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

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Document Interchange: OOXML without Macros
 
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Dreaming in Code: The Long Tail to My Little Ecco

Me and My Ecco

It was around 1996-1997 when I was introduced to an interesting little software product named Ecco.  I am sure it was recommended to me by a coach and mentor who used it in her own work to manage commitments.  I thought I would try it.  I had no particular immediate need for the collaborative features, but old financial records reveal that I paid $52.80 to NetManage for an Ecco Pro 4.01 update on April 30, 1997.

Love the name.  This was around the time that Vicki and I had learned enough Italian to know that "ecco" is an adverb for "here" and "there" and short for "here you are."  I loved that association.  It is a great name for a digital personal-information manager.

I didn't get it.  I never did figure out how to make meaningful use of Ecco Pro.  After using it in small ways, I was flummoxed when I wanted to reorganize materials that practice taught me were not useful the way I had them.  I could never figure out when and whether material would be deleted and I was constantly puzzled by what the product actually was doing, and why.  Fundamentally, I could not discover and internalize a conceptual model by which I could safely use the thing and obtain the results I wanted.  It was very frustrating and I never got past clumsy.  (These days I have similar experience with MP3 players and how they do or do not preserve my Microsoft Media Player organizations of material and their synchronization.)

Outlook to the rescue.  Around the time that NetManage announced the cessation of Ecco Pro development, I had obtained the first public-beta release of Microsoft Outlook, starting out its life as a standalone product.  In my mind, these two events were connected.  I understood Outlook and I was much happier, enthusiastic, and rapidly switching to use it for everything I could.  It even had cross-Outlook synchronization over the Internet, although that turned out to be a serious problem with my household dial-up connection.  Later, I learned there were mysteries and incoherencies in the Outlook conceptual model too, but they were not ones that I had to confront on day one.  This has allowed Outlook to occupy the "good-enough" space in my application of it for over ten years.

I am a satisfied Outlook user.  The conceptual mysteries are ones that I can safely ignore almost all of the time.  I notice similar hiccups in my use of Windows Media Player, but they are all beyond the essentials of having it work from the beginning, and I continue to be a faithful user of WMP as well. 

I am particularly happy that Newsgator Inbox, my RSS aggregator integrates into Outlook efficiently and smoothly.  A bonus for me is that all of my Outlook content, including accumulated blog feeds, is searchable and retrievable using Microsoft Desktop Search right from my Windows XP task bar.  (My coach and her organization switched to Outlook too though I don't know if that remains the case.)  I don't think David Allen has Getting Things Done practices for Ecco Pro, although it would make sense for there to be Ecco-specific guidance.

This is not about Outlook.  I point out this experience because of an important lesson I found in the paperback edition of Dreaming in Code.  It is about the important of encouraging a successful conceptual model and about software products very often failing to be evocative for that. 

It is also the case that it is rather random who "gets it" and who doesn't, and then whether they like it or not. 

I think this is particularly important around software products that are offered as tools for productivity (and social connectivity/collaboration).   If the product is intended to be an instrument for a human activity, how it resonates with that activity is very important to pay attention to.  How it evokes populations of adopters is even more important.  That's the lesson extrapolated from my anecdotal experience, failing to wrestle Ecco to my good use while persisting with Outlook and Windows Media Player since the days of their initial introduction. 

Others will notice that their experience and perceptions of these products are different than mine.  We need to recognize that this says at least as much about us (who are the recognizers of affordances in products) as the products.  Products land differently in the intended use and conceptual grasp of different folks. 

The fortunes of software producers will hinge, of course, on how that is dealt with, along with other factors under their control, such as basic operability, coherence with a known platform, reliability, and appropriate support.

Scott Rosenberg's Long Tail Experience

I had long forgotten about my experience with Ecco.  I was startled to see it mentioned in the last pages of the paperback edition.  Rosenberg loves his Ecco.  It is his instrument for organizing and writing books.  He recounts his own use of Ecco Pro's ten-year old code and how it contrasts with Outlook for him (p. 339).  And he's clearly correct with regard to the power of Ecco as an outliner and information organizer, something I can appreciate even though I long abandoned my effort to figure it out.  (I don't read the last chapters of mysteries first, but for Dreaming I dove into the end first.)

Rosenberg looked at Chandler, the project that the Dreaming in Code story is woven around, as a potential way to replace his use of Ecco Pro before the bits rotted so much that it would no longer run on some future operating-system and hardware (p.344).  This was his personal reality test for each version of Chandler that he installed.  He was also inspired by the ease with which a long-standing Ecco feature was proposed to Chandler and added to its enhancement list (p.345).  But Rosenberg had still not adopted Chandler by the end of Summer 2007 (pbk p.360).

Ecco is Free Abandonware.  When Netmanage abandoned further development of Ecco Pro, the software was made freely-available.  It remained a closed-source, freeware offering.  It is amazing to me that there is still a community of active Ecco Pro users and enthusiasts.   Without the web and Internet, I don't think that would have happened.

Served by the Long Tail.  Ecco Pro has all of the markings of a niche product that, after 10 years without an update, remains in use among a small population of devotees.  The community size, and even its decreasing, is miniscule in proportion to the size of the overall computing population.  Whether or not there is critical mass for perpetuation of Ecco Pro, it is the long-tail visibility that allows the community to coalesce and be sustained.  That community, although working more with a freeware than open-source model, may or may not have critical mass for preservation of its existence.  There is a common feature of smaller open-source projects: Having working code that can be exercised and built upon.  There's also something about being small enough for individuals to grasp and add their contribution.  That's phenomenal in this case.

Even though the source code has never been released, there is recent revitalization of the product.  Rosenberg marvels at this phenomenon, crediting the existence of a plug-in model for Ecco Pro for its feasibility (pbk pp.360-361).  I think that long-tail supporting structures are also important, including the existence of a Yahoo! Group and other ways for enthusiasts and supporters to connect and collaborate on the perpetuation of a favorite instrument.

Recognition and Reflection

Something familiar in the mirror this way comes.  I find myself as a one-man supporter of a 10-year-old niche product myself.  I hadn't made that connection until just now.  The community is different, because the open-source software is middleware known only to administrators, integrators and developers.  And it connects mainly proprietary products.  Engagement is necessarily different with different flavors of stakeholders. 

I worry about critical mass of the community and the inevitable bit rot, something that Windows Vista and 64-bit platform developments already portend.  We have not found a forum for mutual recognition and sharing of concerns and approaches.  I wonder whether creative devotees will appear or it simply ends with me.  I need to look at what is missing in my conduct that would evoke an opportunity for participation.

---

I love Scott Rosenberg's writing, but I find myself wanting to think too much about what he says.  This slows down my analysis, and I need to get over that. 

At the end of February, 2008, Rosenberg offered a few copies of the new Dreaming in Code paperback edition to bloggers who would discuss the book.  I raised my hand because I wanted to see the added postscript and its update of the Chandler effort from January 2006 through September 2007.  Frankly, I used my promise to blog about the book as a structure for tricking myself into giving the entire book the careful reading I have neglected since purchasing the hard-copy edition in October, 2007. 

I've had the paperback for over a month now and there are three matters that I want to explore.  I know that my researching in the text and the chapter notes will drive up more.  This initial foray is inspired by an incidental portion of the new, 6-page postscript where Rosenberg mentions a favorite writer's tool.

posted by orcmid at 4/03/2008 12:46:00 PM