouds (shared, elastic services run entirely behind the firewall), or combining private and public clouds, as needed. Also, by making the platform open source, Joyent expects to ease customers' concerns about being locked in to a particular PaaS vendor. (Vendor lock-in has been much discussed lately in cloud computing circles.)

Another important advantage of the Smart Platform is that it's truly priced like a utility: customers pay only when an application is servicing requests. They pay nothing when is present on a virtual server, but inactive (that is, not processing data or interacting with other applications). This utility pricing model has the potential to make Joyent far more cost-effective than even Amazon's highly affordable Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) service.

James offered this example. Let's say you're hosting your Web site in the cloud for a month. On Amazon, you would pay for the Amazon Machine Image (the Amazon virtual server) for the entire month, even if the Web site gets only a few hits and actually active for a few seconds or minutes.

On the Joyent Smart Platform, in contrast, you would pay only for those few seconds or minutes of activity; you would pay nothing for all the time the server is hosted on the Smart Platform inactive. As a result, your bill should be a small fraction of what it would be from Amazon.

Pricing based on activity rather than deployment could make a big difference for customers whose hosted applications are active only sporadically. It could also be attractive for customers who have forgotten to decommission servers once a project is over and have then been surprised to receive a big bill from a cloud service provider.

If you're interested in participating Beta of the Joyent Smart Platform, visit www.reasonablysmart.com.

The Wit and Wisdom of Scott Cook

Intuit's mini-conference on "Startups and the Cloud," which I wrote about here, featured a lively Q&A session with Scott Cook, Intuit's founder and chairman of the executive committee. Scott—who impressed me as knowledgeable, personable, and down-to-earth—offered a couple of sage remarks I particularly liked.

"Familiarity is 90% of ease of use."

Scott talked about the pains Intuit went through, especially in the early days, to eliminate complexity from their products' user interfaces. Convincing novice computer users to adopt Quicken as their tool for managing household finances was quite a challenge, particularly back in the days when an unformatted floppy drive could flummox a new user. (Intuit's solution: never tell the user the floppy drive is unformatted. Format the drive automatically, and let the user get on with his or her work.)

On a quest for usability, Intuit bought the rights to the interface of another product that was already popular and easy to use. Intuit engineers copied that other product's interface, pixel-by-pixel, and built it into a new version of Quicken.

"Familiarity is 90% of ease-of-use." If an interface design is already familiar, users don't have to think about using it. They simply use it and get on with their work.

I think Scott's advice about familiarity is spot on. Don't try to be overly creative or clever with your UI. When it comes to UI design, simplicity and familiarity are the cardinal virtues.

Later in the Q&A session, Scott Cook said this:

"Behind every successful entrepreneur, you'll find a supportive spouse and a couple of very surprised in-laws."

That remark rang true, too, and made me chuckle.

What Cloud Computing Offers Startups, Part 2

In a previous post, I discussed the operational and financial benefits of cloud computing for start-ups. Today I'd like to discuss another benefit that's just as important, and that has far-reaching implications for the direction of IT development in the coming years.

Cloud computing makes it easier than ever for software companies to deliver innovative, business-critical services to Small and Medium-sized Businesses (SMBs).

Until recently, most software start-ups avoided the SMB market. Selling products and services to SMBs seemed daunting for several reasons:

• Limited Budgets: SMBs are well known for having spartan IT budgets. Beyond buying basic networking gear, Microsoft Office, and perhaps an accounting system, a small business may make hardly any IT investment at all. Even larger, mid-sized businesses tend to be conservative spenders, leery of risk and demanding a clear ROI from a new product—even though it's often difficult or impossible to demonstrate an ROI with a brand new product.
  
• Distribution Overhead: Reaching SMBs has traditionally required a channel (e.g., a distributor who served SMBs in a given area or industry) or, worse, many channels and lots of advertising. Channels require a lot of attention in the form of training and support, and they take a bit out of a start-up's profit margin.
  
• Deal Flow: To achieve sufficient revenue, a start-up would need to close tens or hundreds of small deals to equal the same amount of revenue possible from one or two large enterprise sales. With limited staff, attention, and marketing funds, most start-ups (with the hearty encouragement of their investors) have preferred to pursue opportunities in the enterprise market.
  

But in the past couple of years, cloud computing has knocked down all these barriers. In fact, cloud computing solutions often start with the premise that the customer has limited time and money for managing complex, but important IT operations. The cloud computing vendor rushes in as the SMB hero, managing everything behind the scenes, while offering the customer an easy-to-use, comforting Web interface.

Old Obstacle	Cloud Computing Solution
Limited Budget	Cloud computing solutions, such as SaaS applications or hosted storage, can be delivered cost effectively. There's no need for on-premises hardware and time-consuming installation and configuration services. Customers buy just what they need, when they need it. Delivery on popular platforms such as Force.com and QuickBase greatly reduces customer-acquisition costs, which normally the vendor would have to pass along to the customer.
Distribution Overhead	Cloud computing services are marketed, sold, and delivered over the Web. Customers can discover point solutions built on cloud platforms offered by vendors they already know and trust (e.g., Amazon, Intuit, Microsoft, Salesforce.com). There's no need for a large sales team and offices scattered around the country, nor is there a need to sign on and train large numbers of resellers. Sales and marketing take place online.
Deal Flow	Through promotion in established platform communities, as well as through viral marketing, blogging, and targeted marketing efforts, vendors can find tens and then hundreds or thousands of new customers. At a time when enterprises are cutting their IT budgets, reaching SMBs who are looking for cost-saving, operational improvements and strategic advantages offered through new capabilities, seems like an attractive idea.

Cloud computing has changed the nature of the typical start-up. Instead of a capital-intensive organization building "enterprise-class" solutions for large companies, today's start-up is more likely a small, nimble team, taking full advantage of the economies offered by platforms like EC2 and open source, and delivering online services that are valuable to companies of all sizes—even another five-person company down the hall.


Photo of man and clouds by donabelandewen, Creative Commons License, some rights reserved.

What Cloud Computing Offers Startups

At the Intuit's mini-conference on "Startups and the Cloud," the discussions, which varied from investment to technology, repeatedly raised the question of what advantages, if any, cloud computing offered startups.

To answer that question, we need to know what cloud computing is. I'm going to borrow the definition developed by NIST, which Longworth Venture Partners analyst Vishy Venugopalan cited in his overview of cloud computing, which kicked off the day's events:

Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, storage, servers, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

Five or ten years ago, it was not uncommon for a newly-funded start-up to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on infrastructure. Servers, disk arrays, back-up power supplies, management and monitoring software, an air-conditioned room with a raised floor—the list of capital expenditures could be impressive, and this investment needed to be made before engineers could begin any significant work developing products.

Cloud computing changes all that: it minimizes infrastructure investments, so that companies only need to invest in IT services when they're needed.

Cloud computing eliminates the need for that air-conditioned room filled with expensive server racks. It eliminates the need for the local IT manager to watch over them. And it shortens the management team's list of headaches, by sparing them the details of back-up tapes and server upgrades. IT can be provisioned cheaply and immediately—today, this afternoon, now, and development can begin right away.

Todd Hixon from New Atlantic Ventures put it this way:

Cloud computing gives you a sandbox for delivering solutions while assessing demand. It enables you to avoid needless investment in infrastructure.

Jeffrey Beir from North Bridge Venture Partners agreed:

Cloud computing allows developers to focus on the IP (intellectual property) that's unique to them.

After all, it's that unique IP that's ultimately going to make or break the company. It's the unique IP—not a rack of Dell servers in a computer room—that's going to be the quintessence of the start-up's brand, differentiating the company from the hundreds of other start-ups and thousands of larger companies already crowding the market.

By minimizing infrastructure costs and infrastructure management costs, cloud computing enables young companies to spend its precious capital on what's most essential. For young companies in this time of tight budgets and hard decisions, cloud computing is a financial and operational boon.

The Six Traits of a Fundable Entrepreneur

Yesterday afternoon in Waltham, Massachusetts, Intuit hosted on a mini-conference about the opportunities that cloud-computing offers start-ups. "Startups and the Cloud" proved to be an engaging event, packing a small auditorium on the campus of Bentley College. Sessions ranged from Longworth Venture Partners' Vishy Venugopalan's overview of the cloud computing marketplace to an open Q&A with Intuit founder Scott Cook to panel discussions with venture capitalists and CEOs about cloud computing and the changing economic environment for young companies.

The venture capitalist panel featured a seasoned team of investors:

• Jeff Bussgang from Flybridge Venture Partners
  
• Jeffrey Beir from North Bridge Venture Partners
  
• Todd Hixon from New Atlantic Ventures
  
• Shawn Broderick from
  TechStars
  

This group offered much wit and wisdom on a variety of topics. For now, I'll simply offer their composite profile of a fundable entrepreneur.

In response to a question from the audience, the panel offered this list of traits that they look for in an entrepreneur:

• Passion
  
• Domain expertise (the entrepreneur knows his or her area thoroughly, and isn't just coming up with an idea in response to a news story, for example)
  
• Unfair advantage (something that gives this team of entrepreneurs a sustainable head-start in the market)
  
• Street smarts (knowing how to get things done in difficult situations)
  
• A whip-smart mind
  
• Salesmanship
  

And Shawn Broderick offered this observation, which deserves to be mounted on a plaque over every entrepreneur's desk:

"Execution is insanely important."

Good CEOs May Lack Empathy, But Their Companies Depend on It

In a recent column, New York Times columnist David Brooks summarized recent research that found that successful CEOs were usually not empathetic, novel-reading, team-oriented people. On the contrary. The research—conducted by Steven Kaplan, Mark Klebanov and Morten Sorensen and published in a report called "Which C.E.O. Characteristics and Abilities Matter?"—found that people skills were overrated for CEOs.

"They found that strong people skills correlate loosely or not at all with being a good C.E.O. Traits like being a good listener, a good team builder, an enthusiastic colleague, a great communicator do not seem to be very important when it comes to leading successful companies.

What mattered, it turned out, were execution and organizational skills. The traits that correlated most powerfully with success were attention to detail, persistence, efficiency, analytic thoroughness and the ability to work long hours."

So, can we throw empathy out the window? Not at all.

Empathy is vital to any company's success. Empathy underlies every successful customer interaction, even if it doesn't play an obvious role in some high-level decision making. Ignore the customer requirements in product design, or continually snub customers on the phone, and a company will find itself in trouble, even if it has a remarkably efficient, highly analytical CEO.

Take the case of Apple. Apple products are so attractive and easy to use, people flock to stores to buy them as soon as they become available. In surveys, Apple's customer service consistently beats out that of rival PC makers. And Apple's commitment to empathy is perhaps nowhere better expressed than in the Genius Bar, a walk-up help desk you'll find in every Apple store. At the Genius Bar, helpful Apple employees will listen to you describe your problems with an Apple product and try to resolve them—for free, unless the product requires a physical repair.

Apple is truly an empathic company. Empathy—expressed through great product design and great customer service—is an essential element of its success.

Yet Apple's CEO is, shall we say, not always known for his calm, patient, empathic demeanor. This hasn't slowed Apple one bit. Steve Jobs has always been passionate about building insanely great products for customers and serving customers well (even if the company has made a few misjudgments in this area over the years). He clearly values empathy, even if he doesn't always embody it himself. He pushes the people around him to serve their customers well—and they do.

So while it's true that organizations often take on the character qualities of their leaders, it's also true that a CEO with a cut-and-dried, even brutal leadership style can build and lead a successful, highly empathic organization.

Empathy photo by Pierre Phaneuf, Creative Commons License, some rights reserved.Apple Genius Bar photo by maebmij, Creative Commons License, some rights reserved.