Monkeynoodle.Org

Tag: Products

  • Engines and fuel – who writes quality content?

    Engines and fuel – who writes quality content?

    In software, everyone wants to build engines, and no one wants to make fuel. A platform for executing content has high potential leverage and lots of vendors make those. The expected community of fuel makers rarely materializes. Content for software engines breaks down along two axes: simplicity versus complexity and generality versus specificity to the…

  • Tools and the Analyst

    Tools and the Analyst

    Let’s say I’m responsible for a complex system. I might have a lot of titles, but for a big part of my job I’m an analyst of that system. I need tools to help me see into it and change its behavior. As an analyst with a tool, I have some generic use cases the…

  • Dev and Test with Customer Data Samples

    Dev and Test with Customer Data Samples

    The short answer is don’t do it. Accepting customer data samples will only lead to sorrow. REDUCE THE DATA At first, you may look at a big data problem as a Volume or Velocity issue, but those are scaling issues that are easily dealt with later. Variety is the hardest part of the equation, so…

  • It’s not a platform without partners

    It’s not a platform without partners

    What are the major decisions that a platform needs to make in order to balance incentivizing development vs. maintaining quality and control over their 3rd party app marketplace? Let’s look at this on three scales, in which the right answer for a given team is somewhere between two unrealistic and absolutist extremes. First decision scale:…

  • Where’s the Product in AI?

    Where’s the Product in AI?

    AI & ML products are harder than they look AI tech is obviously overhyped, and conflating with ideas from science fiction and religion. I prefer using terms like Machine Intelligence and Cognitive Computing, just to avoid the noise. But if we strip away the most unrealistic stuff, there’s some interesting paths forward. The biggest problem…

  • License models suck

    Most license models suck in some way: Flat rate sucks for the vendor because it leaves money on the table from large customers. This can be acceptable for an inherently limited product model (e.g. per user with a bulk discount), but it is not ideal for scalable enterprise software. Per unit of a metric sucks…

  • Metrics in Splunk, and Observability

    Metrics in Splunk, and Observability

  • Imperfect Product

    Software vendor people have all sorts of different backgrounds… while lawyers and architects might have pretty similar educations, software people could have been educated in liberal arts or pre-med or hard knocks instead of STEM or EECS. Furthermore, they might have more experience in selling or more experience in servicing, or no customer-facing experience at…