United Breaks Guitars, Then Loses Luggage

In September, I wrote about the role that social networks play in shaping opinions and used the example of Dave Carroll’s “United Breaks Guitars” video that was entertaining millions on You Tube while completely distressing United Airlines. As you may recall, I followed this with an interview with the video’s creator/victim.

This week Dave was invited to appear at RightNow’s user conference in Denver. As the video clip played, a light shone on him as he sang along to the video. Chris Fletcher was in the audience and told me that the crowd went crazy. 

The irony is that United lost his luggage on the flight from Saskatchewan to the conference where he was to be the surprise guest before a packed audience of customer service executives. As if losing your bag containing CDs and clothing was not bad enough, he was forced to wait around DIA as airport personnel insisted that his bag was delayed, not sitting back in Canada. His bag actually ended up in Dallas/Fort Worth. 

The lost luggage incident made the front page of the business section in today’s The New York Times and is scheduled to be featured tonight on CNN. There may also be a story on one of the major networks, too. The new episode has also generated good publicity for RightNow, too.  

Somehow you know that this latest episode will soon appear as the subject of a fresh video. Meanwhile, his first video has attracted more than 5.8 million viewers. This is up nearly 400,000 in the six weeks since we first mentioned his song.

While some readers may question why he continues to fly United, you have to admit that the airline has certainly been a boon to his career.

BigIdeas from BigMachines on the Front End of the Supply Chain

In the latest First Thing Monday I noted that one Model N executive had pulled me aside and chided me for “missing the front end of the supply chain.” Basically, his point was that while our annual supply chain executive conferences are wildly successful, we attract few, if any, vice presidents of sales and sales operations as either speakers or attendees. I bet he’s not alone in having that sentiment.

A few weeks ago I was in Chicago for the annual BigIdeas conference sponsored by BigMachines. While co-founder and CEO Godard Abel didn’t make the same comment, he could have. Like Model N, his company offers software on the customer-facing side of the equation albeit for different roles, industries, and processes. Specifically, the products include on-demand, guided selling applications encompassing the quoting and configuration processes. 

Despite the ongoing recession, BigMachines has enjoyed a strong year since last year’s BigIdeas conference. It added 46 new customers, bringing its total customer base up to 70,000 users at 170 companies in high tech, software, industrial equipment, medical devices, services, telecommunications, financial services, and media. 

The firm also expanded head count to 150, up 50 during the same period. Employees are spread across operations in the United States, England, Germany, and India, with planned expansion to Japan, too.

One of the unique features of the BigIdeas conference is that Godard and team ask attendees to vote on the new features they want to see added at next year’s event. You can tell that this is a real user group because the top two vote-getters among the 350+ attendees were for configurable page layouts and configurable administrative enhancements. 

While I may have preferred that attendees pleaded for big picture ideas like real-time pricing or revenue management functionality a la Model N, or enhanced pipeline management and sales forecasting tools like those provided by close partner Right90, the customer requests were in line with the types of enhancements requested by salesforce.com customers on the Ideas site.

One could argue that a combination of BigMachines and Right90 represents a cloud-based version of the “new front office” needed to better serve the supply chain. From my perspective, this merits further research and analysis.

What do you think?

Salesforce.com and Oracle: A Tale of Two Worlds

In the current edition of First Thing Monday I opened by asking, “What’s salesforce.com doing at Oracle OpenWorld? At the conference, I found the answer: salesforce.com is making the most of what might be a one-time opportunity.

On the first day of the conference I stopped by the company’s booth in Moscone West. At the right end of the booth sat a pair of Mini Coopers wrapped with the company’s cloud logos and bearing the “best of both worlds” messaging. Each night at 6:00 p.m. salesforce.com is giving away one of the cars. This will continue for three days. The only requirement is that winners must reside in one of the 48 continental states. Sorry, no shipments to Alaska or Hawaii, or outside the country. Outside the convention center, six similarly clad Minis make a continuous loop around the sprawling Moscone complex.

Next to the car giveaway there was a small theatre that was full every time I walked by. Periodically, a joint Oracle/salesforce.com customer would take the stage to talk about their experience straddling the two worlds. 

I stopped to talk to a couple of salesforce.com employees who were clearly enjoying their front row seats in a foreign arena. One told me that they were thrilled to be invited to participate in the “IT event of the year.”

The heart of the booth featured standup stations with product demos. The banners on top of the booths proclaimed that this was the home of “Service Cloud2,” “Sales Cloud,” and “Custom Clouds.” The latter is a reference to a new announcement with Dell where the two companies will provide cloud offerings for small and midsized organizations.

Ironically, SAP had a booth behind the salesforce.com pavilion. While this may have seemed to be a good opportunity for guerilla marketing, I sense that staffers would have preferred to be almost anywhere else. When I walked through, I saw employees talking only to each other. 

At 12:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Jim Shepherd and I walked over to the Novellus Theatre to see Marc Benioff’s presentation. We were surprised to see hundreds of people already queuing in line despite a heavy downpour. While some may have been there to receive vouchers for one of the 500 Flip video camcorders distributed at the booth, I suspect that most were here for Marc’s theatrics.

Shortly after 1:00, Marc took the stage. He opened by thanking Oracle for inviting him and acknowledging Larry Ellison for being his first investor. He also talked about how he had appeared on this stage many times to introduce new products during his 13 years as an Oracle employee. Before long, he was into a sales pitch for cloud computing. As he talked, a PowerPoint behind him illustrated the three generations–or worlds–of enterprise computing: mainframes, client/server, and cloud computing. For me, the not-so-subtle message was that client/server was the old world that he left behind when he co-founded salesforce.com a decade ago.

After a brief overview, Marc was joined on stage by Michael Dell who recounted the various ways that their two companies have worked together as partners and mutual customers. When Michael left, Marc invited two employees to demo the new Service Cloud2 and the integration with Facebook, Google, and Twitter. In the new cloud world, social networks matter.

Near the end, Marc invited Sanjay Mirchandani, EMC’s CIO, and a mutual Oracle customer on stage. This was another brilliantly calculated move. The messaging here is that smart companies are looking to cloud applications that link to their legacy ERP system.

To be fair to Oracle, salesforce.com is a relatively important customer. Its multi-tenant architecture is built on Oracle’s database and middleware technologies. The company also runs Oracle financials as its internal backbone. 

Still, the presence of salesforce.com only reinforced that we’re on the edge of another critical technology transition. Oracle needs to step up and take a leadership position before new companies do what he did to Cullinet and McCormack & Dodge. Attendees are waiting to see what Larry has to say on Wednesday afternoon.

Stay tuned.

A Wall Apps Pioneer Weighs In On the Topic

Robb Bush, an innovator at i2 Technologies in the '90s, and now with SAP, offered his perspectives on Wall Apps:

Bruce,

I read with great interest "The Future of Work: Wall Apps." I have also enjoyed the thoughtful commentary. However, I do not think I am either a dissenter or a proponent in general—it depends on the definition.

From my perspective, I can see the definition of Wall Apps in at least two different ways (each of which may have its own proponents or dissenters):

1. Wall Apps as a "bigger dashboard" These represent a display that can be seen by many people in an environment and are generally read-only. That approach has some pros, and cons, as illustrated by other commentary.

Yes, this type of Wall App can be more of a “billboard” than anything else. However, with some real-time data, it can be a valuable "scoreboard" that can be used in practical areas such as call centers, and even industrial environments.

2. Wall Apps as a "High-Definition App" This type is highly interactive, but exploits the larger viewing area, higher resolution, and other methods to make the business interaction more game-like, participatory, and faster than a small 1:1 application trapped in desktop monitor.

“HD Apps” open up many more possibilities, and it is becoming more and more cost-effective to realize.

For example, when I was recruited by i2 in the mid '90s from the consumer and "info-tainment" software world, I could immediately see game-like design solutions to the challenges posed by very complex Sourcing, Manufacturing, and Supply Chain problems. As a result, we developed the first data-driven 3D value-chain designs and applications - showing logical, physical, and temporal flows in real-time. This just happened to work much better on large, or multiple screen displays. Sometimes we used up to 11 screens of varying sizes, working all on the same application data and working synchronously.

However, back in 96-98, to pull this off required some powerful machines, custom programming, multiple advanced graphics cards, projectors and/or very exotic flat screen displays. While it was ‘state of the art' then, the same power is now readily available in commodity machines and console hardware!

In addition, think about how most teens "see" applications and GUIs. They don't! They see, and more importantly... expect, something far different.

Anyone that has raised 'connected kids' in the 21st century quickly understands this. The "Future of Work generation" has never known a world without the Internet, always-on accessible information, and increasingly compelling and immediate ways of interacting in engaging multi-dimensional environments and real-time communications. This is more prevalent in highly-networked console Games, and not limited to what is called Web 2.0. Watching kids use "computers"—you quickly see that the Future of Work is not trapped on a monitor sitting on a desk, but it is on larger wall-sized HD displays, and on handheld devices (But, that’s another story. To get started, just think differently of the handheld-mobile as a new "controller," or an auxiliary "viewer" between virtual and physical, and we’re off!).

In the near term, the most productive Wall Apps may not appear just in management suites, but in busy industrial environments that any employee can walk up to with a familiar hand-held wireless controller, 3D navigation conventions, and real-time communications via wireless headset. They will be able to quickly understand plans, scheduling, inventory, and be able to collaborate across the value chain in a way that makes sense to them, immediately and intuitively.

So to wrap up, bigger dashboards or scoreboards on-a-wall can be very useful, depending on the execution and situational context. And yes, they could easily be call "billboards" if existing only for show.

However, if we think about making "HD-apps" and inform our design-thinking on the tools and the expectations that are already in practice daily by the future workforce, then we really will be heading toward the future of work. And, it may not be too different than the future of play.

Best regards,
Robb

Reader Comments on Wall Apps: The Proponents' Edition

One reader noted that after reading my piece, he happened to watch “Three Rivers,” a new TV drama that employed the Wall Apps concepts in an episode that aired that same night: “At the morning meeting, the doctor went to a wall of glass, hit the top with his hand and the wall lit up with the patient’s ID with photo, and stats/test results:  a scan of the heart; the current heart rate, blood pressure, etc. As he spoke to the patient, statistics appeared on what works and what does not work due to this person's condition with the probable success rates. And of course he moved it all around a la CSI at times.”

Adtran’s Tom Dadmun sees Wall Apps as a great application for sales and operations planning meetings:

“Hi Bruce!
My quick thoughts. Get wall apps going in the monthly S&OP meeting with senior folks concentrating on the Core Competency KPI's and then migrate it to mahogany row via a pull from the execs who liked it in the S&OP. Behavioral change does not take place easy and unless you have an aha! moment it will fall to the wayside as a great idea with no action.”

Senthil Rajamanickam prefers a more interactive display.

“Bruce,
I would define 'Wall App' slightly differently—taking a cue from the CNN Wall. The key difference being interactivity by means of 'touch' (mouse clicks would work as well) rather than 'streaming' data. The other difference being more an Executive Dashboard with full-bore drill down rather than a NOC buried into an operations team.
 
 
(Source: CNN)
 
About a year back I was talking to a Nielsen rep about combining retail geographic information with a whole host of Trade Promotion, Causal event, POS and order fulfillment information organized into a hierarchy of KPIs that can be summarized into a map of United States—like a Google Map mashup. The idea is to deploy such an appliance in the Executive suite so that they can monitor performance on a variety of dimensions—brand, customer, geography etc.
 
Interestingly, I mentioned the same again to one of my consulting providers 2 months back when they were asking for my ideas on how to spruce up their DSR (demand signal repository) consulting sales booth @ Oracle OpenWorld—and they took it on and apparently have executed on that. I am eagerly awaiting to see the results in the OOW!
 
Anyway, here is an interesting convergence of consumer tech and corporate IT ...”

Gerry Bignell, manager of data integration for WESCO Distribution Canada LP, liked the Wall Apps as I described them:
 
“I love the idea of wall apps—from the command centre to those depicted in movies & TV.
 
I think ‘constant’ visibility of ‘measurement’ factors of any sort would be beneficial, although it might have a downside when things are going badly.
 
I would think 4 to 6 slices of measurement data would be sufficient to stay on top of – I like the idea of 4 constant quadrants being displayed—easy to get used to and still large enough for good detail. It could also be multiple of this (i.e., rotating from one 4 quadrant display to another and than back as long as the quadrants were easily recognizable (and each set of 4 was related in some manner).
 
Of course with today’s technology of smaller & less expensive projectors, a flat, unencumbered light coloured wall would probably suffice if cost was a factor (also portable).”
 
Meanwhile Harish Iyer focused more on new tools like OLEDs and Augmented Reality:

“Hi Bruce,

I would like to refer you to a demo on TED titled Sixth Sense which describes how a combination of  mini-projector, camera, cellphone - which acts as the computer and some color tags on your finger tips can be used to have a significantly profound interaction with the environment.
I believe that in the future instead of carrying foldable LED mats etc we would just be looking at a viable mini-projector that can project on any surface and the computer would be just a small box like a pack of cards that u can carry around in your pocket. a small image capturing feature built-into the computer will be capable of tracking all inputs such as drag/drop, typing and other finger movements and translate into actions. I think we are set for an interesting future!”

As for the idea of linking your SmartPhone to your hotel room TV, one reader who requested anonymity recently took the first step by using the TV with his laptop.

“Bruce,

Great commentary on the future of work.

I recently stayed at Starwood’s newest line of hotel’s called Aloft, in which “each room is also a combination high-tech office and entertainment center equipped with wireless Internet access and plug & play, a one- stop connectivity solution for multiple electronic gadgetry all linked to a 42” flat-panel, LCD- ready television.”  The cool thing about it is it actually worked!  I was able to connect my laptop to the flat panel TV in my room, very quickly and easily.”

What do you think?  I welcome your comments.

Reader Comments on Wall Apps: The Dissenters’ Edition

In my recent post on “The Future of Work: Wall Apps,” I  advocated placing large screens in the executive suite and around the building to display real-time performance information. Not surprisingly, I received several emails from opponents and proponents.

The Dissenters’ Edition features emails from three readers who did not agree with me.

The first came from a reader who asked that his name and company be withheld:

“Bruce,
I continually fight "front end" visualization hysteria, lately the world of Business Objects due to our strong relationship with SAP. I find it dangerous! The reason being is that 90% of the work is in the business process, gaining common definitions, having sustainable governance and accountability for data integrity, and going through data and system validation processes all has to occur first. The "front end" stuff is the fun part, but in a large global operation such as ours the business process is the work that has to be accomplished first, ... and it's not easy.”

The second dissent piece came from Jeff Tognoni, CEO, Consona:

“Bruce:
While I have great admiration for your concept from an aesthetic viewpoint I am not sure that all of this visually appealing stuff makes that much difference to actual business results. The bigger point is this, if I had real time sales pipeline data always in front of my face I am not sure that would make me a better CEO or quite frankly a better Sales VP. The question you have to ask yourself is what are the actions you would take based upon having that information and what business impact those actions would result in. So lets say I notice that sales in the SE region are not looking as good one day, am I going to call the SE regional sales vp and ask him what’s up? Quite frankly CEOs that do that usually just create a lot of CYA activity that adds no value to results. From day to day this stuff bounces all over the map and it is only by analyzing this stuff over longer periods that you get real actionable data. I know there are many real time actionable things in some industries but not sure if they are the majority or even the most important to actual results, even in the short term. But like you I am all for the aesthetics of the whole concept and if it sells more software bring it on.”

The third e-mail came from Ed Hancock, a partner at Business Navigation Systems LLC:

“Bruce,
I remember visiting the network operations center of a large computer services company in the 1980s. Standing in the viewing gallery, looking at all of the large screen displays of the real time network status was pretty impressed until one of the tour guides told be that they were just for show. No real work went on in the center. The people on the floor were just working at their desks doing their normal tasks. The room was just setup to impress customers. Ever since that visit, whenever I see visual data displays in factories, call centers, data centers, telecom operations centers, etc. I always wonder if they are there to help manage the business or to impress customers and close business.

I think the same thing applies to wall apps. Will they help managers manage better and improve real business results or are they sales aids?”

Please read the Proponents Edition, too, and add your comments.

Reader Comments on “The Future of Work: When Will Desktops Catch Up to Consumer Electronics”

The current edition of First Thing Monday continues the theme of
“The Future of Work.” This time we asked, “when will desktops catch up to consumer electronics?" If you look at the advances in price/performance for processors, memory, storage, printers, and mobility, we had to ask why we haven’t seen similar advances in the screens that sit on my desktops.

Based on the responses, there are many readers in violent agreement with us. Most have allowed us to use their name and company name, though asked us to point out that these views are their own and not necessarily those of their organization. 

From Charles Milligan, IBM:

“Bruce -
You tickled my techno-weenie side this morning....

Let's see.... Moore's law projects a doubling of density of semiconductors roughly every two years; it's been applied to storage, extended backwards to tubes and relays, camera pixels.... So in our careers - mine is 32 years - that means 15 or 16 doublings since I was in college.   So what did you get in '77 or so?  Graphics-barely - there were stored-image CRTs that could draw lines pretty well (Tektronix made the ones I came in contact with - maybe 11" diagonal?).   Color on a 'standard' CRT display was still a couple of years out - and only characters to start.  The usual screen size was measured in characters, like 24 lines of 80 characters - which mimicked a punch card well (and key punches were still around, and could be called to have a 1-line display, perhaps). Weighed 50± pounds, so rate this as 24x80x2 levels of text (normal, bold) = 3840 (round to 4k).

Skip forward 10 years, I'm in grad school. We have a few pretty much state-of-the-art IBM 5080 graphics terminals connected to a small mainframe (4341) in the lab I worked in. It can do 2-D CAD with no problem most of the time, but it's an eighty pound (but roughly 20") display with a pile of electronics in a separate cabinet. If I had pretty much exclusive use of that mainframe, CADAM would paint my relatively simple wireframe at maybe 4-5 frames per second; enough to use but hardly smooth. On the traditional-business, character front, I had a plasma of a similar size (a very distant precursor to today's color ones) display that would show about 80x160 characters or maybe 800x800 binary pixels when in graphics. Rate this as 800x800x1 = 640k in graphics or 13k in character mode. Or you could buy a Macintosh with it's laughable (today, at least) little B&W display.

Today, my 1 year old laptop probably exceeds that mainframe in compute capacity - it certainly has more memory and disk space.- and has 1400x1050 color pixels, each of which can display 24-bit color; but for business use 256 colors are plenty. It isn’t optimized for real-time graphics rendering but can certainly keep up with Powerpoint, play DVDs, show my vacation pictures, etc. It can display text reasonably well that is too small for me to read at a comfortable typing distance. Increasing the pixel density or color depth isn't going to show me more information. A standalone display of this size might weigh 3 pounds. Rate this as 1400x1050x256 = 376M for graphics and about 85x160x256= 3.5M for text, although if you include fonts, bold, italic, etc. you can push this up significantly.

So, for text, we've grown from 4,000 arbitrary units to 3.5 million, a growth of 870x over 30 years, well short of Moore's law, but we reached the physiologic limits of what's useful about a decade ago. For graphics, we've only really had useful devices for about 20 years or 10 doublings. In my arbitrary units, this is a growth of just shy 600x, not far off the 1000x that Moore's law would project, but again we're running out of  ‘useful.’ So, do I want more? Sure; two screens (in today's metrics) is nice and I can see there are professions where four to 6 would be an advantage, but not a lot. Portability has something to say for it, but if you need 30x40" of display space, you're not going to portable or mobile, ever. At some point in the bigger-is-better debate the data presented ceases to be information because there's too much of it to absorb; we should be spending time/energy figuring out how to present it more intelligently/usefully - thus everybody's desire for ‘dashboards’ - not in displaying every possible facet for the user to wade through.  

3D is around the corner for the business user and is likely to pay off in some disciplines, but until we either have 'cool' 3D glasses or it works without wearing something geeky, it won't make it into middle management or higher.” 

Two Comments From Dave Anderson, Supply Chain Ventures

Here’s the first:

“Bruce
 
Right on as usual…
 
And while you are at it, why not whine about our cars???
 
They are so far behind in enabling mobile work (not while moving, I might add), it is crazy
 
My boat is more technology enabled than my Lexus—weather, depth, position, fish finder, radar and internet on the same Raymarine navigation screen.
 
Go figure…

Dave
 
PS—sitting in the office with two active PC screens, a third screen on CNBC, WGBH playing through Bose, and the BB synching with the machines…sounds cool, but I would like one of your dream “work rooms.” “
 
Here’s his follow up:
“While I am on a roll, here’s how I would like to get my WSJ, FT, Technorati, Economist, NYT in the am:

I get up, go to the media room, sit in comfortable chair while Starbucks brews, spool up the news website (all-in-one news/Blog/? subscription options; no web site reloads!), project on my media wall (10x12 feet), bring up print-like versions of today’s papers (allowing for some format improvements) and scroll through them with a biometric device on my finger, with immediate full article read capabilities, among other apps.

PERHAPS IN A FEW YEARS…

Dave

From Asvin Ramesh, HCL America

“Hi Bruce,
 
Great article, very insightful on how things have not progressed on some aspects of computing and display to keep pace. Another part that is really lagging is the area of Power Management.
 
“One of my professors in engineering school had joked in 1996 that you will have all your computing functions in the size of the watch (13 years hence, he is close with the iPhone) but you will still have to carry a bag for the power that will be needed. I believe had power management been developed at the same pace as the rest of the High Tech world, we would have been living in a completely different world. I found a recent article on how Andy Grove teaches leveraging advances in one field for another in the Economist interesting on a related subject.”
 

From Brian Carter, SAP Labs

“Just what we need, Bruce. 250 people getting on a plane with their yoga mat style graphical displays and trying to find room in the overhead for them. Don't you think that projection technology and the ability to either project a large screen on a wall with a good resolution from a cell-phone sized device (or even from within your cell) or the ability to connect your laptop wirelessly or via a universal docking station (with wireless mouse and keyboard on the desk, which hopefully faces the big screen TV) would usurp OLEDs for travelers - unless maybe you can fold them instead of rolling them up, then maybe we would be have something. And of course, there will be the 80+% of hotel rooms that don't contain the right setup (or it doesn't work) where you will still need the old standby laptop display. I don't think the laptop form factor is going away any time soon, for anything more than a day trip to a customer where you are going to make a one hour presentation and you can fit it on your smartphone. But I guess we can dream, can't we......
 
I enjoy your newsletter. Keep up the great work!”

From Gregory Anderson:

“Having been in a cubical all my professional life, I’ve long wished for all the walls to be displays. Some panels would be set for work, manipulated via a keyboard and touch (like iPhone and/or Minority Report). Others would be communicating panels… video & voice to other cubes, conference rooms and home. Is Janice at her desk, or has anyone shown up for the 1:00 meeting (yes, privacy concerns abound but I cube video should be no more invasive than walking by someone’s desk).”

From Kapil Mishra, Infosys Technologies Ltd

“Very insightful write-up on desktop. As a full time IT worker, I share your views that bottleneck for IT productivity no longer lies with processors and memory but largely with User interaction layer and desktops play a key role there.
 
As a side thought, why have a physical screen at all. No one size will ever fit all needs. There are some advanced researches in holographic projection screen that offer interesting possibilities. 
 
Another related aspect to desktop innovation is matching abilities at OS level. You alluded gently to MacOS in your write-up though I can be a little blunt with how primitive Microsoft UI concepts appear today though they may have been path breaking in early 90s.
 
At the wish list level, I would look for a ‘Stretchable’ screen that can be adjusted to differing needs (a laptop size when I am commuting in train and a 30 inch one in my study). Till then, I will live with my laptop and CRT displays.”
 

From Kevin Wolf, spokesperson for NextWindow:

“You should check out www.nextwindow.com. These guys are making optical touch screens for desktop PCs from Dell, HP and others. Desktop touch is heating up. Win 7 will launch 10/22 and all the largest PC makers are preparing new touch PC products.  Let me know if you have questions about NextWindow and what’s happening in this market.”
 

I welcome your comments, too.