Image: Rather than sitting on the sidelines and watching the game from the bench, software companies need to learn the new strategy and marketing skills required to get back into the game and win.

Welcome to Story Complete, my blog for strategy consultancy ISV Focus to help independent software vendors (ISVs) sidelined by innovation and new players entering the game to acquire the new strategy and marketing skills they need to get back onto the field, re-enter the game and win. I’ve now retired this blog, but if you’ve got any questions then please add your comment to the relevant article, or get in touch with me direct.

Image: The latest construction video from 37signals gives a good idea of how the new offices will look. Towards the end we see the in-house theatre for the first time. [If your RSS reader doesn’t show the YouTube video embedded above then please visit the original post in your browser.]

Carrying on from the previous episode, the latest video from 37signals shows the build-out of the new office. From 3:3:30 onwards we get a first look at the theatre. The raised seating base looks a good distance from the front of the room. Mayban odd perspective effect from the camera? We’ll see.

I recently posted on the mystery 37signals created around their new offices. Well, blog posts revealing the floor plan, construction details and a video showing construction progress have solved the mystery.

Image: 37signals reveal the theatre at their new offices in Chicago. Could it be a coincidence it has 37 seats? [If your RSS reader doesn’t show the YouTube video embedded above then please visit the original post in your browser.]

A pleasant surprise to many 37signals blog readers was what lay at the heart of the new office space: a classroom-like theater!

A classroom-like theater dominates the south side of the office, right off the entrance. This is a 37-seat theatre (diagram currently shows 38, but we went with 37 for cheesy reasons) where we can hold workshops and master classes.

Having 37 seats to match the company name seems an insider joke of no real importance. Look deeper, however, and we discover a remarkable (clever, easy and inexpensive) story crying out to spread.

38 seats? Who cares? 36 seats? Again, who cares? But, 37 seats in a theatre at 37signals? Now that’s remarkable! It’s a sure bet people attending events will notice and remark on it. And so, another story about 37signals spreads.

Remarkable stories don’t need be grandiose. What makes a story spread is that people notice it, and then remark on it to friends and colleagues. Look for every opportunity to craft stories to spread. Sometimes a story is as simple as the number of chairs in a room.

Your stories must be true. Developers can spot lies and it’s easier than ever to spread bad news, such as on Facebook. Not to pick on Facebook, but they serve as an example of conflict between a platform vendor and developers.

Facebook is a platform for third-party applications. And not just for games; you’ll find a range of business and marketing applications as well. After all, with Facebook’s massive user base there’s money to be made.

Facebook has chosen to tell a specific story with their developer blogs, forums, wiki, bug tracker and f8 conference. Open source projects such as the Cassandra NoSQL database and HipHop PHP compiler add credibility.

Their developer-friendly story sounds good, but is it true? Browsing the forums suggests they don’t always live the story. This lack of consistency leads to frustrated and angry developers. You don’t want upset developers.

One example: Facebook doesn’t (can’t?) distinguish developer and end-user roles. Developer accounts get banned for inappropriate (undocumented) use of APIs. Developers testing their apps can trigger Facebook’s abuse detectors.

To make it worse, a byzantine ban review process also seems unable to distinguish developers testing their apps from bad people. This seem a pretty fundamental oversight for such a massive and successful platform.

It appears Facebook isn’t living the story they chose to tell. Your product is your software and the stories that go with it. You get to choose your story, but it must be true. Live your story each day, at every touch point, to make it so.

History has proven that platforms without developers are doomed to fail. Even so, you don’t need to go to extremes like Steve Ballmer’s Developer chant. It might make good material for a funny music video, but there are limits!

Image: Steve Ballmer has gone down in history for this appearance at the Windows developers conference. [If your RSS reader doesn’t show the YouTube video embedded above then please visit the original post in your browser.]

Bruce Nussbaum’s article Facebook’s Culture Problem May Be Fatal shows what went wrong when Facebook chose to tell a new story inconsistent with the worldview of their core users.

Image: Andrew Biss gives a short introduction to Story Complete, what it is about and who the blog is aimed at. [If your RSS reader doesn’t show the YouTube video embedded above then please visit the original post in your browser.]

Update: I am now showing the YouTube versions of the videos to ensure the widest coverage. I have therefore removed the links to the downloadable self-hosted versions of the videos for the time being.

By default the embedded video player starts with the SD video. To view the HD version click on the HD link in the top right corner of the player. Swapping from SD to HD restarts the video from the beginning.

Downloads

To make it easier to watch videos offline you’ll see download links for the video at various sizes and bitrates on the right of this page:

• 720p HD – 1280×720 HD encoded at 2600 kbps.
• 360p – 640×360 SD encoded at 1300 kbps.
• iPod – 640×360 encoded at 1200 kbps with a simpler H.264 profile ideal for Apple iPod, iPhone, iPad and many other smartphones.

Workflow

I record at Full HD on a Canon LEGRIA HF S10 camcorder and edit in Sony Vegas Movie Studio. Sorenson Squeeze compresses and encodes the edited video into MP4 H.264 format.

To lessen the load on my web server I host videos on the Amazon S3 cloud storage service. I am considering the Amazon CloudFront content delivery network to enable real-time video streaming with adaptive bitrates.

Syndication

I syndicate videos to Story Complete channels at YouTube, blip.tv, Yahoo Video and Facebook with the TubeMogul video distribution service. This avoids uploading to each site individually; a real time-saver!

RSS and iTunes

The RSS feed includes the video for each post as an enclosure for your RSS reader. In future, you’ll have extra RSS feeds to choose between HD, SD and iPod versions. I also plan a Story Complete podcast feed for the iTunes store.

Once upon a time it was lucrative to play the software industry game. We sold functionality at excellent margins. Annual maintenance was steady money for (rather) little work. Technology advanced at a manageable pace. The peer community dispensed recognition. Growth was steady and life was good.

But then the software game changed. In many niches FOSS has turned functionality into a commodity. SaaS upsets perpetual licensing, while annual maintenance is increasingly suspect. The community scattered as global players bought and consolidated. Innovation quickened. New business slowed.

Image: Andrew Biss gives a short introduction to Story Complete, what it is about and who the blog is aimed at. [If your RSS reader doesn’t show the YouTube video embedded above then please visit the original post in your browser.]

Many software companies resisted these changes. They dreamed their niche was a special case. That the new rules of the game wouldn’t apply. A fatal focus on functionality left them unable to compete against global players playing by other rules. Faltering sales and lower maintenance left no room to manoeuver.

Innovation has sidelined many formerly profitable software companies. The rules of the software industry game changed as new players entered. Tried and trusted tools and tactics don’t work as well as before. Will it only be the others who get to play the software game in future? Are we doomed to reminiscing?

No. You can (must!) re-enter the software industry game. It won’t be easy to leave the sidelines, re-enter the game and win. Doing so matters, however, and not just to you; it matters to us as well.

The industry has changed dramatically since I joined in 1980. Our tools and technology are remarkable. However, without competition and a diverse set of market players we wouldn’t have most of them today. While an industry with just a few global players is in their interest, it’s not in our interest.

I founded Story Complete in March 2010 to use my 30 years of experience in the international software industry to do work that matters. My idea: work with sidelined software companies to explore and share the skills to re-enter the game and win.

And what’ll it take? What’s to learn? Well: spread stories, don’t rely on facts. See that emotions and wants are replacing functions and needs (yes, even for B2B). Stop interrupting and start earning permission. Open up and collaborate.

The software game has changed for ever, with evolving rules and aggressive new players. The good old days are history. Even so, it’s still about software; that’ll never change. And if we know and understand anything, it’s software.

So, time to leave the sidelines and start to build your skills to re-enter the game and win. Come on, it’ll be fun. Let’s start today…

I’m pleased to announce that Story Complete has a new design. As I hope you can see, it stresses the blog’s content and not the information found in most blog’s sidebars. If you’re seeing this post in your RSS reader then please pop over and take a look at the new Story Complete.

I changed to a 1-column design from the 2-column format used by most blogs. The post meta information is right of the post content; all other information in the page footer. This keeps the pages clean and highlights the content, which is, after all, why you’re here.

Image: The new design has one column, rather than the two column format used by most blogs. (View full-size)

New visitors to Story Complete will mostly come from Google searches or links on other blogs. I exploded the blog so each post acts as its own home page. We can’t assume visitors start at the domain-level home page and navigate down to the posts. Navigation is out. Search is in.

Image: The old design used the traditional two-up column format used by the majority of blogs. (View full-size)

Story Complete still uses a custom version of the used Thesis theme framework for WordPress. The excellent Thesis OpenHook plugin allows me to insert custom code into the page without editing template files. Using these together allowed me to come up with a fresh clean design while avoiding the typical Thesis look seen around the web.

Software companies often find themselves stranded on islands of excellence, serving a small group of customers but unable to grow. Opportunistic sales result in a few more islands from time to time.

It’s depressing to see companies with excellent technology shipwrecked. A love-hate relationship with marketing is often a contributory reason. We love having many qualified leads, but hate getting our hands dirty with marketing.

Why’s marketing hated like this? In my experience the cause is often the developer background of many managers. Developers equate lead generation with advertising. And developers hate advertising even more than marketing!

A ship has appeared over the horizon to offer shipwrecked software companies a new hope (to mix film genres). The hated advertising no longer works; our world is simply too cluttered. We can’t pay attention to everything, so we tune almost all of it out.

If prospects are not paying attention, where will new qualified leads come from? How will we find them? Well, the bad news is: we can’t find them. On the other hand, the good news is: we can make it easier for them to find us.

Seth Godin, author of the world’s most popular marketing blog, has written for years about the death of advertising. Seth’s advice: tell an authentic story to a (very) small group already inclined to believe it. If your story is remarkable, they’ll spread it for you.

Seth’s presentation at the Business of Software conference in September 2008 is a great introduction. I recommend you invest 45 minutes right now to watch it:

Image: At the Business of Software conference in September 2008 Seth Godin told software developers what they didn’t expect to hear: you’re in the fashion business. [If your RSS reader doesn’t show the Blip.tv video embedded above then please visit the original post in your browser.]

The key insight for me: give up our fascination with functions and admit we’re in the fashion business. I couldn’t agree more.

Seth’s presentations, blog and especially his book All Marketers Are Liars Tell Stories inspired me to launch Story Complete. I want to use this blog to share what I’ve learned in 30 years of software development and marketing.

Building on Seth’s work and adding my own views and insights, I want to help software companies escape from their islands of excellence, win new business, grow and become more profitable. And last, but not least, help rediscover the fun in our software industry.

I developed applications for CICS on IBM mainframes in the 1980s. At that time IBM had a project to reimplement CICS using formal methods. Reading about the Verification Grand Challenge reminded me of that project.

An ambitious 15-year international research project, its goal is to create a large repository of useful code, verified to the highest standards of rigour and accuracy. An early case study applied automated verification tools to prove CICS is formally correct. For this they used the CICS Z notation specifications from the 1980s.

Safety critical systems use formal methods because believing software is correct isn’t good enough when life’s at risk. Commercial software, however, is different: belief is all we have! We must tell our story to a target audience already inclined to believe our story.

I’ve worked on transformation tools such as migrating IBM VSE to MVS, refactoring spaghetti code and translating COBOL into Java. Success in this niche depends on whether a prospect is already inclined to believe a solution is possible. While some are inclined to believe this (good), others want to see proof before engaging (bad).

Proving commercial software is 100% correct is impossible. All you can do is answer specific concerns with case studies and proof of concepts. Like clinical trials: no matter how much data you present, you can’t exclude complications.

If a prospect asks you to prove your story’s true, watch out: you’re looking at a heap of hurt. Instead, find a target audience already inclined to believe your story. Your first cluster of customers will spread your story to their less believing friends and colleagues once they’re happy. Be pragmatic, not formal: just say no to proofs.

The clash of worldviews between Apple and developers took a turn for the worse this week. For the first time, Apple will be banning meta programming tools for the iPhone and iPad. Section 3.3.1 of the latest iPhone Developer Program License Agreement states:

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

This new wording bans apps not originally written in an official Xcode language. While language interpreters (JVM, Flash etc) have always been verboten on the iPhone; this is a disturbing escalation.

Although apps are often originally written under the shower, it’s useful to see how GPL defines source code: it’s what you use to maintain your app. On this reading, Apple wants you to develop and maintain your app in an official Xcode language. No meta tools.

Generators, functional languages and tools working at higher abstraction levels are out. This covers Scheme, Unity3D, Titanium, MonoTouch and many others. The ban also (unsurprisingly) covers Adobe’s upcoming Flash cross-compiler Packager for iPhone.

Good code generators emit readable, maintainable source code that only uses native APIs. The generator world has done this for decades to reassure customers worried a tool vendor might go bust. Should that happen, they can maintain the generated code.

How can Apple know you’re really maintaining Xcode source? Perhaps you’re using a tool and secretly regenerating for Xcode? Static source analysis would give the game away, so maybe in future Apple will demand you also submit your source code for approval?

Apple’s walled garden is rapidly changing into a hermetically sealed world with a (secret) licence agreement to sterilise each and every input. It sounds to me like a world Howard Hughes might have called insanely great!

37signals has strong opinions about work. But how should an office look if you’re an international team? That often works from home? With a 4-day week? That hates interruptions? For the moment, they’re not saying.

Image: A look around 37signals’ new office space in Chicago before the start of construction. [If your RSS reader doesn’t show the YouTube video embedded above then please visit the original post in your browser.]

To tell a good story, keep the ending until, well, the end. You can see this in a series of videos from 37signals about their new offices.

To keep the audience’s attention, they’ve added a little mystery to what could easily be just another boring office video.

Image: Construction work is now well under way in the new 37signals offices. [If your RSS reader doesn’t show the YouTube video embedded above then please visit the original post in your browser.]

We’ve seen the empty space and start of construction. Now we’ll just have to wait to see how it ends. Will their offices match how we expect them to? If not, why not? Oh, by the way, were those blueprints in the 2nd video real or perhaps a red herring…

While we’re waiting to see what they’ve planned, Office Snapshots has lots of office interiors to inspire you. Don’t miss Epic’s incredible campus: WOW!

Update: So, the mystery about what surprises 37signals has planned for their new offices has finally been resolved.

Fire-fighting often becomes a core competency at software companies. The usual cause? Our dread of no revenue forces us to accept customers who are not consistent with our worldview. Unique customers cause trouble.

You’re doing the best you can to deliver great software. You pull all nighters and work weekends to satisfy each hard-won customer. Been there. Done that. But, while it’s great to play the hero fire-fighter occasionally, in the end something’s got to give.

Seth Godin nails it in the 2nd edition’s preface to All Marketers Are Liars Tell Stories:

There are small businesses that are so focused on what they do that they forget to take the time to describe the story of why they do it.

There’s no time to think about your story in the middle of a roaring forest fire! You’ve got to put the fire out. For good. By starving it of fuel: customers who just don’t fit.

Stare down your no revenue fear and accept your product is not (must not be) right for everyone. Sounds easy, but it’s difficult in a pipeline review meeting.

Craft a story to resonate with your (extremely) specific target audience and be maniacal about your target audience’s boundary. Don’t let easy revenue sidetrack you. It won’t seem such a good idea when you’re standing in a clearing surrounded by flames. Again.

Put your fire-fighting gear away, find a comfy chair and tell us a story instead.

Worldviews change; ignore at your peril. At Dynasty Technologies Inc. in the 1990s, I saw first-hand what happens when your worldview holds you hostage.

Dynasty was a 2nd generation client/server application development tool. Our main competitor was Forté Software Inc. Founded in the mid 1990s, both companies had significant venture capital funding with a growing global base of enthusiastic early adopters.

The Dynasty Development Environment generated native C/C++ code with no runtime system. Forté generated proprietary code with a runtime interpreter. For some developers runtimes were OK; for others a pure incarnation of evil. Customer’s runtime worldview was decisive for sales.

Business was great until Java exploded on the scene in 1996. The JDK had 2 million downloads by 1997, while the 1998 Java One conference had 20,000 attendees. Developers had clearly spoken: runtimes weren’t (any more) evil.

Java was the polar opposite of Dynasty’s no runtime story. It was easy for us to decide to keep our native code worldview. No Java generation from Dynasty. Forté had no such worldview issue. Java’s architecture resonated with their runtimes are good story. Generating Java was an obvious way for Forté to go.

Forté added Java code generation, which proved an excellent decision as Sun bought Forté for $540 million in 1999. Our commitment to the native code worldview and our no runtime story blinded us to seismic changes in the development tools market.

Dynasty continued supporting existing code-generation customers, but we never crossed the chasm. We subsequently chose to tell a different story: one about applying Artificial Intelligence techniques to business apps.

Don’t repeat our mistake of letting your existing worldview and story hold you hostage. Watch how your target audience’s worldview evolves and change your story so it still resonates. We’re all in the fashion business now. Ciao!

Being remarkable doesn’t always mean you have to develop something large. Sometimes remarkable is small, as this Clang example seen today on Hacker News demonstrates very nicely.

Clang is an open-source compiler front-end for C, C++ and Objective C. The project builds on the LLVM compiler back-end with the goal of replacing the GCC tool chain. Their worldview accepts that programmers can and do make mistakes. Amazing feats of Clang Error Recovery shows how they’ve woven this worldview into the compiler.

What caught my eye was how Clang recovers from unknown tokens. Instead of unhelpful error messages (like GCC), the Clang team chose to do something remarkable: they added a spell-checker to guess what you mean:

$ cat t.c
#include <inttypes.h>
int64 x;

$ clang t.c
t.c:2:1: error: unknown type name 'int64'; did you mean 'int64_t'?
int64 x;
^~~~~
int64_t

$ gcc t.c
t.c:2: error: expected '=', ',', ';', 'asm' or '__attribute__' before 'x'

Another example:

$ cat t.c
#include <sys/stat.h>
int foo(int x, struct stat *P) {
  return P->st_blocksize*2;
}

$ clang t.c
t.c:4:13: error: no member named 'st_blocksize' in 'struct stat'; did you mean 'st_blksize'?
  return P->st_blocksize*2;
            ^~~~~~~~~~~~
            st_blksize

$ gcc t.c
t.c: In function 'foo':
t.c:4: error: 'struct stat' has no member named 'st_blocksize'

Clang uses the assumed token for the rest of the parse, avoiding the follow-on errors you typically get from compilers. See the post on the LLVM blog for more examples of how Clang recovers from unknown tokens and other common programming errors.

Clang’s spell-checker is simple, but remarkable. I don’t recall seeing this in any compiler, interpreter, or generator I’ve used. We could’ve implemented this in the tools I’ve worked on; shame we never thought of it. Props to Clang!

I’m spreading this story as I hope you’ll find it useful and might inspire you to add spell-checking somewhere unexpected in your product. Your software will be more remarkable and you’ll have a great story that might spread.

So, it only took 2 days to hack the Apple iPad. Trusting DRM to work was unrealistic on Apple’s part. Even so, we in the B2B software business have our own blind spot when it comes to software protection.

Each of the software products I’ve worked on has included a protection system. Sometimes a hardware dongle, but more commonly software-based schemes linking the software licence to the customer’s hardware configuration.

We were scared customers wouldn’t pay if they didn’t have to. With licence fees starting at $10K for each developer seat, hundreds of thousands were at stake.

As the music industry has shown time and again, pirates can and will break protection schemes. In our case it wasn’t pirates with cracked versions. No, it turned out some of our leading customers were using developer versions that had leaked from our labs.

Was the protection money well spent? I don’t think so. Instead of putting obstacles in customer’s way, we should’ve invested the money to make our customers even happier.

What does it say about your attitude if you have to force them to pay? What do you think it says about their attitude to you? Instead, do your best to create a culture and environment where your customers want to pay you, not one where they have to.

If your product uses software protection then ask yourself if you need it? Wouldn’t it be better making your software and the stories to go with it better? Does your DRM scheme make it easier or harder for your satisfied customers to spread your story?

Tim O’Reilly said: “For a typical author, obscurity is a far greater threat than piracy.” I think it’s also true for B2B software companies. DRM annoys customers and can’t stop determined pirates. Your best bet is a remarkable product and a story that spreads.

The Apple iPad and other tablets open attractive new channels for storytelling. Increasingly be a tablet will be around when your customer spreads your story.

Unlike notebooks, tablets are easily and naturally shared by passing them back and forth. Ideal for ad-hoc demos in the pub!

Check your website looks good in both portrait and landscape at tablet resolutions (1024×768 for the iPad). Check you’re using supported file formats. The Apple iPad doesn’t support Adobe’s Flash, so you’ll need to re-encode videos in H.264 format.

Check your web product works acceptably with a touch interface. Create a simple native app to simulate key parts of your non-web product. Create high-resolution screen captures with comments, explanations and links to supporting information.

It won’t be long before Apple iPads start showing up in your web analytics log. Get ahead of the game with tablet-compatible storytelling content.

The story’s set 20 years ago when I was building cross-platform application development tools. Our customer’s worldview was that their applications would be running for decades. They expected to move from one platform to another as technology changed. They wanted to build platform-independent apps.

Customers liked hearing what others were doing. One story was about a customer in Switzerland using a Unisys mainframe as a server. Nothing unusual there. What made them remarkable, however, was that their clients were NeXT workstations from Steve Jobs’ Next Computer, Inc. Back then this sounded (and was) an exotic combination.

What made this story even more remarkable was Steve Jobs had to give them a briefing in Switzerland every year. They must’ve been an important customer. I doubt Steve Jobs would agree to do that today, no matter how many iPads you buy!

I never got to cross paths with Steve Jobs. Even so, it’s a good story that resonated. It’s also a reminder that while facts are forgettable, stories survive.

Gather every story that supports your target audience’s worldview. Share these on your website so they’re searchable and linkable. You never know which story will resonate, so make it as easy as possible to spread if it does.

A post about VaultPress on Mike Davidson’s blog reminds us that weaving a story into software can be easy. VaultPress is from the great team behind WordPress and is a real-time backup service for self-hosted WordPress blogs.

Most WordPress products are freemium. VaultPress is paid-only: a high-end product for high-end users. Or: VaultPress is for people whose worldview leads them to expect to pay for backups. That covers me, and I don’t consider myself a high-end user!

WordPress is very visible company with millions of users. Many of these will notice VaultPress and take a look. Because most users associate WordPress with free, the VaultPress team wove their story into their beta sign-up:

Image: Signup form for the VaultPress beta with an explicit statement that this service is going to cost real money — highlight added by me. (View full-size)

VaultPress can only disappoint if you expect a frvice. Much better to let you know right now that this isn’t the product for you. No tears at bedtime.

When prospects are rare you’ll do everything to win. Development adds features. Marketing invents ROI justifications. Prospects are too precious to waste; you cannot risk letting even one get away. You do whatever it takes.

Lack of a shared worldview is an increasing problem as you grow. Special cases abound; exceptions appear. Everybody is paranoid about saying no.

To see how sticking to a clear understanding of your worldview changes everything, take a look at 37signals. They are a 20 person company selling web-based apps for small groups and individuals. With more than 3 million users, they are very profitable.

Some account for their success as due to clever marketing, PR or even a cargo-cult. A more convincing explanation, however, is their total commitment to their worldview:

We believe most software is too complex. Too many features, too many promises. Instead, we build simpler web-based software with elegant interfaces and thoughtful features you’ll actually use.

Their story builds on this worldview. They live it with an intensity that can seem scary:

• Not for you – Tell prospects who don’t share their worldview to look elsewhere.
• Feature creep – Reject feature requests inconsistent with their worldview.
• Up and out – Recommend customers find another products if they grow too large.

Knowing what’s in their worldview also tells them what’s outside. They have a clearly understood basis to say no. And they do. A lot. And this upsets some people. A lot.

37signals doesn’t try pleasing people who’ll never be in sync with their worldview. Instead they invest in making real customers happy. These enthusiastically spread the 37signals story. Prospects are abundant, not rare. No famine here.

You don’t have to share 37signal’s specific worldview to learn from their success. They have created a virtuous circle by sticking rigorously to their worldview. This demands a clearly drawn line in the sand and the determination to say no. Not easy, but doable.

Define the boundary of your worldview so your team knows when (and why) to say no. Every time you say no to someone or something outside your worldview you win. Show it’s (really and truly) OK to say no by recognizing and celebrating these wins.

Don’t waste time and money trying to convert mismatched prospects into (at the best) reluctant customers. Focus on making your existing customers so happy and satisfied they’ll recommend you to friends and colleagues.

Live your story to make it true. It worked for 37signals; it can work for you.