TypePad Widgets Don’t Cut It

I’ve been playing with TypePad’s new widgets and, frankly, am not impressed.

To be fair, it’s great that Six Apart is starting to see TypePad as an extensible platform upon which you can add applications (widgets). Their move reminds me of Salesforce.com’s AppExchange project to enable developers to extend their CRM platform. It also reminds me of Microsoft’s efforts to build a community of several million developers using its Windows and .NET platforms, expecting some small percentage of them to create killer apps — think Lotus, Skype, and Netscape Navigator — that drive platform sales.

Which brings me to my main beef: the selection of widgets available. None of them are “killer apps”. Very few of them are things that, from my perspective, would actually improve a blog. There’s no Google Blog Search, Google Ads, Yahoo Ads, Flickr, Google Maps, del.icio.us tagrolls, ZoomClouds, or live chat for people reading your blog. Or a generic RSS-to-JavaScript capability. Or a way to add more than three feeds to your blog’s margins. Or a way to combine multiple feeds in one. There are dozens of quality web services that today can be added to a blog with a bit of JavaScript programming. All of these could be converted into TypePad widgets with the right approach, which I explain below.

True, there are some TypePad widgets that look interesting such as Pandora’s personal radio station and FeedBurner. But these will not be enough to make the Widget program popular among bloggers or widget developers.

My secondary beef is that this problem has been well known for a long time. For instance, this post from 2004 outlines a number of TypePad shortcomings. It’s a little-known fact that Six Apart has very few actual developers; perhaps this is why the company is so slow to roll out new improvements.

The actual user experience for adding widgets to a blog is pretty slick. But in my opinion, it is the wrong approach, because it requires Six Apart to cut partnership deals with widget providers, and then to have those providers actually implement the API. This takes time. It would have been far better if Six Apart had designed the widgets to work without requiring partnership deals. For instance, provide a wizard that walks someone through the process of adding Google Ads to a blog. This doesn’t require a partnership with Google. It simply requires some pages that prompt the user to enter their AdSense ID, their display preferences, etc. Designed this way, each TypePad widget would have required days of development, rather than weeks of partnership negotiations, and TypePad would have had the ideal collection of “killer apps” for its platform.

Yahoo Ad Network no match for Google Adsense

So says this post.

Gnarly

Express 27 racing in the ocean off San Francisco in the recent 2006 Lightship Race. Looks rough.

Ask

Guy Kawasaki posts some good questions prospective employees should ask before joining a startup.

Stagnate

Interesting post by a Yahoo engineer about how Yahoo Finance has stagnated, providing an opportunity for Google to build Google Finance. This traffic graph shows how Yahoo Finance traffic has declined over the past three years, while Google Finance is on the rise. One of the best quotes:

Yahoo! Finance has stagnated for a long time. It never really recovered from the pain of the dotcom crash….There was a lack of leadership and, even more importantly, a serious LACK OF VISION. It really disappointed me. It makes me sad because virtually all of the new/innovative/cool features in Google Finance are things we talked about YEARS ago. Many of them I’d lobbied for repeatedly. Some were even prototyped.

To me, there are two interesting aspects to this story. The first is how a relatively young company like Yahoo could let one of its main services stagnate. This stagnation didn’t happen at 100 year old Ford Motor Company, 50 year old IBM, or 30 year old Microsoft. It began right after the dotcom crash, around 2001, when Yahoo was only several years old.

Another interesting twist to the story is that, in an industry where many take Andy Grove’s saying “only the paranoid survive” to heart, and continually push for new innovations, Yahoo CEO Terry Semel’s reaction has been to mock Google’s efforts. Not to recognize Google’s progress and exhort his team to re-invigarate their products. With an attitude like that at the top, one has to wonder about Yahoo’s long term prospects.

Freemium: New Word, Common Business Model

Sometimes a new word or phrase comes along that does a great job describing something that we struggled to explain. For instance, “AJAX” and “clicks and mortar”. I think “Freemium” is going to be another one of those terms. It’s described here and here.

Word

I just played with AjaxWrite, an AJAX word processor. It’s a good start, but needs work.

AjaxWrite features the ability to import Microsoft Word documents. This is critical given the large number of Microsoft Word files on people’s computers. This capability is not that solid. I was able to import a one page Word doc into AjaxWrite. But when I tried importing a five page document with tables, the program crashed.

Turn

Interesting

Switch?

For a while I’ve wondered if my next computer should be a Mac. I’ve held off, mainly due to a concern that some of the PC applications I use would not be available on the Mac. Some call this the applications barrier to entry. Over time, Apple has done a lot to win over people with my concerns. There are (once again) great Mac-only programs such as Spotlight (desktop search that works better than Google Desktop), iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, and more.

But contact management has been an ongoing factor preventing my switch. I rely on Plaxo to automatically update my contacts. Plaxo has not been available for the Mac. Until now. I’m not throwing out my PC quite yet. But before I consider Windows Vista and spend any time updading, I’m going to give the Mac a long look.

Which brings me to my second point. To keep my options open, I’ve moved all my documents off my PC and onto a network-attached hard drive. I can access this drive from any computer with an ethernet connection — whether a Mac or a PC. Since my personal files reside on a universally-accessible device, it would be much easier for me to switch from a PC to a Mac should I choose to do so.

I wonder: why doesn’t Apple get into the business of network-attached hard drives? Sure, there are existing players in this market, but none of them can match Apple in terms of consumer awareness, brand, product design, usability, web services integation, and reliability (when has anyone every complained of a broken iPod or iTunes crash?). The device I’m talking about is very much within Apple’s capability to build. It would be essentially a Mac Mini minus the CPU and ports. Or, an iPod with a bigger hard drive plus WiFi and Ethernet. Building this device would enable Apple to sell yet another device to its iPod user base and, more strategically, lower the barriers to switching from a Windows PC to a Mac.

Bubble

If this isn’t evidence of a new Internet bubble, I don’t know what is. Link A three person startup headed by former Apple CEO Gil Amelio raises $150M in an IPO. Gil was fired from Apple in 1997 and replaced with Steve Jobs. Look at the chart of Apple stock price below (link). See how much value was lost during Gil’s tenure from ’95 to ’97. A steady downward slide. I guess the market has a short memory…

Tooting my own horn again: An alliance I helped set up a couple of years ago between Mercury and Infragistics has generated some news:

Infragistics, Inc. (Booth 216) unveils Infragistics NetAdvantage 2006, a
comprehensive presentation layer toolset for designing commercial class user
interfaces for all Microsoft® development environments Windows Forms,
ASP.NET, and Tablet PC. The company will also announce Infragistics®
TestAdvantage(TM) 2006, a collection of custom libraries built using Mercury
Interactive QuickTest Professional.

It’s nice to see one’s work have a public impact. But the lag time between effort and impact is always higher than one initially imagines.

Position

Infragistics is one of those little known companies that makes great products. What they produce are “object libraries” that are used to quickly build software user interfaces. With all the buzz around AJAX, they recently added a page to their website talking how they enable people to build AJAX apps fast. Link

Funny thing is, they’ve had AJAX capabilities for a while now, but never publicized them until AJAX came into fashion. That’s how the software business is sometimes… sometimes you wake up one day and find yourself in a hot market position.

I’m looking forward to seeing what Dean and the rest of Infragistics team does with AJAX in the future.

AJAX Apps and Productivity Gaps

This post started as a product review but ended up being something quite different. Read on…

I played around with iRows today. iRow is an AJAX-based spreadsheet. Excel in your browser.

The promised benefits of iRows are: There’s no software to install, so it’s easy to get a workgroup using iRows. Being network-based, it’s easy to share spreadsheets with coworkers. And, you can import Excel spreadsheets into iRows.

This seemed like an idea solution for my needs, which is to easily communicate project status via spreadsheet circulated among a few coworkers, freeing them up from trying to understand project status on the basis of many emails flying around.

On the positive side, iRows’ basic spreadsheet functionality seems to work. You can easily navigate between cells, and resize columns, for instance.

Unfortunately, iRows didn’t import my Excel spreadsheet correctly. I ran into the following problems:

• iRows cannot import Excel spreadsheets with a space in the name, e.g., “My Spreadsheet.xls”.
• iRows removes almost all Excel formatting: font, font size, alignment, cell borders, column widths, row height, etc.
• iRows ungroups grouped cells.
• iRows removes return characters entered into cells, i.e., ALT enter on Windows machines.

The result was that what was a clear, understandable spreadsheet was now a jumbled mess. I wasn’t able to reach my goal of quickly and clearly communicate project status.

The above shortcomings are critical. A lot of the potential early adopers for iRows have taken the time to learn Excel, and don’t want to give up their functionality. Given all that’s in Excel, it won’t be easy to attain seamless Excel migration capabilities.

I commend iRows on seeing the need for Excel import. Too many Web 2.0 firms providing AJAX productivity apps ignore the vast installed base of Windows/Office, and the switching costs that users must pay to migrate their data to the web. But their product has a long way to go before it’s truly usable.

I see a parallel between the coming battle between AJAX apps like iRows and desktop (“legacy” is too presumptuous) apps like Excel, and two testing products I used to manage: WinRunner and QuickTest Professional (QTP). QTP started life as a much easier-to-use tool than WinRunner, which it was intended to quickly replace. However, it quickly gained a reputation as being much less flexible and powerful. Even today, several years after QTP’s initial release, many still perceived it as less powerful and flexible than WinRunner, even though the gap had closed measurably in recent years. I’m sure that eventually QTP will be perceived as more powerful and flexible than WinRunner, but that will take years.

I think the market is in for a similar surprise around AJAX applications. Right now people are impressed with any kind of AJAX app. And rightly so: they’re not easy to build, and they are some of the most significant user-facing software innovations in recent years.

But technology doesn’t sell. Productivity sells. And productivity is a function of how well a software product automates use cases. Doing this requires a lot of thinking about user needs, design, coding, testing, time and money. Decades worth of time, money and effort, if you’re trying to knock off a product as entrenched as Office.

You think I’m exaggerating? Refer to the WinRunner v. QuickTest in the example above. My team and I controlled the product development of both products, and yet still weren’t able to close the productivity gap after several years. Now think of the case where two competing products are built by different firms, and one of those products (i.e., Office) has 90% market share. You’re talking at least a decade, maybe longer, before you can expect to reach Productivity Parity.

I wonder: have any of the founders of, and investors in, these AJAX products companies considered how these companies are going to fund their product development for ten years? Because that’s what it will take to beat Microsoft Office.

Dead

Windows Live has been promoted as a the AJAX-ification of key Microsoft products. For instance, see this link.

So when I was invited earlier today to join the Windows Live Messenger trial. Eager to see the latest products in Microsoft’s “Live” strategy, I clicked the “Join Now” link. What the heck – there’s no software to download. An instant messenging is the perfect app for AJAX-ification: if you are not online and able to run an AJAX app, there’s no point in using an instant messenging app.

So I accepted some terms, logged into Microsoft Passport, and was hit with a big, orange DOWNLOAD button.

That doesn’t sound like AJAX. Sounds more like a bait and switch.

Now, in fairness, I could see the need for an OPTIONAL client app for doing VOIP calls a la Skype. But let people use an AJAX app for simple text messaging. Text messaging, I believe, is much more common than speaking over VOIP. In my opinion, Windows Live Messenger should focus on the simple text messaging use case and provide an AJAX thin client.

GOOG Undervalued?

Here’s one argument why: link.

Unwire

Nice to see Wireless USB making progress.