ROBAX wrote:
Call me a cynic, but I just sat through a 30 minute exercise in pure marketing with absolutely zero substance.
It starts off by placing the product amongst the major players... "Yeah we're just like Google and all them". Then it tells the required underdog-succeeds story of something else (visicalc) that wasn't understood "Just like us" but became successful "Just like we will", and then just goes on about how great knowledge, learning and communication is... who would deny that?... it's all good, and the video has plenty of examples of this.
But what has it got to do with Yala. The video implies everything, but demonstrates nothing. The last time I saw a DNN module marketed like this, it turned out to be a forum. Perhaps I'm recalling Yala 1.0
It's also quite droll to hear the fine British gentleman read from a script containing quotes such as "..bring these high-falutin' concepts", "It may sound very flaky" and finally "What's all this crap".
Great bit of marketing, but this is a DNN forum... show us the module please.
Rob
Hi Rob
Scepticism is healthy, so do not apologise for it.
I was taught that a thumbnail definition of marketing is “identifying and satisfying a customer need, and making a profit doing it.” I do not see what is so wrong about that.
As for no substance, well maybe you dismiss complexity science and applied social psychology as lacking in substance. Here is Tom Malone saying some of the same stuff.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI2zusRlKBs
Moreover because this talk is pithy people do pooh-pooh it as New Age drivelling. Therefore, here is John Chambers on his hind legs as another illustration of the contexts in which a Yala makes sense.
http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/619
As I explained to John Mitchell, VisiCalc did not make accounting so easy that the technocrats could understand it; it made the technology so easy that the accountants could use it. The Yala tools are as basic and simple as I could make them – and if your criteria for judgement are complexity of screens and cunning use of Ajax you will be underwhelmed.
By the way, this is how VisiCalc was received:
“VisiCalc was announced to the public at the National Computer Conference in New York City in June of 1979. Bob Frankston delivered a paper at the personal computer part of the conference (a small event in a hotel near the main show floor) describing the new program he had just written. In hindsight, it was a great paper. However, it wasn't the well received announcement you might expect. Lots of our relatives and our publishers attended. Almost nobody else cared. There were 20 friends and family and 2 ‘real’ attendees, but as Bob recalls the two people we didn't know walked out early probably because it wasn't like the talk about the undocumented opcodes of the TI-59 calculator (a hot topic in those days).”
You fault me for starting by quoting Google, YouTube, and so on as examples of web applications. Should I have used examples that people are less likely to have heard of?
Wrong, the Yala is not a forum – who needs another one of those.
Sorry, I cannot help the British accent and the American idiom. You would accuse me of a superiority gambit if used the right terms: discourse ethics, social constructionism, homeostasis. See what I mean.
One of the roots of the Yala is work I did for BP (yes the same BP) over ten years ago. They wanted an online resource to aid their people who were managing strategic relationships. I had fathered a site for my company called the Build Quality in Toolkit and BP sought my advice on the suitability of similar tools for their needs.
BP was tending to think of its business more and more as a portfolio of strategic relationships than a portfolio of business units. For example, if it outsourced its fleet of oil tankers then it created a strategic relationship/partnership with the shipping companies that now provided those transport services.
In particular, BP had recently grown through mergers with Amoco and Arco and wanted to inject fresh ideas into the work of its refineries.
At the heart of such operations lies Linear Programming. This mathematical technique seeks to optimize the economics of an oil refinery. It balances the output of the ethylene crackers (those tall thin reactor vessels that tower over refineries like spaceships on the launch pad), and the output of any downstream chemical plant, against the supplies of crude oil and the demands for refined products and chemicals. This technical activity has remained unchanged for a number of years. Every company approaches it slightly differently and each refinery believes they get it more or less right.
BP had decided to outsource this key activity in the hope that outsiders would bring a new focus and, one day perhaps, pave the way to balancing supply and demand not for each refinery separately but for the network of refineries as a whole.
As the deal came into effect the single relationship between the outsourcing company and the oil company’s procurement team had to roll out to two dozen refineries across the world, each an interface where the new arrangement must work.
It was this complex relationship, and the experience of what worked well and what did not work at all, that set me thinking about interfaces, aims, issues and views.
The importance of the success of such strategic partnerships could not be more vividly demonstrated than by what is happening in the Gulf today.
You might say that this is a very poor recommendation for the Yala; on the contrary, the Yala incorporates the most powerful learning experiences. Where BP was going wrong, even ten years ago, was that the leadership (whatever it said) imitated the commitment-oriented style of Jack Welch, which makes it very hard to own up when things go wrong.
If you want to manage the unexpected, you have to increase collective mindfulness. Engage brains, if you like. There is a great deal known about this, too, but I expect you would just dismiss it as flim-flam.
I am eager to show the Yala modules to people who face such problems, do you?