Tech Kindred

Smog In Beijing, originally uploaded by Chad Dub.

A lot of friends have asked me about what the pollution is like in Beijing. This week was particularly bad vs. my previous trips. I love Beijing, but this week was like smoking a pack a day. What looks like fog, clouds, or smoke above is smog. It was rough.

Hopefully, by the big 08.08.08, the city will have this sorted. It would be ashame to have this ruin the Olympic party.

So, Starbucks has a Mix and IdeaStorm-like social network for product suggestions, called mystarbucksidea.  Today, Starbucks announced a new style of brewed coffee called "Pike Place Roast" to address the common customer complaint  of a burnt/bitter taste.  I have complained for years about this burnt-style, and unfortunately I think it's rubbed off on other main-stream coffee providers.  Dunkin' Donuts used to have some good brewed sweet stuff, but the Starbucks trend ruined it.  Luckily, smaller cafes and chains have started to reverse this trend over the past few years, and now Starbucks is listening.

While I think Pike Place is a solid start, we're still stuck with the same burnt tasting espresso-based drinks.  I'm not sure why they introduced Pike Place only for brewed coffee, but it seems pretty lame to me.  So, I joined the social network to "share my idea," or more accurately complain.  So, if you drink coffee, please take a minute to vote for it:

Vote for more mellow espresso drinks at Starbucks 

I knew this network existed.  But what I didn't realize is that it's a salesforce.com application.  It's logical, in that this customer ideation is an extension of CRM, but I didn't know that salesforce hosted consumer facing apps.  When I did a little digging, I realized that IdeamStorm is a Dell version of the same app.  Mix seems to be the only custom CRM social network around.  Anyone know of any others?

Hmm.. Google launched a new cloud-ish web development infrastructure platform called Google App Engine.  Tech Crunch has an article.  I wish this were Ruby based frankly or no language at all.  I think AWS has it right: virtualization, restful APIs, and platform agnostic tech overall.  This may drive Python adoption though, not that Python is bad.  Ruby's just better ;)

I wrote a white paper for a webinar on next generational functional testing that we sponsored.  The webinar consists of two very interesting talks by Jennitta Andrea and Ward Cunningham.  You can view the archived webinar, which includes a small demo of the new testing product that we're building, albeit with a slight audio problem during that portion.  The white paper I wrote is below.  Sorry it's not in an RSS reader friendly format.

Domain Specific Languages for Functional Testing 

My work life revolves around creating great products.  Many software companies think about product development only in terms of features, markets, and price. I’m amazed that some companies actually create products without an opinion, without a point of view, without a stake in the ground.  They slap a bunch of features together, name it, and expect people to buy it because it addresses their pain. The product may not solve any user pain, but as long as it has a convincing story, the companies are content.  Instead of delivering value, they rely only on marketing glitz, market power, or aggressive sales tactics to hawk their wares.

However, successful product companies go beyond that.  They want to delight their users.  They want to create something that has a perspective beyond what potential buyers would say in a focus group.  Theses companies create an emotional connection with their users.  That connection buys companies a lot in terms of loyalty, even when they screw up.

My loyalty for Firefox started when I downloaded the first public release before 1.0.   Not only was it substantially faster and more lightweight feeling than IE, the little things were there.  I loved the tabs… I loved the extensibility.  And it had those features without the annoying ads that Opera put in the free version.  That engendered loyalty kept me using it throughout the last few years; even when the memory leak on Windows was awful; and even when I switched from Windows to OS X.

But, all good things come to an end.   The feeling that I had – that Firefox somehow resonated with me – is gone.  The latest build of Firefox crashes so much on Leopard it’s totally unusable for me.  I think my Firefox hates me, and loyalty can’t transcend such severe disdain. However, at the end of the day, my loyalty hasn’t shifted very far – I’m using Camino.