Simon and Garfunkel – Still Keeping the Customer Satisfied

“Is the customer always right?”

I get some interesting responses. My take on this is clear: the customer is clearly not always right, but it doesn’t matter as long as they are satisfied and happy. In fact, I like my customers deliriously happy if possible. It doesn’t matter if a problem is their fault you need to go out of your way to make them happy.

When it comes to developing applications one of the bad traits developers get into is doing things because they are easy to code, rather than because they are easy to use. There is rarely a time where it is a better policy to make the developer’s life easier at the expense of the end user. Of course, if possible, you want to make every ones life easier.

One of the most useful things a developer can do is to actually watch customers use their applications. It is amazing how “features” that you are proud of get used and abused by them and you can quickly see things that are poorly designed. Another practice that pays off in spades is to spend a day answering calls from customers and use the tools provided to the customer service staff. Nothing shows the flaws of a system like actually using it under fire!

Performance Still Matters.

I started writing software in the outstanding music decade of our time: The Seventies. In those days good software performance was instilled in me early on. System calls and disk I/O were to be kept to the absolute minimum. When I started building websites in 1994 performance was still a big deal to me. In those days static HTML was prevalent and when I set out to build a 100% dynamic CGI site it was quite rare. For speed I used compiled “C” and the site (Garden.com) was feature rich and very fast. Over the last fifteen years there have been many hardware and software innovations to make processing dynamic pages faster. In fact, for many sites we don’t even have to think about it. However, I’m amazed how slow some large and influential sites often are.

You really need to render pages in less than a second to keep people from noticing. Certain pages (e.g. order checkout and account creation) can take longer without losing people’s interest, but for the most part clicking around from page to page should take a second or less. 0.1 to 0.5 seconds are better. You can certainly notice the difference between a second and half a second.

What happens is that developers get so enamored with adding all these “cool features” to a page that they fail to keep an eye on the clock. Or they keep an eye on the clock for the single instance and don’t take into account that 100’s or 1000’s of clicks are competing for the same resource.

I have heard on more than one occasion developers say “Performance doesn’t matter anymore.” Well, performance does matter. Without it you can’t add all the features you need to keep people coming to your site and if you do your site will be so slow that people will leave even quicker.

As we constantly change and fragment the ways we get to deliver content over the web our servers will continue to get pummeled with requests and I don’t see a time when performance will ever be irrelevant. What is more likely is that if we don’t start really thinking seriously about performance at the lowest levels we will build systems that just topple over with the load.

Performance is more relevant today than ever.

John Thornton – General Partner at Austin Ventures

However, I remember feeling disappointed when we first started in 1995 because he was not always as encouraging as I expected about our business. This can often be the case because a VC’s primary goal is to make investments and to get a good return. As an entrepreneur you are typically starting a company out of passion and a burning desire to create something. Of course you’d like to make money, but frequently this is not your primary goal.

As a result, when I started Digital Cheetah in 2001 the last thing I wanted to do was get any external financing. If you can afford to go alone, that is often the best strategy because you can create the company precisely the way you want. However, if you need the cash then remember VC’s are for funding first and just be grateful that they are willing to invest in you at all.

OS/2 Warp using the System Object Model

When I was at IBM I worked with another great coder – Larry Raper. Larry and I worked closely together on one of IBM’s great lost technologies the System Object Model (SOM), and it was through the work on SOM that I received the majority of my patents. Larry and I had many coding discussions together and I have fond memories of those times. Larry was always going to be a coder, I felt sure of it.

Chuck started working for Microsoft in 1989 and today he is a General Manager. Larry is now retired but he spent the last five years of his career as a manager. Both of these great coders took the manager path that I see all too often in our industry. There is only one reason I know that great coders move into “management” – money.

One of the main reasons I started Digital Cheetah was because I didn’t want to end up as a manager. Nothing against managers – a good manager is almost as hard to find as a good coder. What is sad is that our industry almost always takes the best and most experienced coders and makes them managers. I don’t understand why this is because rarely do the best coders make the best managers.

I think companies like Google understand the importance of experience in their coders and only wish that more companies would compensate them fairly. An experienced coder is easily worth ten or more juniors, sometimes a lot more.

IBM Austin – A Patent Machine!

Since starting Digital Cheetah in 2001 I have developed some very creative solutions that are certainly worthy of patent submission. However, I have not applied for one patent. There are two reasons for this:

• The cost of processing a Patent.
• The restriction they can impose to freely use the ideas.

In the early days of Digital Cheetah the cost was the biggest reason for not pursuing a patent. However, these days I am less inclined to apply for a patent because although they offer some protection against their use, they also impede my own ability to use the same ideas in the future. For most small businesses I believe “patent protection” is an illusion and all that you really do is limit your own use of the ideas.

Most of the time the only possible reason for applying for a patent is if you plan on selling the company. Then having a patent portfolio can be attractive.