RE: Slow Down Development, NO; Speed up Minds, YES

["Locke, David" <dlocke -at- bindview -dot- com>]

Clients, customers, users, consumers, influencers--what's the difference.
Tons. 

If you have clients they should be paying you to develop the product, but
you should keep the intellectual property and license it back to them for a
defined exclusivity period. Your clients should be early adopters. And, they
should get a competitive advantage from your work. That's what they are
concerned about. Early adopters listen to influencers.

Customers are economic buyers. They decide if your price and their ROI are
compatible. They generally don't listen to users. Customers listen to
influencers.

Users determine if a software package will be upgraded. They listen to their
own local expert who is a technical enthusiast and consequently an
influencer. They don't have a lot of clout with the economic buyer, but if
they make a case not to renew, you are toast, because the renewal, if
marketed correctly is gravy with its reduced cost of sale. 

Consumers are the people who don't want to deal with a computer. If it has a
few buttons fine. But, if it ever breaks, it's likely to stay broken and
subsequently unused.

Influencers are the people that write PC Week and all those other computer
publications. Some are employed in very small number across the IT industry
where they make recommendations to early adopters. They are a powerful bunch
of people. They don't read manuals. They model the application. Minimalism
was meant for them, but if they need doc, you are toast, because they
couldn't construct an experiment that tells them how to do something. They
will break out a debugger, or a sniffer if it comes to that. Influencers
look at technology before it is productized. They are happy if the
technology enables or improves performance. They really don't expect a box,
a book, a disk, because they won't pay for anything. But, if you don't get
their attention, the next market leader will.

Fast, slow, buggy, or not really depends on where you are in the technology
adoption cycle. Everything about how you conduct your business is controlled
by the particular phase you are in. Nothing works forever. Some things will
work for where you are right now.

By failing to be responsive to transitions in that cycle, you will be left
facing the wrong customer with the wrong product, wrong business processes,
and wrong people. You can stay in a phase for a long time, or you can move
through them quickly. You can be comfortable. Or you can change with all due
haste. But, if you are static, you are reducing the amount of money your
technology could generate.

David W. Locke