Company websites are obsolete, blogs are the how we connect and learn

Our understanding of the world we live in increases step by step. When we face with something new, to be able to understand it, we often need to describe it using concepts that are already known to us. We classify it, associate with similar things.

Software is often complex and abstract. It is hard to grasp what a particular software solution does. It is even harder to explain to someone else, yet we often need to do this. I often find myself in search of a reference point or an analogy, when I explain a software feature to someone else. Real life analogies are not so easy to find for abstract concepts, but when it matches, it makes life much easier. Reference points such as other software that may be more mainstream, familiar to the audience is often easier to find (depending on the audience). As a consultant, I've used this technique quite regularly since I've worked with number of different tools daily and considered myself “independent” as I was not associated with any of the parties.

However, as a vendor, I hesitate to do the same for couple of reasons:

• I no longer work with other products every day, hence the information I have may have become obsolete. Stating something that may be wrong about another vendor's product is the last thing I want to do.

• When I describe something our solution does particularly well, in contrast to another product, it sounds like I'm dissing the other product even though this is not the intention.

• A vendor talking about other solutions has a lot less credibility since it is automatically assumed that s/he is biased. As a consultant, I had a lot more credibility. In reality, many (if not most) consultants are much less "independent" than people think, and what I believe and say has not changed, yet the perception is the reality, and vendors have less credibility (often rightly so)

• Many people don't think it's appropriate for a vendor to talk about another's products whatever their reasoning may be.

I'd love to know what other people think about this. Is it OK to talk about products of others? Does it make a difference if the other vendor is not a competitor?

In conversations, I try to understand what the other side wants and adjust my approach accordingly. In some cases, compare and contrast is exactly what people want to get a better understanding of the domain. When writing in a public medium however, we don't have the luxury to adjust according to the audience (not to mention that what you write has sort of a permanency thanks to Google).

So we're left with definitions, industry buzzwords, and conceptual explanations when describing our products. This is not a good approach. As a consultant/customer, I've hated it. All the vendor sites looked the same (still do). It was almost impossible to figure out the differences between vendor products. Even the solutions from vendors in different disciplines that do not compete with each other end up sounding the same. So the websites are pretty much useless for the potential customers' to get a better understanding of the solutions. Therefore, generic, buzzword infested product/solution definitions are neither useful for vendors (no way to differentiate, everyone says the same things), nor for customers (no way to figure out which solution is what you need).

So what do we do? How do we resolve this problem? For our part, we attempt to ease this problem using the tools provided by the web. We are in the process of converting all our documentation (reference guides, tutorials, etc.) into html format and making it available over the web, enabling the search engines to index them. Manuals have always been available over the web in pdf format. They have lots of information in them that may be relevant to what someone is looking for, yet they are locked inside pdf files, not available to someone searching the web for information. This is so obvious that it puzzles me why we haven't done it before. Shame on us.

The next tool we intend to use for communication is, not surprisingly, this blog. Blogging gives us the opportunity to share the problems we work on, the solutions we came up with, the decisions we struggle with in a way much more open than website marketing buzzword nonsense. We aim to make our company as transparent as possible by sharing our experiences and plans continuously. We aim to make the blog useful by sharing the knowhow we accumulate in the process.

It is our hope that being able to seeing through our thought process, following the evolution of our products, and working though use cases and scenarios we will regularly have will give interested people the tools they need to learn what they need and evaluate whether or not our products meets their needs. After all, this is what we'd like to do when we are searching for a solution for ourselves.

And if we can provide enough value to convince folks to share their experiences and participate in determining where are are heading? Well, we are allowed to dream, aren't we?