So here we are at Adobe Max. James and I are both here and I thought I'd take advantage to actually get some video with James. So, related to Adobe Max, one of the things you've been writing about a lot recently is sort of, to put it in my own phrasing, making portals prettier and more usable. Sure. And, like, when did you start, did this start with the analyst thing, the Adobe analyst thing, where Deloitte was showing how they were making SAP better? No, not really. I mean, I think I've been thinking about this for a while, when I first started to have any dealings actually at all with Adobe. I mean, you know, at least from an enterprise perspective, they came out of this creative suite kind of world. And when I first started hearing about Flex, it seemed like there were some interesting things you could do with that that were not necessarily what you would expect, that were going to add some value to enterprise apps. And particularly, I think it was Adobe Max in Vegas two and a half years ago, there was a great presentation by T-Mobile that really set me thinking about the opportunity to rethink user experience. Oh, yeah, that was the internal training app. Exactly. At the Venetian. Yes. Right, right, right. And, you know, they had done a bunch of interesting stuff. Some of it, you know, that I think Adobe still hasn't thought about how to turn into product. But, you know, as much as anything else, enterprises tend to focus all their user experience stuff facing out. And I do think there's a great advantage to facing a little bit of that end. So I guess what I'm talking about is sex. Yeah, you know, that's something I'm always skeptical that you can actually sell usability and things that look good to enterprises, like you're saying. But I've actually been noticing over the past year or so that there is a little bit more enterprises kind of, not taking it for granted, but what's the word? They're sort of like knowing that that would be a good thing to do. Well, look, I mean, here's an example. Bill Scott, who is now at Netflix. He spent a little bit of time at Yahoo. And before that, he was at Sabre, the airlines folks. And it's kind of weird to think that Sabre had any user experience thinking at all, I mean, CLIs and whatnot. But he has a great blogger, and I'm really hoping I remember this right, but I think his blog is called Looks Good Works Well.
2:05Right. And, you know, that's really what we're talking about. It's not about flash. It's not about pretty. But, you know, with apologies to Arthur C. Clarke, I mean, you know, any user interface sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from sex. I mean, I think that the iPhone has really changed how people think about user experience. I thought it was indistinguishable from magic. Yeah, well, I like to change it. I see. Yeah. Seriously. Come on, the iPhone. Mmm. Yeah, yeah. That's true. Come on, I'm going to zoom in on that. I mean, it's, yeah, magic, sex, those are the same thing. That's what I've been led to believe. Absolutely. But I've been lucky enough to have that. So, you know, as much as anything else, just really thinking about what is, yeah, what works well and not Flash for its own sake. And, you know, I think that pretty clearly Flash got a bad reputation in many respects. For being games or something like that. Or for being the skip intro. For just being, yeah, skip intro. Skip intro, anti-pattern, where it's like, why on earth have they done this? This is not adding any value. But I think now people are realizing that you can use that same technology in a very useful kind of way. And I just think that's an interesting thing that, you know, all the fuss. And, you know, as I just said, the iPhone is, you know, is now the reality in which we all live or something. But, you know, the fact that this morning everybody was waiting to hear that you could, you know, build apps, use the Flash tools and deploy to... Right, at the Adobe Max keynote. At Adobe Max keynote. We found out today that there would be support for, you know, well, in fact, it's not support for Flash on the iPhone, but it would be basically compiling. You wouldn't need to use Objective-C. So, develop using Flash tools, compile, run on the Apple iPhone. But to me, you know, I'm not sure that is what's most interesting or sexy about what you can do with Adobe technology. I mean, call me a sort of an enterprise apologist. But, you know, we just spent half an hour doing some video with FedEx.
4:07And frankly, I thought that was, you know, a really cool app. Way cooler than some bullshit game on the App Store. Who gives a fuck about that? That's right. You know, we had, you know, tracking of trucks with the ability to... So, this is FedEx Custom Critical. They are the people that deliver, you know, drugs that need to stay up to the temperatures. Stuff that the Department of Defense is moving around. Ferraris, they have an exclusive deal. And, you know, those guys, the ability to set thresholds across a truck with sensors, using a rules engine. They're mixing together different mapping modes. You know, they've got all of the policy control. They've got really useful visualization. And I thought there was a really great moment in the interview that you did with the guy, where you're looking at him... And we don't tend to think of, you know, as someone like you with a system management background, you know, we tend to think about event suppression not so much in the agent sense, but in the technology sense. Right. So, his view of visualization was visualization is a technology that enables you to suppress events that you don't need to know about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that, you know, as I say, that's kind of magic. And as I've said, magic is sex. So, I'm just a little bit bored with... Yeah, sure. I mean, Avatar is great. It's great to see all these, you know, cool things that you can do with technology. The video and movies and entertainment. So, yeah, you know, in the keynote this morning we had the guys from behind the Avatar movie come and present. And actually, to me, what was most interesting in that was definitely not what the boring guy said about the plot of the movie. It was what he said about the use of the creative sweet souls. It was pretty clear they were using almost like good enough. It's kind of weird. You don't think of creative... You think of that as high gloss. But, you know, when you're making a movie like Avatar, it's like these are the good enough tools that we use as part of. Yeah, they were using like Premiere and Lightroom and things like that.
6:08Yeah, and, you know, Adobe Connect for a bit of integration when the artist was on site. Oh, yeah, yeah. That was right. So, it was actually they were using the entire tool set, not for the high gloss, but for getting things done. And I think that's what's important about Adobe technology. You know, if it's not about getting stuff done, then it doesn't have any value. And so I think, you know, I've been thinking a lot about user experience. I think there's every chance that we'll run an event in London looking at some of the stuff next year. And really, I think there are some new skills that organizations need to learn. But the key thing is turning some of this external focus. I mean, people talk about the consumerization of IT. That's right, we do need to turn it inwards and start looking about improved user experience. And what does that actually mean from a business perspective? You know, is there genuinely a productivity advantage to fewer clicks? Well, there certainly can be. And, you know, look, my favorite example is probably expenses. Now, obviously, expenses is hideous. Everyone hates expenses, whether you have a good expenses system or not. But, you know, as somebody that talks to a lot of people in tech, I've got to say, it is unbelievable how horrific the standard, you know, Oracle and SAP solutions are in this thing. And how do I know? Because all of the people that I work with at major tech vendors use them, and they all constantly bitch about them. I always figure expense applications are terrible by design so that no one wants to use them so they don't file their expenses. Well, I think that there may be some truth to that. But, you know, from a genuinely tracking, you know, what your ongoing financial expense is, you do need to get people to update this stuff. So I just think that, you know, I think we need a little bit more science. And it's kind of interesting to see Adobe buying Omniture for the consumer-facing stuff. I could see that having some value behind the enterprise firewall. But I think the key thing for me is that, yes, this Adobe stuff has value. Yes, something that's sexy. And something that's very much about the enterprise. And I think, you know, it probably needs more than two minutes in a max keynote. I do think that Adobe needs an enterprise event, something that your common or garden enterprise developer can say to his boss,
8:13I'm going to the Adobe show, and the Adobe show, and the boss says, great, instead of going, what, you want to find out how to make cooler photographs? Yeah, they need a conference you can go to that basically helps you take all of the work you've been doing on the back end and then understand how you put a front end on top of it. And, you know, basically how you make your software usable and how that gets quantified in a business enterprise sense. Because it's not always immediately, you have to have a fair amount of imagination to go from consumer-based things into enterprise things and see how that would actually help you out to have, like the FedEx people, like have something that's very visual and very usable. And actually, it helps expedite business as it were. Well, we want, I mean, employee activities should be about flow. I mean, whether it's someone in the call center, you know, whether it's somebody that's out fixing things in the field, whatever it is, the more you can do to enable your employees to have flow, the happier they're going to be working, the more productive they're going to be, you're going to have better employee alignment and whatnot. And that's the thing is just, you know, too often we try and treat our employees cogs in the wheel. But, I mean, your blog is called People Over Process for a reason. That, you know, even within processes, you do need to be thinking about people and flow and productivity. And, you know, I think that's the, to me, kind of the promise of the Adobe tools. And I'd like to see them actually, I guess, nail down that narrative a little bit more effectively. Yeah? Well, we'll have to see what they have to say next year. Absolutely. Maybe there'll be a whole other enterprise thing. Maybe.