I read this article in Fast Company yesterday profiling Adam Lisagor and his video production company, Sandwich Video. I knew his stuff already. He's part of a pack of renaissance geeks that I've grown to follow over the past five years or so. An amazing group to say the least. But reading the article, and more importantly, watching each and every last one of his "commercials" sequentially, something came together for me that I've been thinking about for a long time. It has to do product categories, and what that concept means, if anything, in today's emerging software product landscape.
If you watch those videos yourself (and I recommend that you do), you very quickly notice that almost without exception, every one of them is more of a demo/instructional video than a commercial. There's very little "selling" going on. The article points out that much of this has to do with the fact that none of these were created for, or will likely ever be seen on commercial television. Anyone who's seen them to begin with was already curious enough to go to the web site of the company that makes the product, click on a link, and watch the video. There's no competing noise to cut through, so the style can be–as Lisagor himself puts it–"dry."
But there's something else at work here as well. And it has to do with the nature of software development in 2011.
Software Then and Now: A Painstakingly Un-researched Oversimplificomparison(tm) of Software Development in 1996 and 2011
Then - 1996
Computers, for those who had them, sat on desks in offices at home or work. Home connections to the Internet, for those who had them, was via 56Kbps modems. Software was distributed on physical media to be sold in brick and mortar outlets. This was very very expensive and resource intensive. Thus, only large companies could afford it. The only software worth the upfront costs was software with a very large existing or potential market. In 1995, there was no long tail. All the action in the software industry was in well defined product categories.
Now - 2011
Enter the Internet. Broadband is everywhere. Social media connects an often disturbingly large percentage of what we do. We (at least a hundred million of us in the US alone) carry pocket-sized computers with broadband connections with us wherever we go. We can hear about, find, download, pay for and start using a piece of new software in less time than (and for less money) than it takes to buy and drink a cup of coffee. If you've written software for one of these computers, making it available to the tens of millions of people who use your particular platform is as simple as clicking a button–at least theoretically.
Leaving aside the growing threat of a hopelessly broken patent system, the barriers for the smallest players to enter the market for software development have virtually disappeared. Anyone with the money to buy a computer and a few hundred or so extra dollars (or less) to buy the target platform for testing, can now develop, distribute and sell software. And for larger companies, including 2011's crop of software behemoths, whose primary asset is no longer the software platform itself, but the users and the information about those users, the software itself is no longer about performing some well-understood task or operation. Yes, categories still exist. But competing in them is unlike what it used to be. The categories overlap and competing in one means making use of others. Like everything else, categories are getting mashed up.
So now, the smallest software companies can find some tiny, unmet need, and with some time and skill create an artisanal, one-of a kind product to meet that need and sell it to enough people to build a business. And larger companies can use the new platforms and the total interconnectedness of categories to deliver value in new and indeed unique ways.
So a lot of what's out there now is stuff that, effectively, does something unique, that effectively defies categorization, at least for the moment. In effect, every product is a category unto itself. Thus, Lisagor's instructional video style works well when each product is effectively selling a new category. The goal is to explain to the audience how your product, and the category into which it falls, will enable you to do something you simply could never do before, which, presumably, would make your life better. The same way you'd have advertised a word processor to someone who had only ever used a typewriter before.
And looking at the range of work Lisagor has done, he spans a gamut of products which may well be categories unto themselves at one point, to one-of-a-kind artisanal creations that, if they're successful at all, may well continue to be one-of-a-kind creations with tiny, niche markets. One can easily see Groupon Now being an entire category at some point. Others, such as Everyday and Seamless are clearly not going to spawn entire product categories anytime soon.
In any case, it's a great time to be in the software industry.