Brevity is the soul of demos

As a product marketer, I’m very impressed with Google’s Super Bowl ad, the Parisian Love demo.

First, given all the special effects in other Super Bowl ads, the Google ad was quite spare and effective — literally, a 30 second recording of someone’s desktop, minimally edited. Spare and effective, just like Google’s website, and brand.

Second and more important: I think of all the demos I’ve given, and which I’ve sat through. None of them have ever lasted 30 seconds. And yet not has been quite so effective. It shows the power of telling a good story in your demo.

As product marketers, we need to get better at telling stories. We spend too much time showing off features, too much time talking about the buttons and fields, and not enough time telling a good story of how our software actually can be used. We need to string together a compelling set of use cases into a seamless narrative.

Shakespeare wrote, “brevity is the soul of wit“. It’s also the soul of an effective demo.

If our software can’t be used to create a compelling narrative in two minutes, then we need to work with our engineering team so they make the changes required. We need to help them understand what’s missing. Is it a feature that will make the audience say “wow”? A less impressive feature that somehow fills a gap in the narrative? A fast-to-use, search-oriented UI? Fast-responding functionality? Bigger, faster servers? Richer demo data?

Whatever the requirements end up being, you can call this thought process Demo-Driven Development. And we, the software industry, could use more of it. We need to keep that target narrative in the collective mind of our team, and not let up — or launch prematurely — until it’s achieved. The Parisian Love demo might have been created in mere days, but the underlying product took twelve years to build. Building something that provides a compelling 30 second demo takes a long time.

Hate Office 2007? Try Search Commands.

If Office 2007 has been as frustrating for me as it has been for me, check out a new feature from Microsoft Office Labs called Search Commands.

The problem that Search Commands solved for me is this: even after using Office 2007 for a few months, I still can’t easily find what I’m looking for, and still get frustrated having to look at many toolbar icons that I’ll never use. The way I solve this problem today is by either digging through the Ribbon and cursing, or using Google. Surprisingly, the latter method is often faster.

Search Commands solves that problem, by letting you "google" your Office 2007 commands, and find the right one. It might seem kind of odd to search for commands rather than use a menu, but consider that Word, Excel, and PowerPoint each have at least several hundred commands. It’s a lot faster to type a few keys than it is to browse and scan through a dozen drop-down menus.

If you like QuickSilver, Firefox search keywords, YubNub, the Unix command line, or other keyboard-oriented ways of working, you’ll probably find Search Commands a welcome addition. It’s not perfect, but it’s a big step forward.

One last thing: Search Commands is still considered by Microsoft to be an experimental feature, meaning that it might not be rolled into the Office 2007 code base. This is surprising given the positive feedback this feature has received, and we’ve known for over a decade that the majority of users like to search, not browse. So, if you like Search Commands, express your support here.

Is Apple’s MobileMe the wrong move?

I wonder why Apple invested in building MobileMe, when Google has such strong momentum in the online
app space, with Gmail, GCal, GReader, GDocs, etc. And Yahoo and Microsoft are the market leaders in online apps, with hundreds of millions of users of Yahoo Mail and Hotmail.

Consider what MobileMe is up against. One on hand, Google’s apps are more mature than their equivalents at MobileMe, and they’re
free. One the other, Yahoo and Microsoft enjoy loyal customers who haven’t switched to Google, despite that company’s innovation in online apps.

Think about it: if you’re a loyal Gmail user, how much better would MobileMe need to be to get you to switch? It’d have to be a lot better. Is Apple going to be able to out-innovate Google in online apps? Especially since online apps is Google’s core business, and only a side business for Apple.

It seems to me that it would have been a better use of Apple’s
development resources to build stronger two-way integration between their own native apps on the iPhone and Mac, and leading online apps from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, and others. (True, some
integration already exists, but there are many, many missing pieces.)

If Apple did this, it would give users the best of both worlds. Users could easily publish, share, and backup their documents, photos, and other digital assets to the cloud. They could also download for safekeeping their online data, and online identity, that they’ve spent so much time creating.

What early adopters really do at their computers

TechCrunch has a great post on how early adopters spend their time on their computers. What’s fascinating about this is the time usage stats are based on actual behavioral data, so it’s very accurate, relatively speaking.

No doubt people are drawing all kinds of conclusions from this. I thought I’d share mine, which revolve around how this data affects market share, revenue, and valuations:

• Gmail is used 3x more than Google.com. Not surprising when one considers their own workday activities. But, assuming clickthroughs are more or less equal for both (valid assumption?) — that means Gmail generates the bulk of Google’s Adwords revenue. Pretty amazing considering that Gmail originally came out of a developers "20% time" project. This supports the notion that sometimes the best projects come out of skunkworks.
• Facebook is accessed 50% more than Google.com. Maybe that $15 Bn valuation is justified after all!
• Outlook is, unsurprisingly, the most used app. Now, think about Xobni. If you got it installed, whenever you use Outlook, you’re using Xobni. That means Xobni could soon become one of the most widely used apps around. That presents some interesting monetization opportunities when you have that many user attention minutes. It will be interesting to see what the future holds for those guys.
• It’s surprising that Yahoo Messenger has such low usage. Last time I’d looked, a few years ago, Yahoo had many instant messenging users. One more thing for Jerry Yang to worry about. I’m also surprised that Meebo is at the bottom of the list.
• OpenOffice and Google Apps have very low usage. For instance, Google Docs has 3% the usage of Word. If even the early adopters aren’t using them, I guess it will be some time before they start to challenge Microsoft in terms of market share. And it will be some time before Microsoft profitability, largely driven by the Office suite, starts to suffer and drag down Microsoft’s valuation.

A note on accuracy: I’m sure some will quibble about the accuracy of the numbers given that
the sample was self-selected, But market research is an inexact science.
Not to go all Rumsfeld, but you need to use the data you have, not the
data you wish you had. This, as far as I know, is the best data we have on what people actually do on their computers. (If you know of a better data source, please let me know.)