I was wondering whether software advertisings tell about customer benefits or not. Ads like: “Our software is flexible, it integrates with other software tools,..” seem more just senseless buzzwords.
Our customers are mostly engineers. They pay attention to the words we use more than we might think.

If saying “Our software is flexible” means that it adapts to changing requirements – like hardware requirements, then you could better say: “our software supports the A, B, C platforms and X, Y, Z operating systems”.

Companies like Google and Netscape knows what it takes to run a successful business. It is the business model, and not the product that determines success or failure of software companies. That’s what many start-ups have unhappily discovered for themselves.

I’ve still much to learn, yet something have learned on what start-ups should better do:

1. -remain a “product company” long enough to build a customer base, before offering customization and services
2. -run the business independently from distribution channel
3. -avoid appointing the chief engineer as business manager.

The motivational book Who Moved My Cheese? features two mice and two humans living in a maze -a representation of our ever changing environment, and looking for cheese -representative of happiness. One day they are faced with change: someone moved their cheese. The humans, having counted on the cheese supply to be constant, rant at the unfairness of the fate and head home hungry; while the mice, having noticed the cheese supply dwindling and prepared for the change, rush in search of a new cheese.

No rush, friends. Our cheese won’t move. It has already moved, and keeps on moving. Our cheese is moving to Chindia. On Linkedin, thousands of engineers are applying for your job (and mine).  Grid Computing and Open source might be the new supply of cheese. At least for a while.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, but the most responsive to change.

An engineer of a company called me saying: “Our COO wants us to evaluate your software for our product design”. Then we set a meeting with him and the COO.

This morning I went there; a first technical meeting with the designers, before seeing the COO. They said the software would be used as an on-off application on a single project. They found the software difficult to learn, therefore they asked me for a quotation for a consultancy project. Then, the COO joined the meeting. I resumed what I was asked by his engineers, and this is what he said: “I don’t need you to design my product, I want my engineers to do that for all our products”. His engineers nodded in agreement.

Customers lie, for many personal reasons. Rephrasing the Newton’s law of inertia:

An object (an engineer) at rest (working in Research & Development) will remain at rest (will use the same technology, methods) unless acted upon by an external and unbalanced force (unless their boss twists their ears).