THE INFOBLOG
Company news, plus our musings on Enterprise 2.0, organizational culture, knowledge workers, and information management.
Ribbon Hero uses game design principles to help users learn Microsoft Office
Kathy Sierra, design and usability advocate, is famous for saying, “If you want people to RTFM, make a better FM.” In 2007, Danc, a game designer and author of the Lost Garden blog, claimed that any user activity that can be learned, measured, and returned as feedback can be made into a game.
An alternative to Minesweeper?
Some folks on Microsoft’s Office Labs team took up the challenge. They’ve released a game called Ribbon Hero, which helps users master the Microsoft Office “ribbon” toolbar.
Danc discusses the design philosophy behind Ribbon Hero and shares his thoughts on turning a traditional application design into one that incorporates learning, fun, and a sense of accomplishment.
I’ve always thought that computer games have a lot to teach the rest of the software industry about design and usability. It’s fascinating to see software developers putting those ideas into practice.
Patent Foolishness
Our provisional patent expires today. We chose not to pursue an official, non-provisional one. It was a tough decision.
I won’t rehash the history of software patents here. And better writers than me have already written at length about the software patent debate. Paul Graham’s essay on software patents comes to mind.
This is about the decision process Gordon and I went through when we decided to pursue a provisional patent, and the reasons why we chose not to pursue the official one. The short version is: It’s the economy, stupid.
Mixed feelings
I’ve always had mixed feelings about software patents. As a programmer, I think they’re silly. It’s hard enough to write software as it is. Must I worry about all the thorny intellectual property issues, too? Code is more like sculpture than chemical engineering. Copyright should be enough to protect my work.
As a business owner, I understand why patents are necessary protection against other firms with large patent libraries. To put forth all the R&D and market development effort only to watch it drained away by litigation is a tech entrepreneur’s worst nightmare.
From an investor’s point of view, software patents are protection against downside risk. Unlike copyrights, patents are tradeable. There’s a market for patents, so even if the software business fails, you’ve still got an asset to sell to someone. You can get some of your principal back.
As long as we were in a bootstrapping phase, Gordon and I were content to leave the patent issue alone. Building working software and establishing a business were more important priorities. As a founder in a startup, you’re focused on delivering the upside, not managing the downside.
When we began seeking outside investment, that equation changed. The balance shifted toward getting a patent because it reassures potential investors. Gordon and I aren’t ideologues. We had no problem applying for trademark protection. So we swallowed our distaste and called a lawyer.
Patents: The Gathering
If the world of intellectual property seemed like one of those collectible card games from the outside — Hey, I’ll trade you two business method patents for three user interface licenses — it seemed even more so once we started the process.
First, we had the problem of defining our unique IP. You want to stake your claim as soon as possible, but since the software is currently under development, you make the broadest claims you can. We weren’t exactly sure what final form our “affinity engine” was going to take. We just knew that we needed to capture user behavior as a way of ranking the relevance of related items of content.
Then you hire a lawyer or law firm to search the patent office’s database of previous filings to determine whether somebody else has patented something similar. Since somebody else was making equally broad claims, it’s likely that you’ll need to refine your patent application a bit. This gets expensive quickly.
Once you file your official application, it can take quite a while before you find out whether it’s been approved or not. If it’s granted, you now have the ability to sue anyone that infringes on your rights. This is very expensive.
Intellectual property: How does your deck stack up?
The real point of having the patent is so that you can negotiate with other other patent-holders in case someone alleges infringement. It’s a strategy of mutual assured destruction. Rather than sue, counter-sue, and fight it out in the courts, you simply trade software licenses among yourselves.
The larger your deck of patent rights, the better the chance you hold the cards for something the other player wants.
For a start-up, this can mean that you can get acquired by a big firm solely because you hold an important patent. And if your business flops, you can sell your IP to a patent troll to use as ammunition against other companies. Investors like to see patents because it improves the valuation of a company and hedges against risk.
So it’s a costly and time-consuming distraction for a small business, but often a necessary one. We spent quite a bit of money on our provisional application in the hope that it would help attract additional investment.
Sunk costs
But then the economy soured, and investment began to dry up. It no longer made financial sense for us to pay for legal work if we weren’t going to raise additional funding as a result of it.
Another complication is that the future of software patents is in doubt. According to the recent In re Bilski case, software patents are only valid in cases where the software is tied to a physical device or is used to make changes in physical objects. Do either apply to software whose main purpose is to organize digital information?
It seemed dumb to come this far along on a patent only to abandon it, but we had to be pragmatic. It’s water under the bridge. We need to preserve what little cash we have left in the bank until our business gets going and the economy improves.
Conclusion
Building a software company is a long journey. Sometimes you make a wrong turn or stumble into a blind alley. We had no way of knowing when we began this process that venture capital would suffer a major contraction in 2009. It was a reasonable choice to make at the time.
I think that deciding not to go forward with our patent application is a reasonable choice now, given the economy and our need to bootstrap the business longer than we planned.
But that doesn’t make the decision any less hard to make.
A New Year’s gift for the easily distracted
I have a confession to make. It’s the New Year, and it’s time for resolutions, and perhaps for being a bit honest with yourself, so I feel among friends making this assertion:
I am easily distracted.
It’s true. And just between you and me, the Internet is not helping.
Look at Twitter, overflowing with real-time data streams full of people who are way more interesting than me, doing all kinds of fabulous things at the rate of one every three seconds.
Look at aggregation services like Reddit and Digg, and RSS, which brings me more interesting content in a day than I could possibly consume in a week.
Underneath all of it is the Web itself, pages and pages of interesting stuff which is fundamentally NOT WORK. As Paul Graham says, it’s like somebody snuck a TV onto my desk when I wasn’t looking.
So, in an effort to trick myself into completing tasks, and avoiding a spacewalk off into the unrelated, I decided to browse websites on how to become productive. (This is, in itself, unproductive, I know, but one has to start somewhere)
In my travels, I came across this inspired productivity hack from 43 Folders: 10 + 2. It’s based on the notion that you can do 10 minutes of anything. Just 10 minutes. You can do that, right?
The way it works is that you start yourself a timer, do those 10 minutes of, you know, your job, and then you can take a 2 minute break to do anything you want. Catch up with the tweetstream. Read your RSS. Heaven forbid, you could even go outside, or stretch. Then after those 2 minutes, you return to the task at hand, or if you like, pick another task that you’ve been avoiding and do that for 10 minutes.
Here’s where all those numbers add up — if you follow this method for an hour, you’ll have done 50 minutes of productive work, and spent 10 minutes being distracted. If you’re like me, you’ll find that this compares pretty favourably with an hour spent without the timer.
I couldn’t find a good Windows timer to help with this hack, so I made one for us – you can download it here. It’s a no-frills Windows only timer, that counts to 10 minutes, plays a dinky sound, then counts to 2 minutes, and then starts again. It’s pretty light on features, but if you find you need it to do something extra, let me know — I might be able to update it.
If I’m not too busy completing all my productive work this year, of course. 
Looking Forward to 2010
This time of year spawns many retrospective blog posts, “best-of” lists, and self-congratulatory advertisements in disguise.
Celebrate the year to come, not the year that's past.
We’re not going to write about any of that. Infovark is looking forward to the year ahead.
This is a short list of milestones I hope we’ll reach in 2010 — the sooner the better!
- The Infovark 1.1 general release, with fixes for several Exchange-Outlook email problems.
- A refined Infovark user interface, with improved layout and typography. Infovark should be easier to read, with your stuff featured prominently.
- A new task management tool that can be used in stand-alone fashion or with our Infovark application.
- Our first “outside” paying customers: folks we don’t know personally.
- Infovark training videos, user guide, and online knowledge base.
- Contributions to useful open source products, either through cash or code. It’s time we gave back to the technical community.
- Further posts on information management, personal productivity, knowledge work, and software technology. We live in interesting, perhaps revolutionary, times.
These are not predictions — I think we’ve all seen enough speculation in recent years. These are action items. Let’s focus on the great things we can get done together!
