I’m in San Francisco for three days of Web discussions. The Web2 series is always interesting, and offers a good look at what might happen in the future. I just attended a presentation on eBay and open services. The presenter compared eBay’s decision to open its APIs to developers to that of AT&T’s decision to allow third-party devices to connect to the telephone network (the presentation will be available at http://innovation.ebay.com/)
In both cases, the openness led to tremendous advantage.

• For US phone users, billions of dollars in revenue — from answering machines to faxes to modems — were added to the economy. One could even argue that the addition of all these components paved the way for today’s Internet. Imagine if we had to get the telco-approved home router and what that would do to stifle innovation.
• For eBay the market was already building a number of tools for modifying and optimizing both the buying and selling process. At the time, this was achieved through screen-scraping: Pulling down pages and extracting the HTML from them. Not only was this inefficient and error-prone, but every time eBay changed its site, this broke the applications.

Some eye-opening mash-ups — including the combination of Craig’s List housing properties and Google Maps — prompted the folks at eBay to open and document the interfaces to their user base. The results were impressive: Over 55 percent of listings on eBay are submitted by their APIs rather than the traditional eBay web application. That’s billions of dollars in transactions over non-human-web interactions.

The idea of openness is one we spend a lot of time working on at Coradiant. We have a wide range of APIs, from legacy protocols such as SNMP (used by practically every Enterprise Management Software package) to more cutting-edge interfaces like real-time streams of user traffic that can be visualized in interesting ways through browsers or desktop applications.

Our openness has been a deciding factor in many of our customers’ decision to buy TrueSight. Of course, the main focus of our Real User Monitoring appliances is their own interfaces, which operators use to troubleshoot and optimize web apps. But a secondary use is delivering real user data to other destinations. Our ability to get to the individual user sessions and objects, and then to step back and aggregate huge amounts of traffic in ways that make them interesting to the business, is a cornerstone of what we do.

We’re big believers that if we’re open, our customers will surprise us with new things. So far, they haven’t disappointed us.

Now for Jonathan Zittrain, an Oxford Law professor, with the provocatively named Web 2.NO, which I’m choosing over the alternate “Print 2.0″ (or, as Jonathan’s labelling it, “how do I fix my printer driver?”)

Shots from the show at http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/web20summit/

We used to be a managed service provider.

Before we started building TrueSight, a lot of what we did involved sitting in chairs, trying to fix things, and answering the phone. We had boxes we relied on daily. Simple things — like a power strip that you could SSH into and reboot a machine through — saved us thousands of dollars and untold hours on planes.

And we had software. Complicated, hard-to-use, never-implemented software. I personally authorized a huge software implementation — half a million dollars — that we never got running (I won’t tell you the name of the company, to spare myself the lawsuits.) It was painful, and wasteful, and led to a ridiculous amount of finger pointing. In the end, a smart employee built something in Lotus Notes in his spare time that let us remotely manage an entire rack of multivendor equipment.

One of the things we’re brutally aware of, then, is complexity. When we started making equipment for data centers, we vowed to keep it simple. It’s one of the reasons we make things in an appliance format. We think that user performance monitoring should be transparent, secure, and as easy to maintain as a load-balancer or router.

It’s also one of the reasons you can see, at a glance, an entire user’s session and drill into it. And it’s one of the things that’s fueling the creation of a wide range of simple, intuitive visualizations (we call them Lenses, and we haven’t really shown them to anyone but our customers yet, but everyone who sees them can’t stop staring and clicking.) More on these in a future post.

So with web operations scars all over me, it makes me really happy when I see quotes from our customers that suggest we’re on the right track. Someone forwarded me a note on Friday that made my weekend:

“Every time a client calls up, the first thing someone says is, ‘Are they on Coradiant?’ So it’s become sort of the standard for troubleshooting. It went from sort of an exploratory product to one that has become almost mission-critical in regards to its usage … I mean, I’ve seen a lot of products that tout all their abilities, but this is one that actually truly delivers and delivers out-of-the-box, which is really the best part of it.”

Simplicity is great. But simple doesn’t mean limited features. In fact, we were talking to a very big software company last week and they looked at me an hour into the discussions and said, “this thing is like Excel: I can start using it in minutes, but there’s just so much depth and detail here I can get it to do pretty much anything.” (Although you can’t use it to play pac-man, as this completely unnecessary Excel macro does.)

I’ve often thought that product management isn’t about giving people what they ask for. It’s about not giving them what they don’t really need.

This year, we’re working on communicating that simplicity to people so they can grasp what we do and understand how useful it is. This video (about the iPod, but apparently created by folks in Redmond) is a great example of how to position for simplicity.

Part of making a simple product is understanding the problem you’re trying to solve really, really well. We spend a lot of time agonizing over small details and using smart defaults so our end users don’t have to. A lot of times, we don’t give people choices; instead, we make a choice for them. Choices, it turns out, are the enemy of great software. Every choice doubles the number of test cases you’ve got. Great technology is smart enough to make its own choices, and let the advanced users adjust those choices if they feel like running with scissors.

A friend showed me fellow Montrealer Andy Nulman’s blog on surprise — it’s great reading if you’re a marketer — and in his first post he claimed that:

“I have always shouted that consumers don’t know what they want. Well, I lied.
They know what they want.
They WANT to be led.
They WANT us to lead them.
They WANT to follow.
And they WANT to be surprised.”

That might sound a bit arrogant. And I’m confident that a lot of technology companies think it doesn’t apply to them: They’re selling non-consumer products, so their buyers make rational, economic buying decisions. Right?

Wrong.

Most people are innundated with rational pitches. I’m with Andy: Provided that the surprise includes novel, efficient, easy-to-grasp solutions to known problems, web operators are OK with us innovating on their behalf. Lots of our customers rely on us to plow the snow on their behalf; in other words, they don’t have time to figure out where web performance is going, so they expect us to do so.

Having sat in their seats for a few years, we feel their pain.