Reflecting on managers; Smart Home products

I'm on vacation this week, which is giving me time for reflection.

Microsoft era managers

I’ve been reminiscing about some of my managers from my time at Microsoft.   I worked with some fantastic people, and I learned a lot from each of them.

My first manager was Rob Glaser.  This was a challenging group to land in at Microsoft — Rob had only one speed, and it was full-on.  I learned a lot about the value of intensity from Rob.  And he also taught me the batting average metaphor — you need to get up and swing, you are going to strike out a lot, but that is OK, even the best players strike out more often than they connect.

Richard McAniff was my second manager.  Richard was intense in his way but a lot more balanced than Rob.   On the professional side, Richard drilled into me that “you can’t gain market share if you aren’t shipping” — all of our incredible innovations and ideas didn’t matter if we weren’t in the marketplace.  And personally, Richard taught me about vacations — it is worth investing a lot in vacations because they create the memories in your life.  This insight completely transformed how I thought of vacations for the better.

I briefly had some other managers and then moved to work under Brad Silverberg, who had the most significant impact on my professional growth and success.  I learned so much from Brad.  He drilled into me the “dog food” principle — we all used exactly the products our customers used, did things the way customers did, and lived the problems our customers lived.  And Brad had such a great eye for detail — every part of the product was worth attention, down to the smallest detail of file timestamps, the number of floppies the product used, or the name of a particular file.  This attention made the product so much better and made everyone’s job seem essential, even the most junior jobs with limited scope.  And overall, Brad had such a passion for products — he wanted to create great products, coherent products, products that had “soul.”  It was an honor to work with him — and I'm looking forward to seeing him at breakfast tomorrow.

The year of the smart home, again

I’m certainly no home technology Luddite.   I’ve embraced every Apple device since the Apple ][.  I am a daily user of my Mac, iPad, iPhone, AirPods, and AppleTV.   I used Airports when they existed.  I’ve tried the Pencil.  I’ve used every variant of Mac, iPad, and AirPods.

I’ve tried almost every Amazon hardware experiment — I am a daily user of my Kindle, Eero devices, Ring devices, and Blink devices.

I use a variety of other smart home devices from other vendors — cameras, security products, vacuums, smart TVs, lighting and irrigation controllers, connected appliances, garage door openers, etc.  I have a whole page of apps on my phone for interacting with all this.

So I love that Apple is trying to innovate in this space with a home device and that Amazon is trying to innovate in this space with a new Echo device.   There is certainly room for improvement in the smart home space.   The UX of all the solutions today is pretty rough; the welter of incompatible standards is exhausting. I am sure Apple has some ideas from HomeKit about killer new features, and I am sure Amazon has some ideas from Echo usage about killer new features.  So I welcome the innovation and competition.

There are some significant challenges in the space, and I am interested in seeing how Apple and Amazon address them.  

The first is naming and identification.   Smart home devices typically have either autogenerated or user-provided names, neither of which help you at all.  “TP-Link-A56Z32i” doesn’t help me understand which light it is, nor do my user-generated names when I have a sea of lights or when I move smart devices around. And none of my devices have any spatial awareness – I can't say "Turn on the lights in the living room" or "turn on the irrigation in the northeast corner" without doing a lot of constant name and device group maintenance.   What I really want to do as a user is point at an area and say “I want more light over here” or “turn that thing on” or “turn on these things here at sunset every night”. 

The second challenge is human interest.   Vendors can make smart home tech 1000 times better — and I don’t want to be the IT manager for my home.  I do not want to spend time on all this smart home stuff, and I certainly don’t want to be my family's first line of support.  Humans adopted PCs and phones for productivity, entertainment, and communication.   Smart home tech provides none of these; it just provides all the IT burden without any of the IT benefits.

I suspect a successful home device will have significant productivity, communication, or family entertainment features.  I am looking forward to what Apple and Amazon do in these directions.