Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

 

Satisfying Generated Wants

A Penny For...: I want it now!.  This is another Scoble spotting with supported anecdotal experience.  In the APennyFor article, Todd points out that it is very important to match availability with want, especially when you've cultivated the want:

"The Internet has changed my tolerance for waiting. I can hear or read about a book and go order it on Amazon that moment. They can have it to me the next day. iTunes is even better. I can have the song I want in about 30 seconds.

More often, I want to just know more about something. I have a greater intolerance for a lack of information. There is no reason I should not be able to find out about a product or service via the internet. Companies continue to underestimate the need and the intolerance.
    . . .
Advice to companies: People want to know about your products NOW and after they make a decision to purchase, they want them ASAP."

Scoble relates a confirming experience and adds an important consideration: Customers also want to drive their relationship with suppliers, not be managed as customer relationships.  The use of RSS as a way of allowing customers to find out what you have to say on their terms moves the initiative. It avoids registration and other silliness that makes customers work too hard and creates an opportunity for mailing-list sales.  Having a private feed devoted to a particular customer is a different case, and a further opportunity.  I can see many ways that is useful in consulting projects.

What has this in my face at this point in time is that I am, at this very moment, working out a commitment to ship a software product in 12 months, announcing it in six.  (I also intend to complete my M.Sc project dissertation at the end of 9 months, so parlaying them together could be cool or disastrous, take your pick.)  It is pretty clear that the 6+6 model doesn't work for a small-change software-publishing operation.  Some sort of rolling build-up with usable product available from the moment of announcement is more like it.  This is a suite effort, so the idea of progressive delivery is workable as well as a way to establish a track record for dependable project management.

Then I thought how great it would be if SourceForge projects had RSS Feeds and, by golly, they already do!  Other sources, such as the on-line Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) are also providing feeds for downloads and their announcement.  This seems like an useful way to offer a variety of customer services on a customer-demand basis.

There is a practice used with Atom that is valuable for becoming feed-centric:  The feed can be made human-presentable by the use of XSLT to make an HTML view. Feed readers can easily ignore the XSLT processing instruction at the front of the file, directly processing the XML instead. 

Here's a place where all of the pieces seem to have landed together.  From here, it is a matter of paying attention.



posted by orcmid at 6/6/2004 01:36:46 PM