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For your customers, support low- and intermittent-bandwidth mobility

four-cornersWe drove slightly more than 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers), my wife and I, during a weeklong holiday. We explored different states in the western United States: Arizona (where we live), Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming. The Rocky Mountains are incredible. Most of our vacation was at altitudes above 6,000 feet (1,800 meters). Many of the mountain peaks were above 14,000 feet (4,200 meters), and one road went above 11,000 feet (3,300 meters). Exciting!

The adventure involved bringing only smartphones, one running Android, one running iOS. We used mobile apps for navigation, for communication, for photography, for reading, for social media, for finding hotels and restaurants, just about everything.

We learned that apps only seem to run well when there is copious bandwidth, either WiFi at a hotel or a fast cellular data link. If a smartphone registered 4G or LTE, all was good. If the phone indicated that the connection was EDGE, GPRS or 3G, all bets were off. It’s not that data loaded slowly. That would be expected. It’s that the apps would crash, or time out, or posting data would fail, or nothing would happen at all. Many modern apps expect or demand lots and lots of bandwidth.

I’m not talking here about apps running completely offline. That’s an entirely different conversation. I’m talking about apps not gracefully handling situations where the bandwidth is narrower than a drinking straw.

Many developers test out their mobile apps using simulators. That, or on devices that have very high bandwidth connections, such an office WiFi network or the type of high-speed network that you’ll find in Silicon Valley, New York City, or other major tech hubs around the world. Having lots of mobile bandwidth is undoubtedly a blessing for developers, but for many consumers, that’s simply not the case.

Lots of customers live in areas with poor bandwidth, or find themselves traveling in places where connectivity is slow or intermittent. Given the use cases for mobile devices—that is, they are frequently used when not at home or in an office—optimizing apps for bad bandwidth should be mandatory. Hey, this isn’t about streaming 1080p movies. This is about being able to use a search engine, or call up a map, or be able to find a hotel room.

Will people use your apps in poor-bandwidth or intermittent-bandwidth situations? If so, here are some steps you can do to improve the user experience:

  1. Make sure that part of your testing involves low-bandwidth and intermittent-bandwidth scenarios. Find beta testers who live with poor bandwidth or who travel to such locations.
  2. Have your app test for throughput, and not only at application launch. Merely detecting whether the connection is WiFi or cellular is insufficient. If throughput is low, consider degrading the experience, such as by using lower-end graphics, in order to keep data moving.
  3. Cache, cache, cache.
  4. Don’t insist on reloading data each and every time the user either launches the app or switches to it. Alan’s pet peeves include news and other websites that freeze the UI while loading the latest headlines or content each time the app is brought to the foreground.
  5. If you detect that the device is in a low-bandwidth environment, pause background data syncing, or at least ask the user if he/she would like to do so.
  6. If you are sending audio or video, compress the heck out of it. That may involve choosing different algorithms for different bandwidth situations, with low-bandwidth scenarios using narrower and lossier codecs.
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Look to the intranet for shared corporate data — it’s a Big Data problem

Microsoft-SharePoint-Foundation-2010-logoWhere do your employees go to find shared data? If it’s external data, probably an external search engine, like Google (which apparently holds 67.6% of the U.S. market) or Bing (18.7%) or one of the niche players.

What about internal corporate data? If your organization uses a platform like Microsoft’s SharePoint, that platform includes a pretty robust search engine. You can use SharePoint to find documents stored inside the SharePoint database, or external documents linked to it, and conversations and informal data hosted by SharePoint. If you are familiar with a product called FAST, which Microsoft acquired in 2008, SharePoint’s search contains some elements of FAST and some elements of Bing. It’s quite good.

What if you are not a SharePoint shop, or if you are in a shop that hasn’t rolled SharePoint out to every portion of the organization?  You probably don’t have any good way for employees to find structured and unstructured documents, as well as data. You’ve got information in Dropbox. In Box.com. In Lotus Notes, maybe. In private Facebook groups. In Yammer (another Microsoft acquisition, by the way). In Ribose, a neat startup. Any number of places that might be on enterprise servers or cloud services, and I’m not even talking about the myriad code repositories that you may have, from ClearCase to Perforce to Subversion to GitHub.

All of those sources are good. There are reasons to use each of them for document sharing and collaboration and source-code development. That’s the problem. Like the classic potato chips advertisements say, you can’t only eat one.

Even in a small company, the number of legitimate sharing platforms can proliferate like weeds. As organizations grow, the potential places to stash information can grow exponentially, especially if there is a culture that allows for end users or line-of-business departments to roll out ad hoc solutions. Add mobile, and the problem explodes.

This is a governance problem: How do you ensure that data is accounted for, check that external sharing solutions are secure, or even detect if information has been stolen or tampered with?

This is a productivity problem: How much time is wasted by employees looking for information?

This is a business problem: How much money is wasted, or how much work must be duplicated or redone because data can’t be found?

This is a Big Data problem: How can you analyze it if you can’t find it?

The answer has to be a smarter intranet portal. In a recent essay by the Nielsen Norman Group, usability experts Patty Caya and Kara Pernice write that “Intranet portals are the hub of the enterprise universe.”

The trick is to discover it, index it, and make it available to authorized users—without stifling productivity. That includes data from applications that your developers are creating and maintaining.

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Microsoft’s bold ambition scares me

satya-nadellaMicrosoft has evolved considerably. It’s moved from its early days selling developer tools, or its era focusing on Windows and Office, or its run as a server software maker, or its first iteration as a cloud/online services company. Despite all the myriad changes, it’s always been true that Microsoft does not excel at innovation.

In fact, when the company focuses on innovation, it often misses with its products and pricing. Features are implemented badly, bugs proliferate, messages are muddled and strategy appears non-existent.

This confuses customers, annoys developers and frustrates partners.

When, by contrast, Microsoft focuses on execution, it does much, much better. Software and services are about getting the details right, and that means understanding the customers, not slamming out a bewildering product that has state-of-the-art technology but doesn’t make sense to anyone.

This is true whether you are talking about operating systems like Windows, or back-end products like Bing or SharePoint, or mobile phones. The new, innovative, visionary, ground-breaking products (or product upgrades) nearly always disappoint.

Reading new CEO Satya Nadella’s letter to his employees, I am concerned that Microsoft doesn’t understand that customers want excellent products. That means execution more than it means innovation.

Nadella’s letter, called “Bold Ambition & Our Core,” was published on July 10. Right up front, Nadella says, “The day I took on my new role I said that our industry does not respect tradition – it only respects innovation.”

That scares me. I think he misses the point.

Nadella writes,

At our core, Microsoft is the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world. We will reinvent productivity to empower every person and every organization on the planet to do more and achieve more.

What does it mean to reinvent productivity? I’m sure it means more than carrying around a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 device that tries to be both a notebook computer and a tablet, but doesn’t truly succeed in either configuration.

Nadella continues,

Productivity for us goes well beyond documents, spreadsheets and slides. We will reinvent productivity for people who are swimming in a growing sea of devices, apps, data and social networks. We will build the solutions that address the productivity needs of groups and entire organizations as well as individuals by putting them at the center of their computing experiences.

It’s a beautiful concept – but so far, Microsoft’s bread and butter has been specifically documents, spreadsheets and slides. Is he talking about SharePoint and Yammer?

In the 3,000-word missive, Nadella spends a lot of time talking about specific areas. He talks about “digital work and life experiences,” which are productivity enhancers designed for the mobile-first and cloud-first world. He talks about context-rich connections between experience, such as with the Cortana app on Windows Phone. He talks about the cloud, where

the combination of Azure and Windows Server makes us the only company with a public, private and hybrid cloud platform that can power modern business. We will transform the return on IT investment by enabling enterprises to combine their existing datacenters and our public cloud into one cohesive infrastructure backplane.

Nadella also talks about Xbox:

The single biggest digital life category, measured in both time and money spent, in a mobile-first world is gaming. We are fortunate to have Xbox in our family to go after this opportunity with unique and bold innovation. Microsoft will continue to vigorously innovate and delight gamers with Xbox.

What’s missing from Nadella’s call-to-arms letter? You won’t read much specifically about Windows Phone, about notebooks and desktop computers, about desktop Windows, or even traditional Office.

You also didn’t see much about execution, about delivering excellent products. All I read is innovate, innovate, innovate. Ideas are nice, Mr. Nadella, but I’d like to see a company that actually delights its customers, instead of frustrating them with its latest upgrades.

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Developer programs are a good investment in your employees

OTN-Tour-2014-370x395If your developers aren’t enrolled in developer relations programs, they will grow old and stale. They will become moldy. They will pine for the Good Old Days and opine endlessly about the irrelevance of new tools, new platforms, new paradigms and new ideas. No matter their brilliance today, they will become obsolescent.

You can’t let that happen!

Developer relations programs are all over the map, literally. Some are focused on operating systems – see those from Apple and Microsoft. Some are about back-end platforms, like programs from IBM or Oracle. Some are tied to very specific products.

It’s hard to know where your developers will get the best value. Let’s take a very simplistic case. If you have a bright programmer who is working to integrate back-end Oracle databases with Windows servers, should she be a member of the Oracle Technology Networkor MSDN? Likely both; it doesn’t hurt to sign up. But where should she spend her time?

It’s tricky to make that call, and it largely depends on both the developers’ self-starter motivation and your own corporate culture. Some developer programs are free, but others aren’t, with prices ranging from a hundred dollars per year to thousands of dollars. Do you offer to cover the costs of belonging to the developer program for each architect, designer, coder or tester who wants to sign up – or do they have to go through hoops that send out the message that the programs aren’t important (or that the employee isn’t worth the investment)?

Let’s say that you are running a Windows shop, and being a Windows Server guru is seen as essential for career growth. Clearly, your bright programmer should grow and enhance her skills as a Windows expert. While deep Oracle expertise is essential, it might be a secondary investment for her time.

Of course, if your team is seen as an Oracle shop, and the Microsoft aspect is seen as secondary, she should invest her time in Oracle technologies.

The scenario above is too simple. There’s no reason that the bright programmer can’t participate in two developer programs. However, what’s a reasonable ceiling. Two? Three? Five? Ten? If developers spread themselves out too thin, it’s hard to gain deep expertise. To my mind, a developer should engage with 3-5 development programs; probably no more. Depending on the situation, though, perhaps only one or two would be appropriate. If you have a developer who doesn’t see any benefit in belonging to a developer relations program, look at where he or she is spending time. There may be local user groups that provide the same level of engagement. But if you have someone who doesn’t want to engage at all in the larger world beyond his or her team — who doesn’t see the value of building deep expertise in products or platforms — you should be concerned.

Early in 2014, the market research firm Evans Data Corp. conducted a study on developer relations programs. They asked developers, “What most motivates you to seek solutions from developer programs?” The answers should not surprise anyone:

  • 35.5%: Need to upgrade from existing, outdated technology
  • 24.3%: Present skillset is insufficient
  • 21.7%: Present toolsets are insufficient
  • 8.5%: Anticipating future problems
  • 6.3%: Need to match or beat competition
  • 3.8%: Other

I’d keep an eye on those who answered “present skillset is insufficient.” Those employees are investing in themselves — and they are going places!