Sunday, January 13, 2008

Product Development. What a Strategy !!!

From time to time, I come to the conclusion that no matter how much effort I consume to succeed on a goal, the goal always changes, superposing itself to something else, another goal, and continuing this effort endlessly. At the end -if such an end exists- I forget the most important steps and those particularities that make the “trip” to the goal meaningful.

Innovation and R&D are not the means to an end in terms of product development. Qualitrak is a very good example. Investing thousands of EUROS, Drachmas at the older days, to develop a software product for construction has been cannibalized to a document management system in order to serve a more keen market segment. The sad part of the story is that we woke up from that dream (the production phase) just to realize that either the market is not ready (construction), or as ready as we thought it was, or we dream something that has no commercial value. What we do then ? We cannibalized it. We try to make it something useful by taking advantage of each building block of software code and reshape it to something different, something that is “time correct”.

While this phase is in progress, evolution hits the door and we add more goodies on it. Now its not a document management, is a file management, workflow, CMS, …. and God knows what else. So now, what we do? We break it down again … We make new modules. And back where we were we make a module for the CONSTUCTION industry.

And we wish … that timing is appropriate, this time !

Saturday, January 12, 2008