Jamie Zawinski’s (author of xscreensaver) has a post up on his blog (same article here), about how he talked Nat Friedman into changing the focus of Novell’s new calendar server project Hula. There’s one point that Jamie made in the article that set me thinking:
According to his article, Jamie told Nat that if all he was going to do was offer a free groupware server, it’d be attractive to corporations, no doubt, but unless it had a “coolness” factor about it, they’d never get any participation from the Open Source community. Groupware, in the traditional sense, he says, was all about ticking line items off checklists, popular among bureaucrats and committees. But their “focus in the client group had always been to build products and features that people wanted to use. That we wanted to use. That our moms wanted to use”.
Instead, Jamie went on,
“..narrow the focus. Your “use case” should be, there’s a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?”
That set the gears turning in my mind. Novell has to balance two things here. It is a company whose products are overwhelmingly open source. That’s Novell’s new business model. For that, on the one hand, the company needs to build great, industry-strength products that large corporates will use, and will be willing to pay for support. But on the other, these products also need to be “cool” enough, “sexy” enough, for the average nerd to download, try out, and muck about with. To put it more succintly, Novell now needs to realise that the community needs to be looked at as the end user, regardless of which client base the revenue is going to come from. Indeed, how will this software get him laid? That’s what’ll get him started on hacking Hula.
Perhaps this model of development is going to herald a new genre of products: Products that are so well designed, they scale from casual, fun use to organisation-wide deployment. Jamie calls this “social software”. We’re also going to see companies coming up with interesting business models. Google is one such company. Novell is one which seems to be doing well too. And if you look at the product range of these companies, you’ll find a common thread – “coolness”, and a large community following. Gmail. Blogger. Picasa and Hello. SuSE Linux. Evolution. Now Hula. The future of software has never looked more promising!
The rest of the article is all about how Hula needs to include functionality that a group of students at University would find useful in their everyday lives. He’s drawn out a few great usage scenarios and don’t-dos. Defintely worth a read.