Andrew Busey: My Musings

The corporate site for my new company, Oxygen Games, is live.  Check it out and find out what we’re planning to do!  Our first game, Duels , is also going live today. Stay tuned for more information! (Oh who am I kidding, like there is anyone reading my blog that is going to actually stay tuned! So if you wander through the great interwebs, fall through the “tubes”, or whatever - check out the game!

I don’t watch much TV, maybe 4-5 different series.  Two of them, The Unit and Criminal Minds are on CBS.  In the last two weeks my CRAPPY POS Scientific Atlanta DVR has failed to record the last 10-20 minutes of the most recent The Unit and the last two Criminal Minds.  I suspect this is because it didn’t have enough space and it was two stupid to make space by deleting old crap.  So I went to the web in hopes of finding these episodes (legally).

Neither are available on iTunes, which if you’ve been reading I have recently been testing with AppleTV.  That would have been cool.  Becuase then I could have watched them.

So while Criminal Minds is strangely unavailable, CBS does offer the most recent episode of The Unit online through their video service, called Innertube.

I’ve now watched the “full episode” of last nights The Unit twice.  Except that the ENDING IS NOT FREAKING THERE.  WTF!  I mean making me watch it twice - well the commercial at least, you can fast foward through segments of the show, but not the commercials - is really annoying.  But how can they not have the ending?  If it is intentional it is the must consumer unfriendly, crappy thing ever.  I mean its not like I have some other way to see what happened.  If it is unintentional, which I hope is the case, someone is really idiotic.  FIX IT!  These guys wonder why YouTube is killing them.

This is not making me a fan of innertube or CBS.  Not that they care, but gah. 

Well I got my AppleTV.  Hooked it up, synched up, and turned it on.  I would say its interesting, but probably not ready for primetime.   If you just want to listen to iTunes stuff on your home theater… and maybe put pictures on your flatscreen, it’s probably good for that.

It would be much cooler if you could buy TV shows right from the couch, but you can’t.  You have to buy them on iTunes, wait for them to download (not much Apple can do about that I suppose), and then watch them. 

So I bought the pilot of a new show called Supernatural.  It had good reviews on iTunes and seemed interesting.  It took a while to download, it was 464mb, but I watched it eventually.  It seemed to be the right aspect ratio, but not HD.  So it was a little dark, but not too bad.  All-in-all a reasonable experience.

But not really a wow experience.  It wasn’t so cool that I’ve downloaded 10 more shows.  I did try to buy 1 or 2 other shows because my crappy Scientific Atlanta DVR (PIECE OF SHIT) decided to only recorded 53 minutes of several shows rather than the whole show.  I still can’t get over how bad that thing is.

Anyway, my recommendation on the AppleTV is to wait until version 2.

Unless you have an addiction to shiny new technology gadgets… but in that case you probably already bought one.

 This is a reprint from my old blog with the original timestamp. 

On product creation:  I wish we could think up everything people would want to do up front. But that would imply some uncanny brilliance or omniscient view - and we have neither. When creating new things (or more realistically combining old ideas in new and interesting ways - I mean, really, how many new ideas are there? — hmm this might be my next blog post…) it’s easy to think of the one application you thought might make sense. It’s also easy to think up the one use case you thought was interesting. Well, again, maybe not easy but it’s much easier than the next thing.

Which is figuring out how it will actually work in practice. If you are Microsoft it takes years to ship a new OS or Office because you have to think through all of this stuff up front. This pretty much sucks. Trust me I know, I’ve been doing product management from the beginning of my career. And that’s what product management is:

1. Come up with a baseline idea.
2. Figure out the many permutations that it might have.
3. Narrow them down to the most important things that the product needs.
4. Add constraints where necessary so users don’t fall off a cliff.
5. Write it all down in a way that UI folks and engineers can understand.
6. Herd cats to get it all done.

This doesn’t seem really hard. But it is. You have to understand the limitations of:

• Computers: specifically the OS(s) and browser(s) you are developing for.
• User interfaces: both what can be done and what people can parse.
• People: this is the hardest one - it might seem obvious what to do when you’ve been thinking about it for weeks, months, or years, but how is someone new going to expect to use it? E
• Engineers: they think about things in a linear, logical way so you have to explain it to them differently. Constraints are key.
• User interface designers: Imagine you are the writer/director, this person is the cameraman. If they don’t understand what you want to see then your movie isn’t going to make sense.

Ok so with that basic primer in hand, let’s look at how the web changes product management:

• Most important: You can change stuff easily. If you find something doesn’t work on the web it’s relatively straight forwad to change it. This is not true in software - even downloaded software - because once people get it, you have to deal with it - patches, new installs, CDs, notifications, etc. etc. etc. It sucks. So you basically want to make sure you get it right if you make software. On the web you can mess up and then fix your mistake.
• The rules of innovation are different. Because you can change things you do not have to think about every possible use in advance and constrain the system to prevent other usage paths. You just unleash and see both how you and your team use it in practice (as opposed to in theory) and how your users use it. This leads to all sorts of neat stuff.
• You can perform post-release polish: find any things you missed and fix them or add them. Often times the things you forgot are not so much broken but incomplete. A few small changes can often make things more dynamic, interesting, or compelling. For example, we launched groups (which I discussed in a previous blog entry) and it worked well in one or two groups. But people weren’t discovering other groups so we added a “related groups” feature which pointed them from groups to other groups that might be interesting. It’s worked great.
• You can learn from actual user behavior to correct interface problems. Discussions, another feature we just launched seemed good when we put it out there. But we started getting a lot of contact from people clicking “report abuse” - a feature designed to enable users to report other users who were abusing the system. However, in the automated output generated by the report abuse system we saw the comments people were reporting abuse on and what they “complained” about. Well, as it happens they weren’t reporting abuse at all they were replying. So even though the link clearly said “report abuse” its positioning was confusing people so we fixed it.
• Finally, you can leverage emergent behavior. This is really important because no one knows exactly what people are going to do in any new web system. A good system evolves to meet the demands and desires of its users. Cerainly we have an idea of what we want to happen and we encourage behaviors down that path, but ultimately our ability to adapt to emergent behaviors that arise can create new, very compelling opportunities that are exciting both to us and to our users.