from the editor of aseidman.com

Poetic Justice

Posted by Ariel Seidman | July 20, 2008

Innovation at the expense of laziness and old-minded dogma

• Ford Motors pumps billions into upgrades of its Ford F-150 pickup truck (i.e. gas guzzler)
• Ford Motors loses $15.3 billion in 2006 and 2007 and more to come.
• Ford Motors shuts down its Menlo Park, CA car dealership
• Tesla Motors (an electric car manufacturer) opens up a new car dealership in Menlo Park on the same site as the old Ford dealership.

 

250 Milliseconds

Posted by Ariel Seidman | July 2, 2008

…is the maximum time that software can elapse without doing anything before the user thinks something has gone wrong.

I looked this up after trying to move my cable service from one location to another on comcast.com — while ostensibly a helpful service I never actually made it thru the process.   I was attempting to do this while eating lunch at my desk and listening to my voicemail.  Whenever I submitted or requested information I thought the site was down as it never displayed a processing icon and I simply thought the site was down and hit refresh — multiple times.  Now I could have just glanced over at the status bar on the lower left hand corner of the browser, but while eating lunch and checking v-mail this was not something I thought of at the time and I imagine that millions of users actually have no idea where the status bar on a browser sits or what it does.  So, after multiple failed attempts I ended up calling the Comcast call-center costing them about $5+ to handle my call. While $5 may not seem like much the fact that such a simple user interface fix cost them real dollars is unfortunate.

Inquisitor for Safari

Posted by Ariel Seidman | June 9, 2008

[Full Disclosure: I work at Yahoo! Search as Director of Product Management]

My hiatus from this blog has been long - a couple of months - and from from the Mac far too long - 15 years to be exact - but I am falling in love with the Mac all over again. We recently completed an acquisition of a great little product developed by a fairly well known Mac developer (David Watanabe) that makes searching from your browser super fast– check out the announcement and give Inquisitor a try if you are Mac user and let me know what you think.

The U.S Airline Innovation Imperative

Posted by Ariel Seidman | June 7, 2008

In the past four years my overall flying experience has degraded so quickly that the thought of a vacation requiring air travel is frankly not very interesting. Here are some gory details from my latest trip from SFO to Brazil:

• Each flight was 100% full
• Seats were old, cloth was ripped in some places, and one of my seats did not recline.
• Entertainment included watching David Letterman reruns from a few months back on monitors which vacillated between black & white and full color throughout.
• Due to mechanical issues the cabin temperature was either frigid or so warm people were tearing off their cloths (sounds more exciting then it actually was).
• For a 6 hr. flight from San Francisco to Miami they charge you for food (odd, since for a 6.5 hr. flight from Boston to London they serve you food)
• The definition of “carry-on” luggage now includes 50 pound rollers — when 100 or so people are each try stuffing this into the overhead compartment it gets rather crowded.

While I happened to be flying American Airlines they clearly have lots of company in the category of poor flying experiences these days. This is a rampant problem throughout all of the major U.S carriers (United, American, Delta, Northwest). These carriers have old equipment, neglected employees, and antiquated software systems. When you combine this with the FAA that is still using 1950’s technology to manage air traffic flow it creates “get me out of here” customer experiences. For a country that prides itself on technology innovation and service our flying experience is an embarrassment.

Business professionals — folks who fly a lot have reached a boiling point and are looking for something new and different. Which airline executive has the the guts to begin innovating again. Only a few years ago cell phone customers were an angry bunch — they had dingy plastic cell phones that did no more then call people, shoddy network coverage, long handcuff contracts, and call-centers that replaced humans with robots. Apple came along and re-defined much of that experience —everything from buying the cell phone, to onboarding customers, to the cell phone itself. Who is going to pull an Apple on the airline industry. Lets start with the flight experience — here are some of the things I am looking for:

• New airplanes: clean interior, inviting ambience, cushy seats that recline properly, and a comfortable cabin temperature and pressure.
• In-seat entertainment: I want at least 15 channels of live TV.
• Laptop friendly seats: Electrical outlets in all seats and seats when fully reclined do not crush an open laptop in the seat behind it.
• Food: Option to buy a meal at booking— if the flight is six hours and leaves at 9am I am pretty certain that I will want either breakfast or lunch provide me the option to buy a civilized hot meal.
• No Black-Out Dates: No black out dates for using frequent flier miles.

Granted this only solves part of the problem, but its a start and its focused on the longest segment of most peoples trip — the flight itself. Other parts of this problem — cramped airport terminals,, long security lines, limited public transportation to airports, etc. require federal and local government agencies, so lets leave that till January ‘09 to start addressing those problems.

Software Companies Should Kill the Cubicle

Posted by Ariel Seidman | January 31, 2008

Cubicles are the ultimate form of a poor compromise.  Lets consider the two reasonable extremes of providing a working environment for employees.  On the one hand you can go with the bullpen approach or you can go with offices. Somebody must have said, well if we just built walls around these desks then we would have the best of both worlds (lots of bad products get developed with this type of thinking).  We would have the privacy of an office as well as the open and egalitarian benefits of the bullpen. Nothing could be further from the reality as cubicles

1. provide a false sense of privacy — you can’t make a private call from your cube.
2. generate just as many distractions as a bullpen environment as you can hear every conversation.
3. rarely provide the upside associated with the bullpen model where ideas can flow quickly and people have the latest information required to make good decisions.

I have no doubt that technology companies and especially those companies whose success relies on developing code cubicles are a significant drain on productivity and general employee satisfaction.  Rather, a better model would provide employees (especially software developers, product managers, qa, etc.) with a small office and in the center of the floor provide an ad-hoc meeting places (not conference rooms that you need to reserve) with Wi-Fi (of-course), refreshments, etc. where employees could congregate around if they need to ideate, exchange information, etc.

Is the End Near for Quicken and Microsoft Money?

Posted by Ariel Seidman | January 10, 2008

In the fall, the personal finance software space — led primarily by Mint.com (which did a superb execution job for a V1 product) and Wesabe was all the rage. Its clear that this space was due for a refresh and had grown stale as both Intuit and Microsoft starved their products for too long creating an opening for the likes of Mint and Wesabe, but its too early to write the eulogy for Quicken and Microsoft Money as Omar and others suggest.

It will be a few years before we can declare any winners in this space — but there are three questions that the likes of Mint and Wesabe need to answer in order to be considered long-term viable competitors?

First, do Mint.com and Wesabe investors have the patience that is needed to fight this out over the long-term? Building a loyal user base in this space will take time as even the early adopters will only dip their toe before committing significant financial data to these services as they want to be certain that these services are committed to privacy and security but perhaps as importantly that their built for the long haul. Nobody wants to wake up two years from now reading an email that they are shutting down and moving all of your data to ACME Financial Service Inc.

Secondly, can they expand the set of users in the personal finance market beyond the Quicken and Microsoft Money base? The personal finance software market is relatively small as the effort to reward curve is steep — your forced to spend lots of time and energy setting up Quicken or Money before you start to see its benefits which only works for a small and dedicated set of the market.

Finally, can they broaden the value proposition beyond simply providing a 360 degree view of your spending and wrapping it in a slick user interface? Sexy pie-charts are interesting for all of 3 minutes, but what will keep people engaged?� The savings trick employed by Mint is a good start, but from my short experience with it not super helpful (i.e. it’s an execution problem).

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