J.D. Meier's Blog : Social Software

Four Stages of Market Maturity

J.D. Meier — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 02:28:33 GMT

You can tell the maturity of a market by the consumer patterns. If you know the life cycle stages of a market you can better anticipate what level of "needs" your product needs to match to be successful. (I always think of needs in stages like Maslow's hierarchy.)

The Four Stages of Market Maturity

Stage 1. Survival
Stage 2. Quality
Stage 3. Convenience
Stage 4. Customization.

From Survival to Customization
In the Autumn Special Edition of "strategy+business" magazine, Alonso Martinez and Ronald Haddock describe how a country evolves from developing nation to industrialized nation:

"As a country evolves from developing nation to indusrialized nation, the population's basic needs pass through four distinct stages. In developing countries, most of hte population is preocupied with basic survival - obtaining adequate food, shelter, and clothing. (Much of sub-Saharan Africa is in the stage right now.) As a middle class emerges, people seek greater quality in their food, housing, and clothing (This is currently happening, for example, in much of China and India.) Once a transitioning market's population can afford relatively high quality, they begin to seek convenience; they buy time-saving appliances and processed foods, and they may move closer to work. (This stage is emerging today in Eastern Europ and Latin America.) Finally, as the market graduates into the realm of developed nations, the population wants customization; with needs for survival, quality, and convenience now met, people will spend a premium (as many do in North America, Japan, and western Europe) to satisfy individual tastes and desires."

Key Take Aways
I think to successfully anticipate global market needs, you need to understand where in the stack, various consumers are. I've noticed a lot more attention on customization, particularly in social software and personal devices.

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

J.D. Meier — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 21:11:00 GMT

Web 2.0 means a lot of things to different people. For me, it means moving from a read-only, one-way Web to a read-write, conversational Web. I think the most exciting part is the shift from sites serving content to humans driving the experience. The machine is us! Where will we take us next?

For a short, thought-provoking video, watch Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us.

Ward and the Wiki Way

J.D. Meier — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 09:50:00 GMT

When Ward Cunningham was on our team, I learned a lot about building Wikis. He walked me through my first Wiki page. He probably didn't expect that 4 days later, I'd have more than 500 Wiki pages (he added a counter to my wiki!)

Ward told me Wiki Wiki was Hawaiin for fast, and he wanted to simplify publishing (the writeable web). This explained away my initial complaints of formatting and features, and I adopted the mindset of shapable content you can evolve over time. I thought of Wikis as notepad for the Web.

Ward and I had a lot of insightful conversations around various Wiki issues: one Wiki vs. many, choosing namespaces, choosing names, collaboration ... etc. The most important lesson for me was to think in terms of great pages. This meant, choosing better page names and make pages that matter. How to eat an elephant? ... one bite at a time. How to build a useful Wiki? ... one page at a time.

Deep Enterprise 2.0 Penetration

J.D. Meier — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 05:36:00 GMT

In Now THAT's What I'm Talking About! , Andrew McAfee writes about a case study of deep Enterprise 2.0 penetration:

"Highly popular, and highly useful. I find that the sites I visit most often these days are ones that give me 'the latest.' They help me stay on top of (or at least feel like I'm staying on top of) the world, the blogosphere, and my personal network of people and content. This page does the same thing at the company level for AARF employees. It gives them 'the latest' about their work environment. And it does so in a bottom-up and egalitarian fashion. This page doesn't contain the latest information that the company's senior managers, or its IT staffers, think employees should know about; it contains the latest information that employees think employees should know about."

Enterprise 2.0

J.D. Meier — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 03:18:00 GMT

I like how Most Business Tech Pros Wary About Web 2.0 Tools In Business summarizes a Web 2.0 + Enterprise world ...

"Enterprise 2.0 can't just be about a wiki here, a blog there forever. Taken together, the emergence and convergence of Web 2.0 and IP communications is what will determine whether there's truly an Enterprise 2.0. It's a new architecture defined by easier, faster, and contextual organization of and access to information, expertise, and business contacts--whether co-workers, partners, or customers. And all with a degree of personalization sprinkled in."

Guidance 2.0

J.D. Meier — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 02:51:00 GMT

Imagine what a Guidance 2.0 world might be like ...

browse tag clouds of reusable "architecture nuggets"
subscribe to "guidance feeds" that give you the latest practices and recommendations
share your "guidance" playlists with friends (share your favorite collections of how tos, guidelines, checklists)
build guidance mashups from your favorite trusted sources of information
rate the guidance and rate the raters (think Amazon or EBay)
browse a federation of guidance Wikis in your company and in the community

I think next-gen guidance is about bringing together a lot of key concepts:

context-precision (using context to organize information)
personalization (create your own views, tailor it for your needs, ... etc.)
community type ratings (expose the thinking and rate the raters for the guidance)
guidance types (evolvable schemas for guidance types, such as how tos, guidelines, checklists, patterns ...)
Folksonomy over taxonomy

A lot of today's guidance lives in blogs. Part of the problem (and beauty) of blogs is that every end node is a blob of information. What if there were RSS end nodes that contained "collections" or "lists" of how tos, guidelines, patterns ... etc.? From a very practical standpoint, I would love to subscribe to the latest MS (or any company) recommendations and view those in a type of my choice (patterns, guidelines, how tos ... etc.) The mashupability is endless.

Those are the ideas that drove and shaped Guidance Explorer. Guidance Explorer was just one small step towards a world of more effective and efficient guidance.