Wow, my first earthquake!

I am traveling in the San Jose area (for the Business of Software conference) this week. Last night I was out at dinner in Sunnyvale with a colleague, and suddenly the room started swaying left to right. It felt as if it was swaying as much as 6 inches, but nothing was falling off tables, and it felt mostly gentle but random. There was no rattling and no thunderous noises as might be expected from what Hollywood has told us.

It lasted about 20 seconds, and then I had the strange sensation that maybe the ground was still moving, but I couldn't quite be sure. Similar to the sensation you get when leaving a cruise ship after a few days.

Apparently earthquakes of this magnitude (it was 5.6 and located about 8 miles from San Jose) are not super common, so I was "lucky" to experience it.

A couple of months ago, I was considering creating a website for St. Croix restaurant reviews. The idea would be that it would be all user-contributed reviews and easily updatable, like a wiki. Well, it's been done! Take a look at Yelp.

I've started writing reviews for all of the St. Croix restaurants I love! Check out my Yelp page.

Seth Godin has an interesting post about bundling.

It got me thinking about how this applies to software. One application is this: General purpose software often doesn't stand out as much as software with a sharp focus, even if it's as good or better.

Part of the reason is due to the effect that Seth talks about. When someone searches for a product, they search for something that solves one specific problem. So what they find first are the products that focus specifically on that problem. The general-purpose apps fall to the bottom of the list.

Of course, part of the problem is likely due to the fact that it's hard to create general purpose software that excels in several areas without being hard to use or expensive. But I recall in the early days of Palm OS, there were tons of specialized database apps and a few really good general-purpose databases. The specialized apps always seemed to out-sell the general purpose database apps, even when the general purpose apps were just as good. Some of those database applications even came with hundreds of templates to make them work just like the specialized apps.

How do you get around this effect if you have a really good "bundled" application (e.g. a product that solves more than one problem)? One extreme idea is to create separate products. Market each one at one of the problems it solves. It's actually the exact same product under the covers, but it's targeted at just one problem instead of several.

I find it interesting that, even as Steve Jobs praises DRM-free music, he likes the DRM concept when applied to locking out applications from the iPhone.