Tim Bray has been working on a series of articles analyzing which factors lead to technology success. The strongest predictor isn't investor support, technical elegance, a compelling idea, standardization. It's the "80/20" rule, systems that yield 80 percent of the benefit for doing twenty percent of the work.
The 80/20 Tribe’s offerings are denounced as “Just a toy!”, while they hurl back accusations of pedantry, big-system disease, and so on.
Big smile. This is what makes me think that our company is really on to something. There are two kinds of skepticism that we run into occasionally.
* "Oh, it's just a wiki"
* Like Lotus Notes, but less.
I hear these occasionally from corporate buyers who are used to big collaboration and KM solutions, and from industry analysts who've been following collaboration software since the dawn of time. These are the feature-checklist folks, who want to know if you product comes with a ballpoint pen and a fish scaler, regardless of whether anybody in their shop needs these things.
The sweet spot is doing the right 20% of the work.
Posted by alevin at January 17, 2004 01:47 PM | TrackBack