From time to time in the blogosphere (ie, 24\/7, including holidays), you’ll find people like me bloviating about the Big Picture. Recently, for instance, I’ve written a series of posts about how business software is changing as applications come to be delivered over the Net. Now, the Big Picture is important. A lot of folks have been hosed by their failure, or refusal, to see the Big Picture. But the problem with the Big Picture is that it’s necessarily simplified and idealized. No one actually lives in the Big Picture. People live in the Little Pictures of their own lives, which are ruled much more by Murphy’s Law than by Moore’s Law. And just as there are dangers in failing to see the Big Picture, there are dangers in failing to see the Little Pictures. Sometimes, it’s good to be brought down to earth.<\/p>\n
Enter the Fat Guy. Scott Chaffin, a small-business owner down in Texas who writes the Fat Guy blog, recently let loose with what he later described to me as “a boozy rant<\/a> after a long old week.” A post I had written about Salesforce.com and its success in pioneering the software-as-a-service model had stuck in his craw because, as a Salesforce subscriber himself, Chaffin had been struggling with what he views as a lapse in the system. Apparently, there was recently a break in subscribers’ ability to sync data automatically between Microsoft Outlook and Salesforce, a problem described in this discussion thread<\/a> on Salesforce’s community site. For some of the small-business owners who rely heavily on Outlook but also use Salesforce, this has been more than a nuisance, as Chaffin colorfully describes:<\/p>\n Until something better comes along, Outlook is the one and only calendaring, contacting, to-doing, and emailing application. I cannot stand Outlook, but there it is. It\u2019s there, where it is, because it syncs with my Palm Treo. My boon companion. Only leaves my side when I lay my fat head down to sleep. I re-charge, it re-charges. Simple enough, right? So that\u2019s two devices that must talk to each other, and hey, lucky old me, I found a third that works into that simple little network of thingies, and that\u2019s the CardScan machine, which simply scans business cards, for the low price of about $200. This is vital, as I will be at a trade-show next week doing about 20 different, isolated meetings, with about 50-60 different people, and I have zero desire to spend a day typing those into Outlook by hand …<\/p>\n I chose to spend a significant sum and network with SalesForce, which once did sync with Outlook quite loverly, but has decided not to anymore. Oh, they\u2019ll tell you they sync. Problem is, you have to go to SFDC (their cute shorthand) and enter everything in by hand first and then they\u2019ll send everything to your Outlook database, which can then be sent to your Treo. As noted, I have zero desire to spend a day typing those into ANY FUCKING THING by hand …<\/p>\n Point is, I\u2019ve been doing exactly the above since at least 1999. It gripes my ass to no end to have Salesforce come along and say to me that \u201cHey dude, you just spent major bucks with us and you identified syncing as a MAJOR MUST-HAVE to make the choice to spend those bucks, so we\u2019re going to cripple our software and make you do everything on our website first before you can do anything else.\u201d Well, I\u2019ve been doing this a lot longer than Salesforce has, and frankly, I\u2019m not going to stop entering contacts into my Palm on the plane, and entering contacts into my Outlook at home, and scanning 100 business cards in one hour at the office, and then SYNCHRONIZING them all between each other seamlessly and easily with no loss of data \u2014 just so I can get a Web 2.0 drag-and-drop Ajaxed interface into mail-merge. You ain\u2019t that good, daddy-o.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Chaffin’s experience, and annoyance, has a couple of broader implications – maybe even some Big Picture implications. First, the people who own small businesses – and who have recently become a big target for many large software companies – have often hacked together their IT “systems” by hand with the tools that have been available and affordable to them. These systems may not be elegant, but they work, and the best way to alienate these people is to force them to grapple with a time-consuming workaround to adapt to some new product or service (unlike large-business managers, they can’t dump the crap work into someone else’s lap).<\/p>\n Second, don’t underestimate the lock-in power that programs like Outlook and Excel and Quickbooks and Peachtree and their associated files still hold, particularly in smaller businesses. Someday we may have standard document formats and easily transportable data, but we don’t yet. The competitive battle for the future of software is going to be fought out at the level of the Little Picture as much as at the level of the Big Picture. Lose sight of either one, and you’ll be in trouble. In other words: It ain’t over till the Fat Guy rants.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From time to time in the blogosphere (ie, 24\/7, including holidays), you’ll find people like me bloviating about the Big Picture. Recently, for instance, I’ve written a series of posts about how business software is changing as applications come to be delivered over the Net. Now, the Big Picture is important. 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