Cloud Computing

Having worked for a Grid computing startup has made me a big skeptic about whatever new marketing umbrella the idea gets resurrected under. As you probably guessed, its latest incarnation is called cloud computing.

Here's a witty video that tries to make the concept of cloud computing less cloudy. Hope you enjoy it.

Product Development Process

I chanced upon this document by Laurie in which she describes a typical product development process. We follow a very similar process, except that the MRD is seldom a formal document. Based on the analysis of market requirements from various sources as described here, we write the PRD. The UI mockups are done by our UI designer who works closely with the Product Managers to understand the workflows.

When there is a need to change the layout or the UI elements, our designer provides a static mockup. For workflows, we use Axure Pro, a wonderful wire-framing/prototyping product. Axure allows us to place UI elements, create links to other pages and design a prototype that is easy for our developers to play with and understand. There are two main advantages in using such a prototyping tool -

1. It forces us, the Product Managers, to think through the design a lot more. When only static mockups are provided, the development team has to many assumptions about various corner cases. Given the distance and timezone differences, it is not always possible to validate these assumptions. However, PMs have to address many of the corner cases when designing dynamic mockups and this reduces the gap between what PMs want and what development thinks PMs want. See here for details.
2. These mockups can be used to demo upcoming features to prospects and customers. Axure prototypes look very similar to the real software and helps us get advance feedback about workflows and features that we are planning for future releases.

I'm told dynamic prototypes can also be created using a Visio plugin. This could save you some $ for sure, but I found it a lot harder to use. Unless I am really cash-strapped, I'd consider the $539 for 5 Axure user licenses a big bargain.

100% protection against viruses and malware?

My wife's laptop recently got infected with malware, despite running an up to date version of a leading anti-virus and a spyware detector. Coincidentally, both these vendors have offices in the same street in which my wife works. Wish she could take the laptop over and tell them how badly their products suck. However, reality meant that I had to troubleshoot and fix the problem. After trying out a few other free anti-viruses and malware, none of which seemed to detect/fix the issue, I found Spyware doctor. A fantastic tool that found and fixed the problem - I ended up purchasing a 5-pack license for all our computers at home.

While on that topic, Solidcore's product was tested against nearly 16,000 viruses and malware by NSS labs. The results are available from our website here. We prevented 100% of these viruses, worms and malware. Needless to say, we were thrilled when we heard this and had celebrated in a big way. We are seeing a tremendous uptick in the demand for this product and there has never been as much excitement at Solidcore before.

Just in case you were wondering why I did not put our product on my wife's computer - I'd have done so had it not been her company issued laptop :)

Update on 10/14 - Shortly after I posted this entry, Secunia, an independent testing firm had released the results of their security tests. Symantec won, but Secunia claims in their blog entry that "Even the "high" score from Symantec was disappointing. Symantec detected a mere 64 out of 300 exploits, or less than one-fourth, leaving 236 exploits undetected!" and the report concludes alarmingly thus - "These results clearly show that the major security vendors do not focus on vulnerabilities. Instead, they have a much more traditional approach, which leaves their customers exposed to new malware exploiting vulnerabilities."

Product Lifecycle

I found this hilarious description of Product life-cycle recently - enjoy!

My First Webinar

Last week, Solidcore held a joint webinar with Trustwave (in which I presented). We had a very good attendance and the recording is available from -

http://w.on24.com/r.htm?e=112634&s=1&k=7F324EFE23D977C21A8DA677D816463D&partnerref=SCWEB

Email Volume?

So, how many emails do you receive daily? My email search engine reports that I have received approx. 24,000 emails and sent 4,200 mails in the last 6 months. This would work out to approx. 133 inbound emails and 23 outbound emails per day. If I just look at week days, the number is approx. 155 inbound and 27 outbound emails per working day. The first number is inflated because I am on multiple distribution lists.

We use SonicWall's Email Security product for spam filtering and it has a wonderful ROI calculator. You plug in a value for the cost of every spam email and it calculates the RoI of successful spam filtering. Not a spam killer, but a great way to justify your product to the Budget Owner. Here's the RoI we have achieved so far using this product -

Books on Product Management

I get asked a lot about good books on Product Management. Here's what I have read in the past 2 years or so since I moved into Product Management.

1. Crossing the Chasm
2. Inside the tornado
3. Built to last
4. Good to great
5. Innovator's dilemma
6. Innovator's solution
7. Selling the wheel, and
8. Blue Ocean strategy

I read it approximately in the order listed here and have been greatly impressed by items 5 and 7. #8 is a great read for anyone who is evaluating new ideas. Here's a good article describing how to apply the strategy canvas to evaluate new ideas ( http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/54/Blue-Ocean-Strategy-A-Small-Business-Case-Study.aspx). Rosen tells me that he has ah-ha moments everytime he reads these books.