Wingz – Airport Rides and One Bad UI Issue
I’ve been using Wingz to get to/from the airport. The idea is simple, black car service like Uber but exclusively for airport transportation, and a big advantage is that you can schedule the rides in advance. With a web-based and mobile app, it’s alway available and convenient. Wingz is aggressively priced, about 40% less expensive […]
Infor and ‘No Fugly Software’: Design as a competitive weapon
Located in a prominent position on the wall of Infor’s New York headquarters, is a large graphic that says, “No Fugly Software.” It is a summary statement of the company’s ongoing effort to define a unique cultural identity that links design to improved outcomes and experiences for customers. Infor is a sleeping giant among enterprise […]
Salesforce Startup Lesson #1: How are products built by Oracle, SAP or Salesforce different?
One of the questions often asked by venture investors and entrepreneurs alike is – how does product strategy work at a company like Salesforce? How is it different from Oracle? How does Salesforce thinking about products fundamentally different than how SAP or Oracle approach it? To me it comes down to the way the three […]
Where’s Waldo?
Go back to your student days and try to remember your best textbooks… They always started out with the basics, then went deeper and deeper. Each chapter led you stepwise through a concept, using examples, painting a picture then rounding off with some exercises before moving on to the next chapter. They were not half […]
Evolution of the User Interface
I’ve used Siri for 3ish weeks now and this morning, as I was "talking to" my iPhone, I was thinking about the way we interact with computing devices and how much that has changed in only a few years. I…
Happy Birthday, Personal Computer. Rest in Peace.
Business Insider reminds us that today is the 30th birthday of the original IBM PC: the computer’s brain was a 4.77Mhz Intel 8088 processor (for my younger readers, it’s Mega not Giga) and it had a grand total of 256K RAM (again, it’s not 256 GB, not even MB, but Kilobytes). Yet it was a […]
Webtrends Engage 2011, Making Web Analytics Sexy
I spent a few days this week catching up with Webtrends during its annual user event, Engage, in San Francisco. Web analytics is covered in my IDC group under CRM analytics but as most of you know this isn’t something…
Bad UI – Shoppybag
I finally got tagged in enough photos on Shoppybag to give it a try… here’s the problem, their user experience leaves so many unanswered questions that I simply gave up. The signup process is pretty straightforward until the 2nd step and it is an entirely self inflicted wound. I fought back my initial hesitance about […]
NetSuite Fights Hairball Epidemic with New Release and Edgy Marketing Campaign
NetSuite’s marketing team has been known for their edginess, starting from pranks like the SAP for the Rest of Us Party during SAP’s annual conference to staging a shootout at the anti-SAP Conference or releasing edgy videos a’la Mac vs. Windows. Today they are doing it again, by establishing the Hairball Institute for Business: (The […]
The iPad and the Enterprise
(photo cc attrib. pntphoto thanks!) I have seen several keynotes from software executives lately. I recollect that all of them had iPads in them. Seasoned software executives have been getting positively giddy about the iPad. It has given Steve Jobs a sales force that he didn’t know he had. It seems without really planning for […]
