When I worked at frogdesign, I remember our team going to a PC client and getting reprimanded for not using their company’s PCs If we were going to work for them, then shouldn’t we be using their products and getting to know how “great” their products were by living with them day to day?
The same thing happened at Yahoo!. I remember a sales rep who had a major PC manufacturer as a client and he immediately went out and bought a laptop made by that company to show solidarity and support for the client. I don’t know if he used it when he got back to the office, but definitely he brought it with him to client meetings. He even switched his cellphone to that company’s brand (maybe you can figure out who this company was now heh). It was all to show that he was in full support of the manufacturer as client and supported them so much that he lived and breathed their products, as much as what he did with them at Yahoo!.
I drank the Kool-Aid too. When we worked on Yahoo! products, we were told to always use them. It kind of made sense at the time. If you lived and breathed the products, you could make them better. You could spot problems, make suggestions, and overall show the world that a company who uses its own products must obviously have the highest confidence in them to do so.
After observing and experiencing this behavior for many years, I’m going to take the contrarian view. I am going to suggest that using solely your company’s products is not so good as people claim.
I reached this conclusion just now, almost 3 years out of Yahoo! and have been out there using whatever it was that made my life easier, instead of just using Yahoo! products only. I found that there were a huge number of products out there that were really great, and often much better than what Yahoo! could offer. I even took Yahoo.com off my home page button, which had occupied that button since 1995. Drinking too much Kool-Aid too long made me miss out.
If you are constantly using your own products, I would put forth that it’s the best way to put blinders on. Sure, your company’s products may be the best there is when they come out, but they may not be at some time in the future. With Web development happening so fast, it could happen sooner than you think.
In today’s Web, things move so fast. People come up with stuff that you personally would not have dreamed of. The more you focus on your own products, the more the likelihood that you fall into that comfortable place where you don’t need to change, you don’t look for something better, and you just don’t feel like learning something new. You get complacent and feel that what you have is good enough, or you think it’s world class because you worked on it and people have told you so. How can it not be? You take pride in what you’ve done and nobody can knock you off the mountain. Everyone tells you to research and look at competitors’ products, but yet nobody finds the time to do so. It is a small number of people who actually have their own personal curiosity to go out and try somebody elses products. It’s too freakin’ busy to go and do this in your spare time!
I would put forth that the blindness that happens with being comfortable and focusing on yourself and your own company is precisely the way you get blindsided by some fast moving kids out of college developing something that is so cool and compelling and you see them gaining traction only after you’ve fallen behind.
What’s the best way to combat this?
USE THE BEST PRODUCT OUT THERE FOR WHATEVER IT IS YOU DO.
Force yourself to always try new things, even when your boss is telling you to use the company’s products. Fake using Gmail when you go to a client meeting, but return back to what you think is the best product for email when you’re out of that meeting. Use the best cellphone for you, but when you go back to work carry your Sony-Ericsson.
You can’t learn about a product by just trying it; you really need to live with it and become a real user of that product and internalize why it is great.
Always ask your friends what they use. Read magazines and blogs about what they recommend. Collect your insight and feed it back to your own development process for your own products.
Don’t get complacent about your own products by missing what’s happening in the greater world. This is more than just being “innovative”. It is experiencing and acknowledging the world is a bigger place than just you, your product and your company. Broaden your horizons and you’ll be a superior product person for it. Truly in today’s Web, the best product does win.
POSTSCRIPT:
When you realize that you are practically using none of your company’s products because your competitors’ products are so much better, and you can’t get your company to realize this, I think it’s time to leave.
POSTSCRIPT Part II:
If you’re a boss, don’t be an ass and make everyone on your team use your own products, if they aren’t as good as your competitors’. That should be motivation enough to make your own stuff better.