According to Google’s own data, Microsoft’s live.com has taken a commanding lead in the search engine war:

;-)

Free is good. Free that makes my product look better is great.

If you’re an Inno Setup user, take a peek at the free skins from Code Jock. The gallery of styles is here. They add a bit of polish and take only a few minutes to add it to your setup. It does add about 300 kb, so if you obsess about download size, it may not be for you.

I used the Office 2007 skin. Here’s the before:

Here’s the after:

I wonder if I can get Skinned for Vista Certified.

Version 2.2 of FlowBreeze Flowcharting add-in for Excel has been released. It has several new features and many minor usability improvements. Two of the features have come from customer requests - a Style Wizard, and Insert Branch tool.

The Style Wizard (shown below) lets you quickly apply formatting to an existing flowchart. You can make bulk edits to the font, style, or connector style. Or you can use the drop down selectors in the Symbol and Style columns of the grid to change individual shapes. (The Style Wizard is not available in FlowBreeze Basic Flowcharting Edition.)

The Insert Branch tool (shown below) provides a easy way to add tree / org chart structures to a flowchart. It allows you to add standard, left-hanging, and right hanging branches. Optionally, you can specify a label for the connector line of each branch.You can also set the shape type for each branch element and the spacing between branches.
The form is optimized for quick entry. When you hit the Enter key, the branch text and label will be added to the grid without having to tab over to the Add button. If the branch text and label fields are empty, hitting Enter again will close the form and generate the branches.

The bulk of the other changes were small improvements to other forms and a number of minor (but annoying) bug fixes.

Working Backwards

Lately I keep running into instances where different worlds coincide with a common theme. The theme I’m running into lately is flipping the funnel. Sometimes when you hit a stumbling block, it helps to flip the funnel and work the problem backwards.

For example, consider these three topics:

1. Improving e-commerce sales.
2. Reducing manufacturing cost and lead time.
3. Bringing a software product to market.

Focus on Checkout

In the first case - selling products online - it’s a common mistake to work the process from the front end. The standard logic goes: get more traffic, which will result in more downloads, which will get customers to the purchase page, which will result in more sales.

When you start out, this makes sense. But once you have a steady level of traffic, driving more traffic is expensive. Then you must put more effort into optimizing the landing page to drive downloads. Then, you continually improve the product to drive visits to your checkout process. Then you get the improved revenues, right?

But if you look at it in reverse, you would start with your checkout process. According to Closed Loop Marketing, the average drop-out rate during the checkout process is nearly 60%. What if, instead of driving 10% more traffic to your site, you fine-tuned your checkout process to convert 10% more customers?

If you put advertising money into driving 10% more traffic, you will need to pay that every month. And not all the leads would be well qualified. But putting the effort toward improving your checkout process provides a bigger payoff. The visitors are pre-qualified (after all, they already were interested enough to click your buy button), plus the rewards will be felt long after the improvements are made.

Fishing in the Value Stream

In the second case, I’ve been re-reading Learning to See, a book about Value Stream Mapping. Value Stream Mapping is a tool to analyze manufacturing processes (and recently service-based processes) in order to reduce cost and lead time. The process steps are laid out from start to finish, but the analysis works in reverse order. This is an over-simplified description, but essentially you start with customer demand and work your way back upstream to determine what you need from the preceding process and identify areas to reduce waste.

Write the Press Release First

The third case has to do with my own efforts to develop a new product. I wrote the spec, then started developing to it. It’s hard to describe, but there was something missing. It just felt like bits and pieces of related functionality without any glue.

Then I came across an old blog post by Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com. In it, he lays out 4 steps to the product definition process:

Step 1 - Write the press release. He says, “Writing a press release up front clarifies how the world will see the product - not just how we think about it internally.”

Step 2 - Write the FAQ.

Step 3 - Define the customer experience.

Step 4 - Write the user manual.

Normally, I’m like many developers who market there own products. The press release is practically an afterthought. After coding and testing is done, you want to say, “Phew! That’s a relief. I’m done.” But you’re not. There’s a lot of work left to do, and having to write the press release afterward hits you when you’re running out of steam.

So I took Werner’s advice and did steps 1-3. (OK, so I skipped #4. So sue me.) Honestly, I wasn’t expecting it to have a dramatic impact, but surprisingly it did. I was able to refine what my marketing message would be. In doing so, I was able to refine what the user experience would be in a way that was much more logical and congealed.

I was less impressed with writing the FAQ, because those questions are always contrived until you actually get asked real questions by real customers. But overall, I would definitely recommend steps 1 and 3. It’s one of those things that people read about then forget, but if you actually try it, you’ll be glad you did.

You Might Have Guessed This Was Coming

Yes, I’m currently revamping the BreezeTree checkout process. Not only do I want to improve conversions, but I also need a system that works better for multiple product offerings because I’m working on the product that I pre-wrote the press release for. And, of course, it just happens to be a Value Stream Mapping edition of FlowBreeze.

Like a lot of people, I rely on voice mail a lot. Most of my sales are handled via online transactions with no assistance on my part. Most of my support issues are handled via email. But with a global customer base, I can’t always be there to answer the phone when a customer does call for sales or support issues.

The problem is, a lot of people think that leaving their phone number is a speed race. Strangely, the worst offenders are sales people.  I’m guilty of it too. You leave a message in nice clear English, but when it comes to the phone number it, you spit it out as fast as you can: 503-201-ze-za-zo-ze. Huh?

The worst thing is, most people wait until the end of the message to leave the number. So if you miss it the first time, you need to re-listen to the entire message to catch it. I’ve had several messages like this in the last month, and no matter how many times I’ve replayed them, I still can’t make out the number.

I’m not trying to be rude, because I appreciate getting calls from customers. I really do want to call people back, and, like I said above, I’ve been guilty of this too. To resolve this, I propose a standard format for leaving voice mail messages:

“Hi, my name is {YOUR NAME}”
“I’m with {YOUR COMPANY / ORGANIZATION}” (Optional)
“My phone number is {YOUR NUMBER}.” (S-L-O-W-L-Y and clearly!)
“My email address is {YOUR EMAIL}” (optional but recommended)
{MESSAGE}
“Again that’s {YOUR NAME} at {YOUR NUMBER} or {YOUR EMAIL}”

Now, if you leave someone a message, they get the most important information - your name and number and email - at the top of the voice mail. If they miss it the first time, it’s repeated at the end. And if they still didn’t get it, they don’t need to repeat the whole message - just the first part.

Following MacWorld, Reg Developer started a rumor [1] that VBA would be going away from future versions of Microsoft Office for Windows. The speculation was based on Office 2008 for Mac dropping VBA (a big blunder by Microsoft, IMHO) and on Microsoft dropping their licensing program for 3rd parties to incorporate VBA into their applications.

Sometimes the internet is like a Petri dish for The Stupid Virus. Rumors grow and spread rapidly. This rumor spread wide enough that it even caused Microsoft to take notice. The Excel team at Microsoft posted a clarification [2] that VBA for the Windows based version of Office won’t be going away in the foreseeable future.

This is a good thing.

I’ve read speculation here and there about the future of VBA for a while now. Partly, this was due to the Mac 2008 VBA issue [3] and partly this was due to the huge push Microsoft is making for SharePoint services, relegating Office VBA development to the role of the red-headed stepchild. But no official word from Microsoft was issued until now. It took a widely read site like The Reg to make Microsoft stand up and take notice.

This started me thinking. What about all the other things developers wonder about?

I’d like to port FlowBreeze from VB6 to .NET, but there are still some stumbling blocks. The biggest hurdle is the lack of official support for Excel 2000. The next biggest hurdle is that COM add-ins run in the Excel process, and only one version of the .NET framework can be running in a single process space. If you develop using .NET 2.0 and the customer also uses an add-in based on .NET 1.1, then problems can occur. There are ways of dealing with these problems, but it would help if I had more information on which to base decisions.

I, and a lot of other developers, would love to know the penetration stats for the various .NET frameworks. And what about the user stats for Office 2000, XP, 2003, and 2007? Solid market data on that would be great.

Maybe The Reg can help us out. I’m sure other people could think of more data Microsoft could share to aid the developer community. Could we get a few more rumors out there?

[1] http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/01/14/office_mac_08_vba/
(See the footnote that the article has been updated. In this case, ‘updated’ means ‘completely rewritten’.)

[2] http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2008/01/16/clarification-on-vba-support.aspx

[3] http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2006/08/08/saying-goodbye-to-visual-basic/

Do you ever feel like you’re not in control of your own workday? A lot of people do. They get to work and have little say over how to spend their time. Sure, they can prioritize projects and tasks, but overall the projects and tasks are set by external forces. They don’t get to pick their own projects and their own tasks.I used to have a job like that. The management wasn’t tyrannical, but there was so much work to be done. Plus we were so understaffed that there wasn’t much wiggle room in my schedule. I felt bogged down and unhappy.

That’s when I came up with The 10% Rule.

The 10% Rule is simple. To stay sane, allocate 10% of your time to secret pet projects. That 10% needs to come from your time - lunches, evenings, and weekends - not your employer’s. Most people have a ton of work to do, so skimming 10% of the top to work on pet projects is a bad idea for multiple reasons.

More importantly, doing little projects on the side gives you control. Control matters. Even if you’re the most diligent GTD or 7 Habits practitioner, most of your workday is spent doing tasks that are driven by outside forces. When you do secret pet projects, they are driven by you. You control a piece of your destiny. You get a greater sense of accomplishment and satisfaction.

The most rewarding projects of my career were secret projects that I had a hunch about. I did them in my own time, told no one about them, and only publicized them if they were successful. I didn’t knock it out of the park on all of them, but I had a fair number of successes. And most importantly, I was happier.

So if you’re feeling stuck in a rut, try The 10% Rule. You’ll feel so much better after you take back a little control over your work.

[This is a story about Bob. Bob is not his real name, but he is a real person. The events here were gleaned from intermittent conversations and pieced together as accurately as I could.]

I’d never heard the term “lifestyle business” until I met Bob. It was a few years ago, not long after he started a software company with the goal of being bought out. I told him about my company, and that’s when he introduced me to the term and explained the difference between a startup and a lifestyle business.

When I first met him, Bob was struggling to get off-the-shelf versions of his products to sell, so his company kept afloat by consulting - mainly providing customized implementations of their core product.

Finally they hit pay dirt when a golden trifecta of companies each bought multiple team licenses for his product. I won’t name the golden trifecta, but the three companies make chips, make computers, and sell the software that runs the computers, respectively. This got the attention of some national players, and Bob’s dream of selling his software company for a big payoff began to take shape.

Several suitors made preliminary offers, but one stood out. We’ll called it BigInvestCo. It had a track record of success and made the best offer. So he said thanks but no thanks to the other outfits and settled on BigInvestCo.

Then things slowly went south. It seems that these masters of enterprise at BigInvestCo were con men in $2000 suits. They suggested that the buyout price would be in the “set for life” range. After Bob had said no thanks to the other suitors, BigInvestCo lowered the buyout figure by half - which still would have been very good money. Following that, they did the due diligence and the final offer was to be put together. And that’s where things went bad.

The initial offer (which I assume was non-binding) was back in June, and BigInvestCo told Bob they hoped to close the deal by the end of the month. As part of the deal, he and his team would be given positions in a newly formed company, which would be a subsidiary of the BigInvestCo’s existing business. But the existing channel partners would be replaced by their in-house sales channel, so there was no need to keep nurturing them. Those ties were severed.

The owner of a startup is the rainmaker. Bob had hired a few salespeople, but none of them had the passion and understanding of the products to close deals like Bob did. But with Bob spending weeks away from his business while trying to negotiate the deal, the sales pipeline started to dry up.

Every time the deal seemed to be on the verge of closing, BigInvestCo used all kinds of delaying tactics and legal maneuvers designed to eat up time and legal expenses for Bob. With the sales pipeline sufficiently dry, a payroll to meet, and Bob’s finances getting tight, BigInvestCo came back with an offer at 10% of the June offer (i.e., 5% of the “set for life” figure).

I have to assume that hope overtook logic, because Bob plowed on, convinced he could still pull off a great deal for his company. Then one night, Bob’s out for dinner and drinks with BigInvestCo’s lawyer. After one too many, the lawyer let it slip that this is how these deals are done. They get the prospect all charged up, then as the deal progresses BigInvestCo does everything possible to bleed them out. When the seller is at the point of desperation, they make a lowball offer.

That was four months ago. I just found out the deal has gone tits up. I could tell it was painful, so I didn’t press for details. I don’t even know whether his company is still afloat.

At this point I suppose I could draw some conclusions or point out Bob’s missteps along the way. I assume readers can do that themselves. But I do think that starting a company solely to sell out is a long shot. You’re going up against people that do this for a living. They have deeper pockets, longer time lines, and less risk than you do. This is their game. They’re better at it than you.

Meanwhile, my quaint little lifestyle business looks better every month.

I’m always looking for new avenues to get the word out about FlowBreeze, so recently I ran an experiment using StumbleUpon’s advertising program. If you’re not familiar with StumbleUpon, basically it’s just a random site re-director. StumbleUpon users are served up random pages based on their preferences and demographics. If they like a page, they can give it a thumbs up, tag it for their personal bookmarks, or write a review. On the other hand, if they don’t like a page, they can give it a thumbs down. The more thumbs up a page gets, the more frequently it is served.

Occasionally they are served sponsored pages, which is how the advertising program works. They charge $0.05 per visit with a 100 visit per day minimum. When you sign up for StumbleUpon advertising, you can specify the following (see image below):

- Target URL.
- Category. (I tried both the Software and Shareware categories)
- # Visits/day (100 minimum at $0.05 / visit = $5/day minimum).
- Demographics (male/female/both, age, country, state, and city)

My Stats:
- Visits: ~500
- Downloads: 0
- Purchases: 0

My Reviews:
- 3 thumbs up.
- 5 thumbs down.
- Telling comment made by one reviewer: “Boo proprietary software.”

Why I Did It:
1. Because I love StumbleUpon. Of all the social bookmarking sites, it’s the only one I truly use and dig (pun intended).
2. I have actually purchased items from pages I’ve Stumbled.
3. BreezeTree.com has been Stumbled in the past and vistors have converted.

Key Downsides:
- Targetting is too broad.
- Audience probably looking for freebies.
- Targetting is limited to one country or all countries. There is no subset for a single campaign.
- Ads start running at midnight, so targetting global visitors will eat up your visits before the U.S. wakes up for breakfast.

Who I Would Recommend It For:
- People with a lot of money to throw around.
- Sites trying to build a buzz.
- Sites that offer free or cool content.
- Site hoping to gain gain backlinks.

The Bottom Line:
My $25 would have been better spent lighting a $5 cigar with a $20 bill (or better yet, a $20 cigar with a $5 bill).

My oh so clever 11 year-old son Nathan gave me this flowchart. I gotta hand it to him. The kid’s tenacious.

(Click to enlarge) 

Flowcharting Software at a Deep Discount

FlowBreeze  is  was featured on Bits du Jour today. The sale is now over.

Product DescriptionsFlowBreeze Basic is a simplified flowcharting tool that allows you to create flowcharts just by typing. It produces business document friendly black and white flowcharts in Excel. It integrates well into all Office documents and is perfect for training materials and process documentation.

FlowBreeze Standard extends the capabilities of the Basic edition. It features 124 symbols with 84 preset styles and 21 preset connector styles. It has an image exporter for publishing flowcharts to the web, help files, and any other document that could use a splash of color. It also features the Text-To-Flowchart Wizard, which allow you to pre-layout the flowchart in plain text on an Excel spreadsheet then import into the wizard to set the symbol types, style, connector routings, and decision branch labels. Then it auto-generates the flowchart for you.

A complete feature comparison can be found by clicking here.

FlowBreeze is now available in two editions Standard and Basic Flowcharting Software.

The Basic Edition was created in response to customer demand for a light weight version of the product at a reduced price. It still utilizes the same, highly productivity text-to-symbol engine. But the Basic edition has a simplified start window, is limited to black and white flowcharts, and uses just the 28 core flowcharting symbols.

FlowBreeze Basic Edition is perfect for creating process flowcharts to be used in business documents such as work instructions and training manuals, where simple design is preferred and color is unneeded. The differences between FlowBreeze Standard and FlowBreeze Basic editions are covered in detail in the feature comparison table. Also, the changes to the user interface are shown on the screen shots page.

For user convenience, the two editions are packaged in the same download. The different capabilities are highlighted in the the trial and, upon purchase, activated via different license codes.

The following are sample flowcharts of the 8D problem solving process invented at Ford Motor Company. The first flowchart was created with FlowBreeze Standard Edition, and the second flowchart shows the same diagram in black and white created with FlowBreeze Basic.

Checking the morning round of news sites, I see that Google’s announcement of on-line storage is making a big splash. I fail to see the excitement. Not only is this already available elsewhere on the net, none of the other companies have a mission statement that reads like Google’s.

From http://www.google.com/corporate/:

“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Now why the hell would anyone want to put their data on Google’s servers? Or their documents?

I keep reading how Google is the Microsoft killer. Maybe they will be. But in the last few years I notice an increasing number of emails with boilerplate non-disclosure statements in the signature. I’ve worked for a few companies that were absolutely paranoid about their corporate documents. Who knows. Maybe that paranoia rubbed off on me, but even the less zealous companies I worked at weren’t the type that wanted their documents “universally accessible”.

Methinks Google needs to change their stated mission.

Best of the Web

Every time I see the Culinate site, three things happen. First, I wish my site looked that good. Second, I wish sold food instead of software, because even with the best site design in the world, you can’t match the richness and warmth that beautiful food conveys. Third, I wish I could cook. Time for yet another PB&J lunch.

Worst of the Web

One of the funniest sites I’ve come across in a while satirizes over-hyped sales pages. Check it out for a good laugh.

I’m working on a new product, and I’ve been doing a lot of search for related content lately. Maybe it’s just me, but my feeling is that the results are getting worse and worse. Hence, the top 10 signs your Google search results suck flowchart:

(Click to enlarge)

Fog Creek released a new version of FogBugz this week with something called Evidence Based Scheduling. It feeds project tasks and developer characteristics, along with historical data, into a Monte Carlo simulation then builds a probability distribution for project completion.

By coincidence, I was reading about statistical methods for project estimation several months ago. (All I was looking for was a probability distribution that a typical project would meet a set timeline, but you know how easy it is to get sidetracked on the web.) It turns out there are a number of stochastic project scheduling techniques that use Brownian motion (aka random walks), Kolmorogov extensions, and a number of other things that bring about bad flashbacks to my Applied Statistics class (hint: “Applied” in academics means “Theoretical” in the sane world).

In short, it’s the kind of stuff that makes my brain throb. So kudos to Joel Spolsky and the team at Fog Creek for pulling this off (assuming it works as advertised).

But, one of the things that I told myself when I started BreezeTree Software is that I would build to a feature list, not to a set schedule. I never wanted to feel rushed to get a new version out the door before it was feature complete.

I’m starting to realize, though, that this philosophy makes no sense. The problem with it is that the list of planned features exists in my mind. If you don’t make any commitments about a particular feature, releasing a new version without the feature wouldn’t disappoint anyone or break any promises.

As I’ve said in other posts, the road to FlowBreeze 2.0 was pretty rocky. I had “completed” version 2.0 back in early March.

Then I threw it all away.

And I feel fine.

I made the decision at the earlier juncture to pull back 2.0 and refactor the core for a variety of reasons. They were are solid reasons from both a technical and business perspective, so I don’t regret them. As the months wore on, several epiphanies sprang to light and complications like the Software Passport (Armadillo) compatibility problems arose. These pushed the schedule out again.

When I sat down to write up the 2.0 release announcement, I looked at all the features I’ve added. Many of them were completed months ago. Of those, most relied on the new core but others didn’t. So this begs the question, by not releasing the features that were already complete, was I depriving existing customers of valuable improvements just so I could feel it was “feature complete”?

Understanding Opportunity Cost

I made the mistake of telling several customers that FlowBreeze 2.0 would be released by the end of the August. I missed that target date. If I had cut a few features I could have made the target date. As I said, one of my goals was to release to a feature set instead of to a schedule, so I chose not to.

I think this is one of the toughest decisions indie software developers face. It’s easy to become emotionally attached to a feature or two and think they must make the next release. It’s also easy to always view your application as feature incomplete compared to the long term vision you have of it. Meanwhile, customers are blissfully unaware of that feature complete vision in your head.

And that’s where the concept of opportunity cost comes in. Opportunity cost is one of those basic concepts you learn in school or on the job. In a nutshell, allocating resources to one thing means you can’t allocate them to some other thing. That plus the unrealized benefits from the path not chosen are the opportunity cost.

There are probably better definitions out there, but it doesn’t matter. Because you’ll never really understand opportunity cost until you run your own business. When you work for a company or organization, those opportunity costs get absorbed elsewhere, and you usually don’t feel the consequences. When you run your own business, you feel the consequences right in your pocket.

So spending more time on development means spending less time on marketing. Likewise, having longer release cycles means less marketing bursts in the form of press releases, announcements on your blog, site submissions, or simply cool new benefits you can showcase on your product page.

If you don’t work to a schedule, you are not controlling your most valuable asset. The biggest opportunity cost decisions you face are for the allocation of time.

That Damn Monkey

So having already admitted that the cymbal-banging monkey in my brain was wrong about the “build to features” scheduling mentality, I will try (it’s hard!) to switch to a time based release mentality. Ultimately, it would be nice to build a given feature set in a given amount of time, but past history leads me to believe that I would be wrong 99% of the time.

So I will monitoring the airwaves to see what others are saying about FogBugz’ Evidence Based Scheduling. I’d especially be interested in any one or two man shops that use it. Hopefully the feedback will be positive, and it won’t take forever to build up a sufficient data bank of historical inputs.

When I loaded up new screenshots a few weeks back, I decided to replace Lightbox 2 with John Reid’s PopBox. The more I see Lightbox, the more I find it annoying. It just seems slow. And no matter how many times I use it, I still hit the back button occasionally.

It turns out I’m not the only one. I looked at my web stats for the past two weeks and the number of page views matches the visits almost exactly. Looking at several previous two-week spans, page views are about 5% higher than visits. So the conclusion I came to is that visitors are hitting the back button, realizing their mistake, then returning to the page again.

So if you’re using Lightbox or Lightbox 2, check out PopBox. It’s fast, intuitive, and the script weights in at half the combined file size of Lightbox 2 and its dependencies.

Update: The method described below will cause IE7 to drop the extension. A modified version is pending.

Until recently, I had no idea that IE6 cached downloads. I knew page and image caching were issues, but I didn’t know if affected exe’s and zip’s as well.

FlowBreeze 2.0 was released 11 days ago, putting some of the 30-day trial users in the bubble. They were using the 1.4 version, so they’d come to the site, download the new version, and install … Version 1.4?!?

One customer didn’t think I’d believe him, so he took screenshots of each step: clicking the download button, saving to the Desktop, and running the setup file, which clearly said version 1.4 on the screen.

Thanks to the folks on the BoS forums, I figured out the problem and wrote a little Javascript to resolve it. If you are running dynamic pages, server side scripting would be more robust. But if you’re all HTML like I am here at BreezeTree then this should work in a pinch:

function UpdateDownloadLinks() {
var i;
var linkLength;
var linkType;
var linkCount = document.links.length
var randNum = Math.round((Math.random()*10000));
for (i = 0; i < linkCount; i++) {
linkLength = String(document.links[i].toString()).length;
linkType = String(document.links[i].toString().toLowerCase()).substring(linkLength, linkLength - 3);
if ((linkType == "exe") || (linkType  == "zip"))
document.links[i].href += "?fid=" + randNum;
}
}

(N.B.: I haven’t played with Javascript in years, so if this code sucks, leave a comment below and let me how to make it unsuck.)

The script downloaded by clicking here.

Until this past week, I’ve never been able to tell whether AdWords was paying for itself or not. Somewhere between my ads and the payment processors, my tracking lost its way. It all hinged on a) the tracking working through the payment processors or b) the customer clicking the link to return to the BreezeTree web site after the transaction. Based on what I’ve seen in the past week, I’d estimate that those two methods were working about 10% of the time.

Tracking concerns anyone running a web based business because the cost of Google’s advertising is going up up up. They just reported a 46% rise in 3rd Quarter profits. While the boys in Mountain View are getting richer, the rest of us are wondering whether we’re just throwing money away. You think that the Chinese government is rerouting Google traffic to Baidu today in retaliation to Bush’s meeting w/ the Dalai Lama? Nah! My money’s on some Chinese hacker ticked off over the rising cost of AdWords.

To improve tracking, I decided to change the FlowBreeze order confirmation email. The old FlowBreeze confirmation letter included the registration information and a long list of instructions for downloading, installing and registering the software. It also contained a mini getting started guide. I decided to go with a minimalist approach in the email but link to a confirmation page (where the tracking code is). The new email looks like this:

###

Dear [BUYER’S NAME],

Thank you for purchasing FlowBreeze flowcharting software. Your product registration information is as follows:

[REGISTRATION INFO]

If you haven’t already done so, we strongly encourage you to visit the confirmation page:
[CONFIRMATION LINK]

On the confirmation page, you will find…

• A link to download FlowBreeze (if you haven’t already done so).
• Installation and registration instructions.
• How to get started with FlowBreeze.
• Over 100 flowcharting templates.
• Links to help and support.

Again, thank you for your order. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Sincerely,

BreezeTree Software

###

With this system in place, I’m estimating that close to 100% of my customers have visited the confirmation page. Suddenly the light is on. AdWords is actually paying for itself - much better than I thought.

There are some flaws with the system. I’m using both Google Analytics and Google AdWords tracking systems, and neither does a great job of tracking. So I have to look at them both. My Venn diagram isn’t as cool as any of Jessica Hagy’s (my fav), but basically the tracking looks like this:

I’ll admit I don’t understand this because both systems are javascript based and placed at the bottom of the confirmation page. I cross referenced my own sales data vs. my server logs vs. Analytics goal tracking for AdWords vs. tracking shown on the AdWords Campaign Management page. Of the sales that come from AdWords clicks, some are tracked only by Analytics, some are tracked only by AdWords, and some are tracked by both.

So to get an accurate total you would need to determine A + B - A Intersect B. Figuring out that Intersect number on a regular basis is going to be a real pain.

Overall, I would say the conclusions to be had are:

• Give your customers a reason to visit your confirmation page.
• Offer something free for their effort (in my case, the 120 flowchart templates).
• Don’t rely on just one of Google Analytics or Google AdWords tracking systems.
• Don’t rely on Google Analytics for your web traffic analysis (the holes in this data reaffirm my opinion that Analytics sucks).

FlowBreeze 2.0 was released a week ago. Very quietly. No formal announcemnent was made on the site. No press release was sent out. No current users were notified. I admit, it’s kind of a strange way of launching a major revision, but I had my reasons.

The biggest issue was testing. With 4 Microsoft Office versions, 3 Windows versions, and varying levels of user permissions, I felt the likelihood of a few bugs going undetected in testing was high. There isn’t much difference between Excel 2002(XP) and Excel 2003. But the jumps from Excel 2000 to XP and 2003 to 2007 are significant. Over time, I’ve seen permutations of all the possible the OS/Office combinations (except Office 2007 on Windows 2000). And they all have their quirks.

So in order to avoid getting a thousand emails pointing to the same bug, the release was purposely done quietly.

It turns out there were a number of issues that weren’t found in-house or by the handful of beta testers. I jumped on each one as the reports came in. So last week there were multiple updates posted daily. This weekend the last remaining issues on the list were tackled, and a new version was posted this morning.

With all the reported issues resolved, I will turn my attention toward getting a formal release package out, and send out product update notifications to all existing users. Overall, I’m happy with the way that this release has gone. Had I done it the other way around, I would have had to spend as much time answering emails as I did fixing the bugs and getting quick turn updates posted.

The “official” announcement, including a few major product changes, will be made soon.

In lieu of a full preview of FlowBreeze 2.0, I have posted the help file online. A firm release date has not been set, but an October launch is most likely. The full list of new features and improvements will be posted soon, but the following is a sampling of some of the more prominent ones.

Text-To-Flowchart Wizard

The Text-To-Flowchart Wizard allows you to pre-layout a flowchart in plain text on a worksheet. It will load the text into a form that allows you to set the symbol type, style, out-bound flow line routings, and any branch labels for Decisions. Below are screenshots of the Text-To-Flowchart Wizard window and the resulting flowchart.

(click for larger view)

So this …

… becomes this:

Integrated Excel 2007 Styles

FlowBreeze 2.0 allows you to preset the symbol styles using the styles available in Excel 2007 - even if you are using a previous version of Excel. In general, the styles render nicely in previous versions of Excel (with the exception of the last row of styles in the first image, which are only available in Excel 2007). Below are the two tabs for the symbol style selector window and the flow line style selector window.

Flowchart Settings

The Settings received a major overhaul in version two. As shown below, the styles can now be preset by symbol type, as well as the default width and minimum height. The keywords and prefixes still function the same for text to symbol generation, but the editor has been simplified. FlowBreeze ships with a basic set of flowcharting symbols “active”, but the symbol list editor now has 124 different shapes available. Other new features have been added to the “Special Symbols Settings” and “Advanced Settings” (not shown), and those will be outlined on the product page upon release.

(click for larger view)

Flowchart Templates and Other Startup Options

FlowBreeze 2.0 will ship with an integrated template loader. When you start a flowcharting session, you will now be able to load a template for title blocks; cross-function diagrams (aka swim lanes or deployment charts); opportunity charts; DMAIC, PDCA and SIPOC diagrams; or a number of other flowchart and block diagram templates, as shown in the image below.

Save As Picture

Excel has always had limited capability to export shapes and worksheet ranges as picture files. FlowBreeze 2.0 will allow you to save flowcharts as PNG, BMP, JPG, GIF, TIF, or WMF picture files. Not only can you save the flowcharts as pictures, but you can save spreadsheets as well. One of the major selling points for FlowBreeze is the convergence of data and diagrams. The screenshot below shows a flowchart with spreadsheet data being saved as a picture.

More to Come

There are many other features that were added to FlowBreeze 2.0, and the full details will be announced upon release.

Fireclick has published some interesting numbers on software conversion rates on their site:

http://index.fireclick.com/fireindex.php?segment=9

Fireclick is a web analytics company owned by Digital River, which owns a huge chunk of the payment processing market for software vendors. The data is compiled (anonymously) from all of Fireclick’s clients across different sectors. The software sector includes benchmarks for overall conversions, keyword conversions, email conversions, and many other interesting stats that help answer the “how am I doing?” question.

Of course, every business is different. You’ll glean only so much from the data, but it’s interesting to peak at anyway. And 1yr graphs confirm what everyone in the software business already has a good sense of - sales peak in March and dip August. At least it’s gratifying to know the climb upward is beginning this time of year.

I admit I have totally waffled on my opinion of the Ribbon. At first I thought it was a nice looking change. Then I started using it and thought it was a nuisance. Then I got used to it (somewhat). Now, I’m just left frustrated by the amount of hunting around I still need to do. Even worse, I find a lot of simple things to be a lot more work.

Reading Simon Murphy’s post on the inefficiency of loading automation add-ins in Excel 2007 touched a nerve. I’m wrapping up the help file for FlowBreeze 2.0, and I consistently find explaining things for Excel 2007 to be a lot more steps. Here is a passage from the troubleshooting guide, in the event that the FlowBreeze toolbar doesn’t load:

=====================================================

4. Check the Disabled Items list:

Excel 2000 - 2003:
- Click Help > About Microsoft Office Excel, then click the Disabled Items button.
- If FlowBreeze is listed, enable it and restart Excel.

Excel 2007:
- Click the Office Button in the upper left corner of Excel 2007.
- On the bottom-right of the popup menu, click the “Excel Options” button.
- In the Excel Options window, click “Add-Ins” on the left navigation panel.
- Select “Disabled Items” from the “Manage” drop down and click the “Go…” button.
- If FlowBreeze is listed, select it from the list, click the “Enable” button, then close out the Excel Options window and restart Excel.

5. Check the security settings:

Excel 2000 - 2003:
- Click Tools > Macro > Security.
- Click the Trusted Publishers tab
- Make sure the “Trust all installed add-ins and templates” box is checked.
- Restart Excel.

Excel 2007:
- Click the Office Button in the upper left corner of Excel 2007.
- On the bottom-right of the popup menu, click the “Excel Options” button.
- Click “Trust Center” on the left navigation panel.
- Click the “Trust Center Settings” button.
- The “Message Bar” panel should be open by default. Make sure the the “Show in Message Bar…” option is selected.
- Next, click “Add-Ins” from the left menu.

You have two options on the Add-Ins panel:

Option 1:
- Leave all the settings on this panel Unchecked.

Option 2:
- Check the box labeled “Require Application Add-ins to be signed by Trusted Publisher”
- Uncheck “Disable notification for unsigned add-ins”
- Uncheck “Disable all Application Add-ins”

Excel needs to be restarted for these security changes to take effect. If you selected Option 2, then the next time you restart Excel a security message will show below the Ribbon. Click on Options and manually enable FlowBreeze. You will need to restart Excel (again) for the FlowBreeze toolbar to fully load. (Note: FlowBreeze is digitally signed by a Trusted Publisher, but checking the first checkbox will disable it anyway - until you manually set the permissions on the next restart.)

=====================================================

If I had screenshots for #5, you’d really see how bad it was. Argh!

I was recycling some old magazines today, and I accidentally dropped the May issue of Quality Digest on the floor. It fell open to a page I had put a hard crease in. I looked at the page again and it still makes me go “Wow!”

It’s just a single sentence from the Statistically Speaking section:

“There are between 15,000 and 17,000 components in the average automobile made in the United States. In North America alone, 70,000 cars are delivered every business day.”

For those of you without a calculator, that’s over 1 billion components. Every day. Just in cars. In North America alone.

When I think about how that scales to the entire global economy for all products and services, it’s like trying to picture infinity.

Someone on the Business of Software forum asked how others motivate themselves to get working. This is a timely question. The jump from FlowBreeze 1.x to FlowBreeze 2.0 has been a long struggle. The code base has grown 3X and of course that doesn’t include the re-writes and thrown away code. Facing burn out in the final stretch, I’m pulling out every technique I can think of to get 2.0 out the door.

Below are the techniques I’ve been using. They don’t come from some motivational or time management book, but I’ve found they work for me. YMMV:

1. ID all the mundane TODO’s that don’t require much thinking. Do those when you’re tired or lazy.
2. Start writing your help file. It’s never too early to begin, and if you put it off until the end you’ll shortchange the effort. Some people might fit this under #1 above, but if you think writing a help file doesn’t require much thinking then you’re either a naturally good tech writer or your user documentation sucks.
3. Edge into the periphery of tough problems. Pseudo code, helper methods, data structures supporting the tough problem - whatever it takes. Eventually they’ll suck you in, and you’ll forget that you were tired.
4. Print out your existing code, sit in a comfy chair and review it. Make notes in the margins. It’s productive, you’ll find bugs or inefficiencies, and often you’ll spot something that motivates you to take immediate action.
5. Back to the comfy chair. Make a list of all your TODO’s and break them into the simplest possible tasks. Find the easiest one and tell yourself you can’t take a break (or go to bed) until you do that one little thing. Typically, you’ll finish it then knock out a few more. Often, you’ll knock out a lot more.
6. Use the technique Jerry Seinfeld motivated himself with to write new stand-up material. Keep a calendar and tell yourself that everyday you need to do at least one thing on your application. When you’ve done one thing, you can place an X on the calendar. The goal then becomes never to break the chain of X’s.
7. Sit down and work. Sometimes the “just do it” thing really is the best motivator.

The Business of Software blog posted Part II of their microISV survey. (Part I van be found here.) I have to admit that I was surprised by some of the low revenue numbers. But I’m one of those obstinate people who refuses to believe something when it doesn’t fit his world view. At least for a while, anyway.

Successful people are often too busy to spend time on forums, so they wouldn’t even be aware of the survey. Others just wouldn’t be interested. Business is war - why share data? My neighbor runs a successful microISV, and he doesn’t hang out in any online communities. He’s too busy. Scale that to the globe and you’ll have a good idea why I think the results of the survey may be skewed to the low end.

Still, I’m a data junkie and there are several data points I’d be interested in seeing. Are the microISV’s with two or more people more successful than one person shops? How do revenues correlate between B2C versus B2B apps? Of the successful companies, what’s the breakdown between those selling a small number of flagship products or a handful of smaller products? I have a gut feel for each of these, but I’d love to see the numbers.

Due to the recent incompatibilities between Vista and the crappy 3rd party licensing tool I use for FlowBreeze, I have been re-examining how I look at anti-piracy protection. I’ve decided it all boils down to a simple formula:

PL = F(SLS + SE + LS - DT)

Where, PL = Piracy Loss (i.e. the revenues lost due to software piracy) is a function of:

SLS = Support Labor Savings
The support time savings by NOT having to deal with crappy 3rd party licensing tool problems.

SE = Software Expenses
The money saved by not buying the forced upgrade to the just-as-crappy new version of the crappy 3rd party licensing tool that still fails on Vista.

LS = Lost Sales
The lost sales caused by installation and runtime problems which are due to the crappy 3rd party licensing software.

DT = Development Time
The labor to develop my own licensing tool and delivery mechanism to replace the crappy 3rd party licensing software.

The question is, should the formula be…
(a) PL < F(x) or
(b) PL = F(x) or
(c) PL > F(x)?

Obviously I wrote this piece because I think the answer is (a).

In the past few months, there’s been an spike in user-reported problems. First, there’s Vista. Putting a crappy 3rd party licensing wrapper around a DLL justing isn’t working on Vista. In fact, FlowBreeze won’t even install on Vista 64. Unfortunately, there have been a number of reported problems on XP as well. I haven’t been able to pinpoint the cause of the problems, other than sending users an unprotected version of the software resolves everything.

Did I just say that I was sending out unprotected versions of FlowBreeze? Yes, I did. In fact, I’m candid when people ask about it.

It’s a trust based system, and conversions for those who request a copy are much higher then the standard conversion rate. I think that there are two reasons for this. (1) The people who take the time to inquire are more interested than the casual downloader. (2) Most people are pretty honest.

Granted, the release of FlowBreeze 2.0 is just around the corner, so the risk of sending out unprotected copies is low. But it’s still nice to know that most of the people I deal with are willing to pay for something they value. Not only does that re-affirm my belief that (a) is the correct formula, but also that nascent microISV’s are better off implementing their own simple licensing system than relying on 3rd party tools with potential side effects.

When Google rose to the top of the search engine food chain, they created several commodities. One of them was backlinks. Google’s algorithm places a premium on the number of incoming links to a site. The more incoming links a site has, the higher the site will rank. The higher it ranks, the more traffic it will get. The more traffic it gets, the more money it will make.

And so the link commodity was born. There are link building services, link brokers, link traders, social bookmarking services, directory submissions, and assorted other operations built around this new cottage industry. One of them, Text-Link-Ads, even has a little calculator to show how much you can earn by selling links on your site.

Of course, Google doesn’t treat all links as equal. Links from authority domains or on-topic domains weigh more than links from Joe Blow’s PR1 blog. But that doesn’t stop the link scammers. They’ve even developed nice little charts showing how to gain high page rank from masses of low ranking incoming links. And even if page rank doesn’t directly translate to high search engine result positions (SERP’s), that doesn’t stop people from buying and selling scammy links.

Back in college, I knew a couple of guys who would subscribe to magazines under the name Mr. William M. Later. Then they’d get 2-3 months of free subscriptions to Playboy, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, etc. until the magazines wised up and realized that no one named William M. Later (aka, Bill Me Later) was going to pay up.

I was reminded of this when Andy Brice, creator of the legitimate 5-Cow ranked table planning software Perfect Table Plan, wrote a piece about the fake awards granted by some download sites. He created a fake piece of software called awardmestars (that’s AwardMeStars for the camel-case impaired). This software could have been written by William M. Later because it does nothing. It’s a text file with the extension changed to .exe and the product description even says that “this product does nothing.” And yet, many of the cheesier software download sites still awarded him 5 Stars.

Now that Andy’s article is making the rounds, I’m positive that more than a few link scammers will pick up on this. All they need is a text editor and a copy of Robosoft, and soon they will have hundreds of back links from low rent software directories. And I hope they do. If these software directories start getting bombarded with fake submissions, maybe they’ll actually clean up their act and stop accepting all kinds of crappy software and awarding these rankings worth less than a Commemorative Lincoln Medallion.

In my last post I kind of took a pot shot at Microsoft’s focus on SharePoint Services, insinuating that the internal push was driven in part by competition from Google Docs and Spreadsheets. But I don’t think that Microsoft really has much to worry about. Yeah, Google Spreadsheets are still kind of kludgey. But I’m sure they’ll improve, so that’s not the reason I say this.

The thing they’re lacking is an ecosystem like Microsoft’s. Microsoft’s applications not only allow them to make money, but they allow others to leverage off their systems to make money as well. Nowhere is that more evident than Excel. I had no idea how big the Excel ecosystem was until I developed a commercial add-in for it. But if you read the Google Docs and Spreadsheets terms of service, you’ll see that Google just doesn’t get it. Here’s an excerpt:

“Subject to the Terms, Google grants you a personal, non-transferable and non-exclusive right and license to use the object code of its Software; provided that you do not (and do not allow any third party to) copy, modify, create a derivative work of, … unless such activity is expressly permitted or required by law or has been expressly authorized by Google in writing.”

Pretty scary words for an OSCON sponsor. To be fair, I don’t think many of the OSCON sponsors truly open their source code to customers, but that’s another topic. Regardless, as a developer I stay away from things that requires me to get express permission (or a lawyer) before I can touch the keyboard.

If Google really wants to challenge Microsoft, they need to provide terms of service that allow 3rd party developers to leverage off of Google Spreadsheets. And make money doing so. There’s a lot more being done with Excel then a simple grid with graphs. I’ve seen some first class database reporting tools, dashboards, financial analysis packs, statistical packages, and many other add-ins developed in Excel. These are the sorts of things that tie users to a product.

Microsoft’s web based spreadsheet is comprised of three parts - Excel Calculation Services (the engine), Excel Web Access (the browser interface), and Excel Web Services (the API). The fact that they brand the whole package as “Excel Services” shows that they “get” it. Maybe someday, Google Spreadsheets will have a friendly license, like Google Gears does. But until they do, I just don’t think they’ll never be able to fully challenge Excel.

It’s late Saturday night and before hitting the sack I decide to catch up on a little web reading. On a lark I went over to the MSDN blogs home page and searched for Excel. After all, I make Excel add-ins, and who better to find out the latest Excel news than from the Microsoft developers themselves, right?

Holy moley! The top 10 results by relevance are:

• Darren Strange writes about multi-threading in Excel 2007
• Steve Caravajal explains how to publish to Excel Services from Excel 2007
• Joanna Bichsel asks Excel on the Server?
• Wael Kabli explains about Excel Services and Excel 2003
• Clint Covington provides Links to resources about Excel Services
• Sharar announces a new Excel Services blog
• An Introduction to Excel Services, or ‘running Excel spreadsheets on a server’
• An Excel Services coding example
• The Excel Services - Architecture
• And Excel Services – Key Scenarios

(The last 4 were by Dave Gainer, on the official Excel team blog.)

Other than the first link, it seems that Microsoft employees definitely have a SharePoint fixation. I realize that Excel is a mature product and there may not be that much new ground to cover, blog-wise. But you’d think with the release of Excel 2007 this year that there’d be more. Is SharePoint just shiny and new and worth talking about? Or, has Google scared the bejesus out of Microsoft, and the execs are pushing it hard internally? Either way, it’s an interesting insight to where the company is headed.

My first programming experience was in Computer Math class back in High School. It was taught by Mr. “write this down and never forget it” Gray. Mr. Gray was a witty guy, but he wasn’t Mr. Witty. Mr. Witty was the Biology teacher, but he was actually kind of loony. But he wasn’t Mr. Looney. Mr. Looney was the calculus teacher, and he, simply put, was a bad ass.

One day, one of the guys in the gym was getting cocky after benching 300 for the first time. “Oh yeah, that’s nice,” says the 50-something Mr. Looney. Then plops 350 on the bar and knocks out 10 quick reps like a hot knife through butter. He then got up and casually strolled out the gym while we all tried to find our jaws on thre floor.

So the rules of thumb were, you never goofed around in Mr. Looney’s class, you never dozed off during Mr. Witty’s week-long lecture on photosynthesis, and you never ever ever got on one of Mr. Gray’s computers before checking and double-checking your code by hand.

I didn’t learn to program back in the Jurassic period when everything was done on punch cards. No, I learned later during the Cretaceous period when programs were run on mainframes. You had to dial your AT&T standard black rotary phone endlessly until you finally got a connection. Then you placed the phone’s handset into the modem cradle and you were up and running, ready to enter your FORTRAN or BASIC program.

Kind of.

If you made an entry error in your program, sometimes you had to start back at the beginning. Other times you got logged off completely and had to dial up again. Anyone nostalgic for those days must be daft. But the key point was that our school had a limited number of minutes per month, and the fastest way to a bad grade was to waste Mr. Gray’s time on the mainframe. So all code was written by hand and run only when you were as sure as possible that it would compile and run correctly.

Last night I was tired of sitting in front of the computer, but I didn’t feel like knocking off for the evening. So I grabbed a stack of paper and a pen and sat down in the family room, coding the old fashioned way. I’ve got to say it was great. There’s something about stepping away from the PC that helps focus attention and separate you from distractions.

I wrote several hundred lines of code, and when I was done it looked like a mess. There were strikeouts and arrows and itty bitty lines of code squeezed between other lines of code and wrapping around the edge of the paper. But I understood it. When I entered it in today, it ran. First time. No errors. I lifted my coffee cup in salute to Mr. Gray, wherever he might be.

Excel 2007’s new Ribbon menu takes a while to get used to. I’ve heard a lot of people say that their productivity dropped way down after switching to Office 2007, but eventually it rose up again to match the pre-2007 levels. Some people even say they’re more productive now.

I’m finally getting used to it myself, but there is still one thing that bugs me. The Ribbon thinks it knows what you want to do better than you do. When you select different items (ranges, charts, shapes, etc.) the Ribbon will automatically switch tabs in anticipation of what you want to do next. Even worse, Microsoft didn’t provide a way to pin tabs to force any given tab to stay selected.

The problem is even worse with Excel add-ins. Add-ins extend the functionality of Excel through both expanded features and convenience. If any add-ins exist when Excel 2007 loads, it creates a special Add-Ins tab. If you’re using the features of an add-in, Excel often gets all smart on you and switches the active tab. It can be a real pain, but luckily there’s a workaround.

QAT To The Rescue

The QAT is the Quick Access Toolbar. It’s a special toolbar that users can add custom buttons to so their favorite features are readily available. And it works for add-ins as well.

To include an Add-in on the QAT, first you need to select the Add-Ins tab. At the bottom of the Add-Ins tab is a label titled “Custom Toolbars”. Right-click on the label and a menu will popup allowing you to add it to the QAT, as shown in the picture below.

(Click to enlarge)

Selecting “Add Group to Quick Access Toolbar” will make the whole add-in toolbar a dropdown from the QAT, as shown below.

(Click to enlarge)

On other thing to note is the position of the QAT. In the first picture above, you can see that the QAT is above the Ribbon. In the second picture, it’s below the Ribbon. It’s a matter of personal preference, but if you like having favorite features even closer to the worksheet, you can change the position of the QAT. As shown in the third picture, below, just right-click on the QAT and select the option to show it below the Ribbon.

With the QAT below the Ribbon, you lose a little screen real estate, but you make up for it with added convenience and increased productivity.

Without much fanfare, BreezeTree Software released FlowBreeze v1.4 the other day. I’ll get to the fanfare bit later. The following is a summary of the changes.

New Features

• Apply Styles: Applies the default styles to all the flowchart symbols and lines in the drawing.
• Toggle Gridlines: By default FlowBreeze hides the gridlines. This simply lets you toggle them on/off.
• Extract Flowchart Text: Iterates through all the flowchart symbols and outputs the text to a worksheet - useful for assigning and tallying process metrics.

Changes

• The Toggle Toolbars feature has been replaced with integrated drop down menus, now with more symbols added.
• A fail-safe has been added to the toolbar loading. Occasionally Excel will hang when setting toolbar icons. If this occurs, the toolbar buttons will revert to all text. (Given all the cryptic icons out there, this is actually kind of refreshing.)
• The Smart Sizing feature has been extended to Decision shapes. Formerly, their height was set based on the text length, often producing short, squat diamonds. The new approach is to set the minimum height equal to the width for a uniform look.

Bug Fixes

• Yes.
  [There were a number of fixes, most having to do with gracefully handling the changes to the Excel 2007 AutoShapes object model.]

Why No Fanfare?

The 3rd party licensing tool used by FlowBreeze has been causing a number of Vista compatibility issues. If you are running Vista and interested in trying FlowBreeze, please contact me directly and I will send you a Vista friendly version.

More to come on that issue …

Proposed SAT Question
Liberal is to Linux as Conservative is to _________.

Only in America would we politicize operating systems, but I’ve seen analogies like the one above before. Of course, in reality it doesn’t hold water. Most (sane) people don’t pick their operating system based on ideology.

Douglas Karr has done some analysis and found that a majority of the Democratic candidates’ sites are running on Linux, while a majority of the Republican candidates’ sites are running on Windows. Interestingly, though, Hillary Clinton is running Windows/IIS and Rudy Guiliani is running Linux/Apache. So if they remain the front-runners, the general election could be a Democratic-Windows ticket vs. a Republican-Linux ticket. Who would have thought that?

(I’m going to hold off predicting Bill Gates* and Richard Stallman as their respective VP nominees, though.)

Glad This Guy Didn’t Use FlowBreeze

A man was arrested in Minneapolis for planned kidnapping and attempted harassment/stalking. The odd thing is he mapped on his plans to “club her hard” in a flowchart. Sick, wrong, and just plain weird. The dude’s giving flowcharts a bad name. (Story)

Haris Just Gets It

Haris.tv lists 5 reasons Excel is his favourite flowchart software. I couldn’t agree more. Plus, it reinforces a few articles I wrote last year:
- Top 7 Reasons to Flowchart in Excel
- How to Make Flowcharts in Excel

Is Shakespeare the New Nostradamus?

The inimitable Leon Bambrick sums up my week in a single line from Shakespeare: “Striving to better oft we mar what’s well” — King Lear. I hope I can drum up a better quote to sum up next week.

*The Digg Nazi: “No Diggs for You!”

According to Ade Olonoh’s top secret Digg prediction algorithm, this post won’t get Dugg because I failed to put “sucks” after Bill Gates name. Oh well…

I had planned to write a piece on my upcoming process mapping software, since I have been fielding a lot of questions on it lately. But it was one of those days, and I got sidetracked by coincidence. I was in my garage searching for a old copy of the ANSI standard for process mapping symbols without any luck, and what do I find sitting inside the last box I looked in? Cheaper by the Dozen.

A few years ago I got stuck had the pleasure of taking my kids to go see the latest remake of it with Steve Martin, Bonnie Hunt, and the remaining cast of wacky characters. Steve Martin plays football coach, which is kind of sad because that’s not the original story at all. In the real life story, the dad was an Engineer. Egad! We can’t be having that in Hollywood. In Hollywood, ‘business people’ are in advertising, publishing, or at least sales. Definitely NOT Engineering. But even a generic business career was too bland, so they recast the role as a football coach.

The original semi-autobiographical story was written by the children of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. Frank was not a football coach. He started out as a bricklayer and went on to become a management engineer. Together he and Lillian collaborated on the study of work motion that became one of the foundations of Industrial Engineering. There’s a ton of material available detailing his career, and quite frankly it was the kind of stuff that would put me to sleep as an undergrad. So I won’t pretend that it’s interesting now.

But the irony is, Frank Gilbreth is also the inventor of Process Charts. That’s what I was looking for! And all I found was a lame Hillary Duff movie.

Gilbreth’s Process Charts were a predecessor of flowcharts. They used 5 basic symbols: a Circle for Operation; a Square for Inspection; an inverted Triangle for Storage; a block Arrow for Transportation, and a big D for Delay. These symbols were adopted by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) when they published the first standard on process mapping symbols, which I believe evolved later to become ANSI Y15.3M, Operation and Flow Process Charts Standard.

This year the ASME withdrew the ANSI Y15.3 standard.

It’s just as well. The problem with Process Chart symbols is that there really isn’t a standard that anyone adheres to. Plus, there exist several other standards for process flowchart symbols, and they all stink.

Since FlowBreeze is an Excel add-in, it uses the symbol set included with Microsoft Office. I don’t know the official source of their symbol set, but as far as I can tell it’s exactly the same as the template that IBM used in the 1960’s for data processing flowchart symbols. That’s why every version of Microsoft Office ships with such useful symbols as Punch Tape, Card, and Sequential Access Storage.

The process mapping version of FlowBreeze will include the capability to use traditional process mapping symbols, as well as many other features. A run down of those will have to wait for another blog post…

Everyone knows that Google is king when it comes to generating traffic for your website. In fact, many webmasters practically disregard Yahoo and MSN altogether in their SEO efforts. And software download sites? Their time has passed, right?

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t agree with those statements. I look at my stats everyday, and the traffic from Google dwarfs all other sources. And download sites? I barely see a trickle from them. But most of the time when I look at my web stats, I’m looking at daily or weekly snapshots. I hadn’t run any long term numbers in a while, so tonight I decided to look at the year-to-date stats then slice and dice the data. What I found surprised me:

Looking at just traffic and purchases, I assumed there was a gap in the data because Google visitors came back at some later point, after trying the software, and then made the purchase. But when I added the Download stats to the chart, the equation changed dramatically. MSN and Yahoo remained consistent between the three metrics, but Google dropped off significantly. This is a complete reversal of my last long term stats look-see.

And what’s the amorphous blob called “other”? Google Analytics doesn’t let you track external referrals for downloads, but luckily the stat package provided by my web host does (SmarterStats, in case you’re interested). Surprise, surprise. In the Downloads data, “other” is made up mostly of download site referrals and the rest is direct traffic.

I’m not going to jump to any conclusions yet, but I thought the data was interesting enough to share.