Intuit employees recently had an opportunity to hear from Reed Hastings of Netflix about how designing software has changed as SaaS has evolved.
Netflix is a great example of a company that lives for testing, experimentation, and improvement. He started off his presentation talking about how in packaged software we focused on big-bang releases and because of that model we needed the geniuses who knew how to create great products. We still see that in movies or fashion or other industries where the releases are big investment = big payoff. Steve Jobs is our industry’s genius and physical products still operate in a big-bang release model.
With the advent of SaaS there is the opportunity to have multiple people with great, intuitive, artistic ideas deciding what we should do with the product. Let them try out their ideas, and we can watch what happens – we can let the data decide. Not only does this take some of the emotion out of making these decisions, it also allows people to see and learn what works and doesn’t - both from their own ideas and others.
What is exciting for us is that the QuickBase Developer Platform is a great resource for rapid iteration and experimentation not just by us, but by all of our customers and partners. Pace of change is a huge advantage in innovation. If I can try things at a very low cost, then why would I conduct long, theoretical research studies and produce huge design documents? The ability to experiment and learn in the real world at low cost enables us to set product teams free. In this case, we can set thousands of developers free in the market.
What we’ve created is an engine for innovation. We have already seen some of the fruits of this based on the exciting applications that developers have been building. We can’t wait until this stuff gets in the market. Come join us and be a part of the experiment.
Intuit is known for innovation and Netflix has utilized that model to come from virtually nowhere into the changing market of entertainment. With an understanding of SaaS as the wave of the future its exciting to know that Intuit will entertain new ideas and new patented techologies to leap ahead of Microsoft, even as they attempt to clone the QuickBooks model on their own. I am hopeful that my company can get a chance to give Intuit tools to outshine Microsoft on some of their own basic functions such as Outlook - I can't wait to meet the right people to present this technology!
Posted by: Diane Dutton | October 07, 2008 at 10:23 AM