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I was reading a piece in the WSJ which is a perfect example of a very common mistake in product strategy: The Business Card Will Not Die.

When the tech-savviest people on the planet meet, how do they exchange contact info? The same people who hail taxis by app and pay back friends via email have a wild way of sharing details: They hand over paper business cards.

And the only thing worse than handing over business cards is not having any to hand over. My own new business cards have yet to be printed. But if everyone I meet these days has a smartphone, with memory and wireless capabilities galore, why do I even need these 3.5 x 2 inch pieces of card stock?

The question is phrased as if it were obviously absurd - but it’s not. The article goes into a few of the suggested replacements, and guess what? None of them are as good as the humble business card!

One requires NFC, which not many phones have. Another requires scanning QR codes, which is fiddly. Bumping phones seems like it should work, but I had the app on my phone for a year and never met a single other person who used it. Ditto for the audio tones in Evernote Hello.

If you want to replace a universally-adopted technology, your replacement needs to be not just as good as what you are trying to usurp, but substantially better. Business cards have a very high bar for replacement:

• Universal compatibility

• High legibility

• No battery life constraints

• No network connectivity requirement

• No potential security hole

What, security on business cards? Well, yes. Any time you accept data into your device, you run the risk of unwittingly executing malicious code. NFC seems the most vulnerable tech, but a QR code could redirect to a trojan, and do so transparently so that users are not even aware their connection has been hijacked.

In contrast, the business card works as-is in just about any situation. You can exchange cards in a moment, stick them in a pocket with confidence that they will still exist and be legible later, and carry effectively unlimited numbers about until you’re ready to go through them.

This doesn't mean that you’re stuck with the cards, of course. Cards work well as a vector for information, but less well as an archive. For a start, the search capabilities are terrible. Personally, I import the data with Evernote Hello, which makes it easy to scan and OCR the contact info from the card itself, geo-tag the contact, add notes on the conversation, and save the lot in the cloud.

The answer is obvious for business cards, but too many businesses try to do the same sort of thing in other fields. If you get frustrated with explaining how your app is better than existing options, it might be time to take a step back and see whether you’re not better off building a complementary solution instead of attempting a displacement.

Image by Diogo Tavares via Unsplash

Cross-posted to my work blog

There's an old joke that in China, it's just food. The main thing that will happen in 2014 is that it will be just computing.

Cloud has gone mainstream. Nobody, whether start-up or enterprise, can afford to ignore cloud-based delivery options. In fact, in many places it's now the default, which can lead to its own problems.

The biggest change in 2014 is the way in which IT is being turned inside out. Whereas before the rhythm of IT was set by operations teams, now the tempo comes from users, developers, and even outside customers. IT operations teams had always relied on being able to set their own agenda, making changes in their own time and drawing their own map of what is inside or outside the perimeter.

The new world of IT doesn't work like that. It's a bit like when modern cities burst their medieval walls, spreading into what had been fields under the walls. The old model of patrolling the walls, keeping the moat filled and closing the gates at night was no longer much use to defend the newly sprawling city.

New strategies were required to manage and defend this new sort of city, and new approaches are required for IT as well.

One of my first customer meetings of 2014 brought a new term: "polyglot management". This is what we used to call heterogeneous management, but I think calling it polyglot may be more descriptive. Each part of the managed infrastructure speaks its own language, and the management layer is able to speak each of those languages to communicate with the infrastructure.

That same customer meeting confirmed to me that the polyglot cloud is here to stay. The meeting was with a customer of many years's standing, a bank with a large mainframe footprint as well as distributed systems. The bank's IT team had always tried to consolidate and rationalise their infrastructure, limiting vendors and platforms, ideally to a single choice. Their initial approaches to cloud computing were based on this same model: pick one option and roll it out everywhere.

Over time and after discussions with both existing suppliers and potential new ones, the CTO realised that this approach would not work. The bank would still try to limit the number of platforms, but now they are thinking in terms of two to three core platforms, with the potential for short-term use of other platforms on a project basis.

When a team so committed to consolidation adopts the heterogeneous, polyglot vision, I think it's safe to say that it's a reality. They have come down from their walls and are moving around, talking to citizens/users and building a more flexible structure that can take them all into the future.

This is what is happening in 2014. Cloud is fading into the background because it’s everywhere. It's just... computing.

Image by Kelly Sikkema via Unsplash

I’ve worked booth duty at my fair share of trade shows, starting back when I was still in high school. One of the constants is the presence of "booth babes"¹ at the shows, acting as eye candy to bring traffic into the booth. I had never actually worked in a booth which had booth babes until recently, but I really didn’t like it, not least because I have always had close female colleagues, and I felt that booth babes devalued their presence and professionalism.²

I just didn’t have the data to do more than roll my eyes and gripe about it in the bar after the show with those female colleagues. But now, someone actually did A/B testing on whether booth babes even work, and wrote up their findings: Booth Babes Don’t Work.

It’s a pretty indefensible practice. The hiring of young, college-aged females to dress as provocatively as possible to help promote… um, Ultra HD TV sets, Android tablets and Internet-enabled toothbrushes. It’s a relic of old enterprises, but that’s just the way they like their world. But what nearly every critic has failed to mention is a real concrete business reason to end the practice.

Well, I do: Booth babes do NOT convert.

Read the whole thing, but basically it boils down to the fact that nobody you want to talk to wants to talk to booth babes - and vice versa. Anecdotally, I have seen the exact same mechanism in action. Sure, there will be a queue to talk to the booth babes, made up of people drunk on their own inflated self-regard or actual booze - or both. Meanwhile, actual real prospects are hovering around the edges of the booth or even walking away, embarrassed or unwilling to waste time talking to the eye candy.

Wow, don’t I look comfortable…

If you are in charge of, or have any influence over, your company's presence at a trade show, leave the booth babes off the budget. Get people (including women!) who actually know the product and are passionate about it, and I guarantee you will get much better conversion rates on the leads, and probably more outright leads too.³

I had refrained from commenting on Marissa Mayer's anti-telecommuting edict because it seemed like every human with a blog or a Twitter handle had already done so. Today, though, I read an interesting piece in the FT by John Kay, who compared telecommuting to Robert Moses's proposed clearances in midtown Manhattan and the mooted Lower Manhattan Expressway.

Now, I work from home quite often myself - after all, I am near Milan and my boss is in Boston, so it's not as if I have an immediate need to be in the office every day. Skype works about as well from my home office as it does from my employer's office in Milan. All the same, I do try to go into the office every ten days or so. Partly this is for the prosaic reason that we are not yet an entirely paperless office, and I have to submit physical receipts for my expenses, but partly I go into the office for the serendipitous conversations which often arise from doing that.

This is where I am reminded of the downside of being in the office. In common with most offices, my desk is in an open space with lots of other desks, separated by waist-high partitions. This is not exactly an environment conducive to being able to concentrate. In fact, when all those desks are filled, I'm doing well if I can hear myself think! This means that the office is where I go to have impromptu conversations and face-to-face meetings, but it's not where I am most productive, even with my headphones on. I am much more productive at home, in aeroplanes, or in hotel rooms without distractions. John Kay's negative scenario of a corridor of closed office doors is actually a dream for me! Meet up in the cafe area, or open your door if you're available, but have the ability to close it if you're trying to concentrate.

I would hate to work only remotely, though, and seize every opportunity for gatherings of our little team. With members spread across all of the US, plus me in Europe, we try to meet up once a quarter or so, but those are usually fantastic brainstorming sessions where we really plan out our activities. Some companies like Cisco push the telepresence thing to extremes, even having their yearly kick-off meetings via telepresence. Given that some of the most useful conversations I have at kick-offs and the like have happened in bars and between sessions, I think this is rather short-sighted, although I don't doubt that there are attractive savings from doing things this way.

A healthy combination of alone time and together time works best, at least for my workflow. Most of my desk time is spent building or reviewing content, which requires concentration and does not really benefit from face-to-face interaction. If you are doing something that really does require constant interaction with colleagues in your geographical area, then perhaps going into the office every day really is best.

Finally, some people will always take advantage. I remember the story of one engineer who would tell one salesperson he was with another when he was actually with neither. Finally he got fired for this, and the luckless person tasked with cleaning out his laptop found tons of, um, not-safe-for-work content... One opinion is that Marissa Mayer, being very data-driven, unearthed a lot of this slot of behaviour, perhaps based on VPN logins and such. Given that situation, the right option probably is indeed a very public crackdown, followed by a quiet return to a more flexible approach once the Augean stables have been cleaned out.

The more over-the-top pronouncements against Marissa Mayer are probably overblown, but even if they are not, this is the beauty of the capitalist system. It's not like working at Glorious State Web Company 319; I hear that Northern California has a couple of other web firms which might be willing to accommodate workers who prefer to be home-based. If it's that important to you, make your choices based on that.