Building Complete Products
Have you ever used a web site or service that "wasn't all there?" Maybe it looked good and did something useful, but it required that you go elsewhere to finish what you were trying to do. Travel-booking sites didn't used to have integrated maps. (Hard to believe...) Then some clever person (probably a travel-site product manager) realized that customers had a problem locating the motel they were booking, and that they were plugging the street address into Mapquest or Google Maps. Pretty soon every motel listing had a link to pop up a map, and eventually the maps were embedded into the listing itself. The product was more "complete", and it solved the customer problem more effectively. Likewise, one of the hazards in developing packaged software is the failure to make a "complete product." Simply put, if the product in the box does the whole job, then it's complete. If it requires the user to go elsewhere to do part of the job, then it'...