Try To Think Intimate

That was the message VisiCalc co-inventor Dan Bricklin had for several hundred attendees at CRN's recent daylong Industry Hall of Fame event, held Nov. 16 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

When he first dreamed up the electronic spreadsheet with Bob Frankston, it took a while for Bricklin to explain the concept until he showed his professors at Harvard Business School how they could solve specific problems with it.

When I asked Bricklin to offer the keynote that day, we chatted quite a bit about the anticipated audience: solution providers and VARs. He immediately grasped their top strength: providing "diverse" solutions based on a core set of tools, whether they be applications or network infrastructure or even components, as is the case for embedded systems.

The difference between invention and innovation, Bricklin maintains, is that innovation essentially has a practical outcome, making an existing process a whole lot easier to handle. In this week's cover story by Senior Editor Elizabeth Montalbano, Bricklin muses: "[Custom software development] is part of not having the audacity to think you know everything."

What Bricklin doesn't say, of course, is that by asking the right questions, solution providers often help their clients make this discovery. So, while the early users of VisiCalc may not have wanted an electronic spreadsheet, they sure wanted a way to analyze their company's sales projections and use that information to target their resources more efficiently.

So, I ask you, when was the last time you really had a conversation with your best—and not-so-best—customers? Better yet, when was the last time your entire sales and technical team got to hear from those customers instead of you? And I'm not just talking about hosting a vendor-sponsored product fair or a regular, transaction-oriented sales call.

As IT becomes an even more intimate part of the total business process, it only makes sense to spend more time getting even closer to your customers. I'd love to hear about what works for you.

Are you close enough to your customers? CRN Editor HEATHER CLANCY appreciates your comments and feedback at [email protected].