Technology First, People Second

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Technology First, People Second

My last.fm post generated some discussion in the blog world and Rags pointed me to David Porter who works at Live365.

David's analysis is spot on, but the comment that popped out at me was the following:

Ironically, technology is the starting point for Last.fm’s relatively social approach (i.e. the Audioscrobbler application) while people are the starting point for Pandora’s largely technological approach (i.e. musicians’ and others’ evaluations of music on a specific set of attributes).

I have always thought that the most vibrant web services use a combination of technology and people to produce the value.

But I have never thought specifically about the order in which the two need to be brought to bear on the issue at hand.

My initial reaction to David's post was that technology has to come first and people have to come second. I think that's the most scaleable and most natural way to architect a web service. But maybe that's not right.

Thoughts anyone?

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Posted January 30, 2006 in Venture Capital and Technology

Comments

Most of my career I've been told, and accepted as gospel, that the user (the people) are the ultimate arbiters of what is useful, and should be provided. This hasn't always gelled with my experience as a software developer, where I have found some of the most widely-accepted, heavily-used functionality I have written has been as a result of R&D/skunkworks/selfish interest. This is also something of an open-source belief - you write software to scratch your own itch, and others will often start using it as well.

Posted by: Ric | Jan 30, 2006 8:22:30 AM

I'm not sure whether we can generalize, but I do agree that Pandora is going to have a hard time scaling. While Last.fm can grow its collection very quickly, songs that enter the Pandora system need to be evaluated by trained musicians. Unless Pandora can come up with an automated way to analyse the tracks, the system just won't scale.

Posted by: Pete Cashmore | Jan 30, 2006 8:26:31 AM

Fred-

Of course people have to come first, or at least the needs, interests, and ideas of people. It's all about people. You can have great products, services, businesses for and by people w/o technology. But not the inverse.

Technologists are way too dazzled by the technology itself. How many times have you watched engineers and designers develop solutions in search of a problem? Thousands probably. We all have. How many times have you seen a company try to impose a tech layer into a process that only complicates the process and alienates the users? Hundreds probably. That's not just a matter of bad vs. good technology. Its a matter of, to borrow a phrase, "putting people first," or what some wags call "consumer driven design." Whatever you want to call it, the layer of human engagement, human ideas, human creativity, and human needs trumps the technology every time.

Posted by: Jason Chervokas | Jan 30, 2006 9:01:55 AM

I think in the case of "Pandora" the people had to come first. A panel of experts on all genres of music. Hard team to put together. Pandora, has an in house team of musicians’. That particular type of approach, in the context he discussed is correct.

However if we take most any other community based social site ala flickr, the technology is certainly first.

I think it's very rare that the people are first (unless your building your team).

Posted by: Jason Hawryluk | Jan 30, 2006 9:14:50 AM

Don't quite know how to say this without sounding obscene:

Shouldn't they come together?

Posted by: Mike Orren | Jan 30, 2006 9:44:37 AM

I tend to agree, depending on Web Service. If it's a bootstrapped effort and the folks starting it up can find the right type of open-source software, then yes. However, if the people w/ the idea need assistance with finding the right software (not all idea generators are tech-savvy), then some of the right people need to come first.

Posted by: Adam | Jan 30, 2006 10:04:36 AM

Chicken, meet egg.

Egg -- let me introduce you to my good friend, Chicken.

Just to go for the big ones -- is Google about technology (spiders and SERPS), or is it about people (the creators of all those inbound links)? is Apple about technology (products) or is it about people (user-driven design)? is Linux about technology (the code) or people (the developer community)? how about WoW?

Answer: the right process is so iterative that it might not make sense to try to pick which comes first.

Great services _are_ technology, but they're inspired (and built!) by people. And it goes backandforth and backandforth all the time.

Interesting brainfood!

Posted by: Nicholas | Jan 30, 2006 10:53:45 AM

Personally, I dont believe that you can create rules about what technology strategy is best. I think creativity is a honing of random thoughts that leads to cool stuff that serendipitously happen to be good. Applying some rule that technology must come first or people must come first obscures the complexity involved in satisfying human taste.

Posted by: hank williams | Jan 30, 2006 10:55:20 AM

Sigurd Rinde and I had a discussion about technology and process/people innovation. It started here:
http://thingamy.typepad.com/sigs_blog/2005/12/ambitions_and_l.html
and continued: http://www.undefined.com/ia/archives/2005/12/what_problem_ar.html
and
http://thingamy.typepad.com/sigs_blog/2005/12/more_on_ambitio.html

This seems somewhat relevant, at least. Sig essentially believes that people-oriented problem solving solves more important problems than technology-oriented problem solving. I remain on the fence.

Posted by: John Brothers | Jan 30, 2006 10:58:15 AM

I'd through my two cents in with John Brothers and Hank Williams. We need a better question because examples can be given for putting either first. Is it implied that the question is just for creating a peer produced content site, or just for comparing music? Google and Flickr are tech first and scaleable, which backs up Fred's inclination. I'd think Craig's List is community first because of the lack of original technology. I'd also suggest that you can start with tech, like Google, and then Google could allow communitieis to add value, like Amazon and Yahoo with user feedback. Perhaps Craig's List could develop tools using existing data to guide posters to better their purposes, such as suggesting price points or linking to similar previous posts. End of the day - depends what the problem is you're solving....Perhaps the more pointed problem is can you get a VC ROI with people alone?

Posted by: Lloyd Fassett | Jan 30, 2006 2:42:43 PM

I do not think that you can serialize the process. Technology choices are not more important than people, and people are not more important than those choices, with respect to a given software development challenge. If you have an incremental technology, you will ultimately run into problems with respect to scalability, positioning, etc. However, if you have a powerful technology, but have not paid sufficient attention to user requirements, adoption will become an issue. That being said, as a general rule, I have found that during any engineering process the user ultimately comes "first." We build software for users. Whether that user is a developer, web-savvy teen, or business analyst, people ultimately are the consumers of many services. Even those platforms that are "technology-driven" ultimately have the best interest of a user group in mind – the Internet is a prime example – the estimated horizon with respect to requirements, adoption, and use is a just a bit broader. In short, although I agree with Pete Cashmore - you can necessarily generalize - if I had to pick, I would say that understanding user “pain” is the key to building great software.

Posted by: Hooman Radfar | Jan 30, 2006 2:46:22 PM

My two cents:
If you want all potential users to participate, then the technology should come first - the fact that audioscrobbler/last.fm works in the background without any user interaction makes it easy to use. For "enthusiasts", you can push more responsibility to the user. I found that the old "Firefly" service, one of the first web-based recommendation engines, was often more accurate than last.fm is, because it forced the user to rate music on a scale, rather than simply play it. It depends upon whether the service provides enough value to the user to get them to provide input. It's similar to tagging of content. Enthusiasts will use a service like delicious. But, if you want everyone to access the content, it's up to the publisher to tag it and make it accessible.

Posted by: Barry Graubart | Jan 30, 2006 4:20:15 PM

There is a good deal of dependence on the problem at hand. For example, for a vertical search engine targeted at a niche it can be a combination of technology PLUS people intelligence that can deliver very targeted and relevant results. A pure technology solution for that same problem - say a generic search engine like Google - will just not work because the users want quality results not mere quantity. They really do not case if the search engine crawls 100M pages or 2B pages. In such a case, a smaller index that is cleansed by an expert team will deliver on the desired solution.

I also think, unlike some comments above, that Flickr was not just technology. Its community building angle played a big role in helping them build the initial critical mass.

Posted by: Vaibhav Domkundwar - iNods.com | Jan 30, 2006 9:36:30 PM

i think tim o'reilly wrote the book on this with his concept of an Architecture of Participation - which synthesizes the duality of technology and social.

Posted by: James Governor | Jan 31, 2006 3:25:31 AM

Fred, you're ahead of the curve again. Slashdot just picked this debate up today:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/01/0553233&from=rss

Posted by: Brouhaha | Feb 1, 2006 9:42:02 AM

A VC

Musings of a VC in NYC