Here are some of my favorite posts from Atalasoft blogs this year: Remembering Glenn Glenn worked for Atalasoft since its inception, and was known throughout the programming community as Mr. TWAIN. We knew him as a good guy: quiet, with a wicked sense of humor, and a sharply hilarious remark if you asked just right. He was a musician, gamer ...

This is an attempt to look at PDF in a Jobs-To-Be-Done perspective and have it actually apply for a job as an invoice document format. INT. AN OFFICE IN THE BUILDING OF A SMALL WIDGET MANUFACTURER The CONTROLLER of the company is seated behind her desk looking over some spreadsheets. An HR ADMINISTRATOR knocks on the open door. PDF is ...

Clay Christensen’s The Innovator’s Solution describes a way think about products, called the jobs-to-be-done framework. Briefly, you look at a product as the job it was hired to do, rather than its category, features, benefits, who bought it, etc. Christensen makes the argument that jobs are enduring over time (as products and customer segments ...

Last year I wrote a post about the social media metaphor in Twilight: Eclipse: I think a lot could be said about how the wolf pack telepathy is like Facebook (Jacob talks about the drama of a love triangle being broadcast around the wolf pack). And perhaps Alice has some kind of super-twitter that people can’t help using to blurt out their ...

How products become commoditized One of the theories in Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Solution explains how a high profit-margin business turns into a commoditized one. Essentially, Products in a market start to have performance that exceeds the needs of most users New entrants make a product “good enough” for the low-end ...

Three years ago, at the Business of Software conference, I presented a Pecha Kucha (lightning talk) on how to gather data on your product’s trial usage when you aren’t a website. I suggested that you should incorporate useful features into your desktop apps that need server support, and to do it in a way that is transparent to your users. In ...

As part of my duties on the local Regional Employment Board, I probably pay an inordinate amount of attention to the labor market. This graph struck me: It shows that there are seven unemployed workers for each job opening.  Other sources report a similar trend – The EPI reports 5.4 as of Jan 2010, and closer to 4.5 now. The important ...

When Napster came out, the tech media was obsessed with the power of peer-to-peer. This classic Joel Spolsky article nailed it: A recent example illustrates this. Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like "Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music" and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking ...

All of the overviews I’ve read of Google+ so far concentrate on the social aspects, Circles, Huddle (Group Chat), Hangout (Group Video), and rightly so, as those are the features that Google is hoping will make you switch to them. Sparks, the feature where you list a topic of interest and Google feeds you information on it, gets described like ...

I don’t usually ask for a code sample, but I do accept them if they are offered. I don’t ask for them because the code samples I have received have been disappointing and perhaps do not represent the potential of the person giving them to me. The biggest problem is that they weren’t written to be shown and are usually just plucked from some ...