I’ve made the following platform choices:

Initially, the embeddable client library will strictly provide a C interface for Windows. In future versions, I’ll also provide wrappers in popular high-level languages, starting with C# and Java. At some point, the library will also be available for Linux and Mac OS X.

The server will be developed as a standalone Java server (i.e., without requiring Tomcat or JBoss or anything like that) with a MySQL backend. Future versions will enable more database choices (probably starting with SQL Server), though I won’t develop a non-Java version.

In a subsequent version, I’ll also release a “reflector” module in PHP/MySQL. The reflector will be a dumb server component that listens for events from the embedded client library and stuffs them into a database. Periodically, it will connect to the main server and send a batch of data. The purpose of the reflector module will be for developers who don’t want their users to see an outgoing HTTP request to an unfamiliar domain, but who don’t want to actually host the main server themselves. At some point, the reflector will probably also serve as a load-balancer and/or a failover mechanism.

The reporting client, with all the fancy charts, will be developed in C# using the .Net 3.5 framework, for maximum WPF goodness.

Thanks again for your help in choosing platforms!

Do you use Java or .Net to develop your desktop software? Or are you maybe using C++ with MFC or WxWidgets? Anyone selling desktop software built with Ruby or Python?

Do you have a server? Is it Windows or Linux? Do you have your own server, or do you use a VPS account? Or just a shared web server, with PHP/MySQL? Do you have permission to install your own software into your server environment? Are you already running a Java app server? Tomcat, or something else?

Whatever platforms people seem interested in are the ones I’ll focus on in my development, so express you preferences here!

Without any additional commentary on my part, what do you think of that design? I’ll answer questions in the comments section.

Something, perhaps, to express your knowledge of contemporary video-game pop culture, while simultaneously making an ironic commentary about being a complete social misfit. Not just a run-of-the-mill computer nerd. But maybe a former a member of an actual high school band. Brass section.

Maybe something like this…

Oh yeah. That’s the stuff.

To buy that shirt, you’ll need to surf on over to the Torso Pants website, where you’ll find a truckload of other pithy outerwear. No matter what ironic outings you’ve planned with your friends this summer, you’ll find a breezy 100% cotton tee with the perfect one-liner somewhere on TorsoPants.com.

While you’re there, open up the HTML source in your favorite text editor and scroll waaaaay down to the bottom. There, you’ll notice a SCRIPT tag, linking to code from a google.com domain. And if you’ve been involved in web development – in even the slightest capacity – over the last two or three years, you’ll immediately recognize that ubiquitous little snippet of JavaScript as belonging to the embeddable Google Analytics library.

Anyone with a GA account can paste those two lines of JavaScript into her website’s design template and immediately start collecting a broad array of metrics about the site’s users, their browser environments, and how they interact with the website. Most importantly, the marketing department can see where their incoming links are coming from, which types of users tend to buy (or not buy) which types of products, and which advertising campaigns are most efficient at converting which eyeballs into dollar bills.

The Torso Pants people can actually quantify the hilariousity of their t-shirts by comparing the popularity of the product pages, even among people who don’t buy! For my money, Tuba Hero is at least 35% more hilarious than Homeschool Valedictorian.

Right about now, given the vast scope of my readership, I assume the guys from the TorsoPants marketing department are looking at a blip on those charts, wondering what the hell is going on. The abnormal rate of traffic from this page will surely show up on their dashboard, and they’ll probably click on over here to investigate. (Hi guys!! I’m sure you don’t mind my borrowing one of your images, cuz of all the free advertising I’m sending over? Right?)

I picked the Torso Pants website for my little story to illustrate the fact that pretty much every company (small or large) doing business on the internet is currently using business intelligence, usually in the form of Google Analytics, to optimize every aspect of their online presence. Torso Pants is just one example out of millions of other small businesses with the same snippet of JavaScript on their pages. The few companies not using GA have — almost without fail — implemented the more sophisticated (and enterprisey (and therefore more complex (and significantly more expensive))) solutions from Omniture or WebTrends.

But the idea is the same.

From the placement of links to the wording of ad copy, every element of the interaction design can be studied and optimized using a web analytics platform, performing A/B testing about the effectiveness of different ads, different landing pages, different offers, different prices, and so on and so forth.

In fact, the existence of these analytic tools on the web provides one of the most substantial positive arguments for developing a new software application as a webapp, rather than on a desktop platform. Even if the web development process is more cumbersome. Even if it means additional IT staff to deploy and manage the online app. And even if the browser environment degrades the user experience.

Releasing your product on the web means you can easily incorporate a sophisticated statistics package, by just pasting two lines of code into a single template file.

It’s hard to argue with that.

But what if there was an analytics package for desktop applications? What if the integration process was as simple as linking to a library and pasting two lines of code into your own project? How would that change the equation? And why is the competitive landscape so crowded in the web analytics marketplace be so barren in the desktop analytics space?

I’ve spent the last few months thinking about just such a platform, wondering what kinds of things you could learn about your users. How could you use that intelligence to design and build better software? Here are a few of the ideas I came up with:

• First of all, how many people are actually using your application? You might know how many people downloaded it, but do you know how often they launch it? Do they use it every day? Maybe only once a week, or once a month? Is it used mostly Monday through Friday, during the day? Or primarily on evenings and weekends, implying the difference between corporate purchasing and leisure and hobby users? After using the application for a week or two, do most people uninstall it, or do they start using it even more?
• Do your users have shiny new, high-powered machines running Vista with 4 gigs of RAM, or are they clunking along in Windows 98 on a Pentium II? Do they have Java? What version? Do they use multiple high-resolution monitors, or do they run mostly on laptops? You probably have more downloads from Windows users than from Mac users, but which population of downloaders is more likely to become a group of loyal users?
• How long does it take your trial users to finally buy a license? If you offer a 30-day trial, do people use the software during the full trial period, or do they launch your software only once? Maybe those people who uninstall at the end of the trial would buy your software if the price was lower. Users who abandon the software long before the end of the trial probably used the software for one task and satisfied their need. Maybe you should offer a shorter trial. Or maybe you should offer a money-back guarantee and get rid of the trial altogether.
• How many people are using pirated serial numbers? Do some of your licensed users install on both a desktop and laptop computer? Those users provide an excellent way of determining which features are more well-suited to each platform, since you can observe the same person’s behavior in two different contexts.
• Maybe you offer a “Pro” or “Enterprise” edition, with a few extra features for a few extra dollars. Do people actually use those premium features? How often? Which features are the most valuable? If people don’t actually use those features, you might need to redesign the distribution of features among your product editions, to take best advantage of your pricing segmentation opportunities.
• Do people get lost in the user interface? How often do they browse through the main menu before clicking on a menu item (indicating they’re having a hard time finding features)? When invoking commands, do people prefer keyboard shortcuts, context menus, toolbar buttons, or the main menu? Maybe you just implemented the vaunted “Office Ribbon” interface. Do people switch back and forth between ribbon panels without choosing an option (again, because they can’t find the right button)?
• When you release a new version of your software, how long does it take your users to upgrade? Do some of your high-volume users resist upgrades, even across major versions? Maybe the features in the new version didn’t capture the interest of those long-time users. That’s a big problem, because in most businesses, your existing customer base is the richest source of new sales.
• Do your users actually read the Help docs? Is it because they understand your software really well? Or is it because they don’t know how to find the Help system? Do they read the docs immediately after installation (maybe because of a confusing interface) or only after a few weeks or months of usage (maybe because the interface is easy to use at first, but the advanced features are hard to understand)? When people do read the docs, what topics tend to be most popular?
• What if you could run a snippet of profiling code on every user computer, to get a baseline performance benchmark for all of your users? What if you could get stack-traces for exceptions thrown on remote machines? What if you could see which devices, platforms, and configurations contribute to the most errors? Should you spend a lot of time fixing those errors, or should you just tell people that Windows 95 is not supported?

Those are the types of questions I hope to answer with my software. And so that’s the focus of my project for the month of June.

Of course, the product I’m describing here is more than a 30-day project. But I don’t intend to stop at the end of the month. In this article, I’m defining the long term vision, and over the course of this month (and, realistically, probably part of the next month) to restrict the scope to something a little more bite-sized for version 1.0.

I hope that sounds as exciting to you guys as it does to me. I’m completely psyched for this project.

At the moment, I’m about 60% finished designing the database schema. I’ve written a few bits and pieces of code (Java and .NET) for the embeddable libraries. And I’ve spent a lot of time (altogether, about a week) working on the user interface design sketches.

While the primary goal of the project is to provide a truckload of business intelligence about desktop software deployments, I also want to provide the most gorgeous, detailed charts ever seen in a BI platform. I’ve been reading a lot of Edward Tufte lately, and I’ve been absolutely slaving over the GUI. So far, I’m really happy with how it’s going.

But more about that later.

I’ll be back within the next day or two with more details. And pictures!

In the mean time, let me know if this is the type of thing you’d be interested in. Based on the bullet points above, are those the kinds of stats that would help you in the development and marketing of your software? What other kinds of stats would you like to collect? (Incidentally, my personal checklist is much longer than what I included above; I trimmed it substantially for publication.)

If this sounds like it’d provide value to your company, let me know some details about your development platform and process. (Either comment below or send an email to benji@benjismith.net.)

What platform do you develop on? Java? .Net? Mac? Would you rather run the server component yourself, or would you prefer a hosted solution (knowing that the cost of the standalone version would probably be about the same as a year of the hosted subscription version)? If you’d rather host it yourself, what does your server environment look like? Windows or Linux? Do you run your own servers? Are you on a VPS? Do you (god forbid) use a shared-hosting provider? Depending on the size of your user population, it might be necessary to get dedicated hardware for a server like this. Would you be okay with that?

I’ll concentrate on producing embeddable libraries and server components that are compatible with the deployment requirements of the biggest segment of prospective customers. So if you’re even remotely interested, let me know!

Holy crap! I’m currently in the process of designing and building a product in 30 days. A whole bunch of other software developers are doing the same thing, at the same time, during June 2008. Everybody’s blogging about the process, and all of our RSS feeds are being aggregated into a single incredible feed. You can follow along here.

During that time, I did a lot of blogging (sometimes as late as 3am, to write a blog entry while on vacation, after everyone else had fallen asleep). The whole endeavor really got me into a mindset of wide-open possibilities, to the point where it was hard to stop thinking of new ideas and actually focus on just one.

(I’m going to make a bold statement: The people who complain about a lack of software ideas have never really spent a significant chunk of time going through a methodical brainstorming process.)

Now, after two years, I’m finally making good on the implied promise of that brainstorming month.

At the end of June, I’m going to release a new product.

Later this afternoon, I’m going to write my first line of code.

Before I get into all the details of the project, I’ll tell you a little bit of the back-story of how I got from there to here…

Anyhow, back when I finished that month of brainstorming, I made a decision about the best idea in the bunch and started working on an analytics application for the stock market. I was a little nervous about competition from the big online brokerages, since E-Trade and AmeriTrade had already started offering advanced charting and analytics tools with their basic accounts. But I kept working on that project for about six months before finally crumbling under a few major obstacles.

Most importantly: I couldn’t find a data vendor who could provide the type of data I wanted to bundle with my application.

Since I didn’t think I could cobble together a satisfactory data feed, and since I had planned for the feed to be the work-horse of my revenue strategy, I scrapped the project.

At that point, I got an offer for a job in Boston, with the promise of a leadership role in the research department of a well-funded media startup. I moved across the country to accept the position, putting my entrepreneurial ambitions on the back-burner again for another year or so.

Last November, I left that job (on good terms, of course :) to start my own company, with the intention of using consulting projects to bootstrap my product development ambitions. The self-employment thing has worked out well. I really really enjoy the flexibility, the creative freedom, and the sense of strategic ownership (also: I have the coolest boss ever).

My biggest consulting project was vast and complex and researchy (I was working on a prototype of an agent-based collaborative decision-making simulation), so I didn’t actually have much time to spend on my own product.

Anyhow, I wrapped up the big project a few weeks ago (the client decided to pass on the full implementation), and all of my other projects had already wound down over the previous month or two.

As I comb through my professional network looking for new projects, I nevertheless have a lot of time on my hands to finally do some solid product development. But within the next month or so, I expect to find a new client, and then I’ll be up to my eyeballs in consulting work again.

That means I only have about 30 days to get as much work done as is humanly possible. At the end of June, or potentially early in July, I need to be ready with a beta-stage product.

And, as the fates would have it, there’s a whole gaggle of other solo software entrepreneurs doing the same damn thing!!

They have a website and an RSS feed and they’ve described the response from the one-man-software-company community as “incredible interest“.

Looks like June is officially “Get Down to Brass Tacks and Finally Build Your Damn Product Month”.

Maybe in November we can all write novels together…

So, everyone’s going to be blogging about their experiences, talking about their design and implementation and marketing processes. Looks like it’ll be a real hootenanny, and I thought it’d be fun to throw my hat into the ring as well.

I have a novel product idea (not one of the ideas from the 30-day brainstorming project, though). I have a few graphic design sketches. And I have the utmost confidence in the marketability of the product. It’s ambitiously big for one person (especially given the constrained time-frame), but if anyone can do it, I can.

Over the next 30 days, I’ll tell you all about it.