It’s time to name my blog

Naming is a tough thing.  I’ve come up with good names and bad names for products over the years.  The problem is that you can’t define a good name – you just know it when you hear it. 

I have decided that I am going to stick to this blog thing – so I need a good name for it.  My description/tagline for the blog is “A Blog on the LabVIEW Platform: Where Business and Technology Collide”.  I was thinking of referencing LabVIEW wiring in the name:

Untangling the Wires

Tangled Wires

Wired for Business

or something like that.

Please vote on your favorite name based on these three entries, or, if you have a better idea…

Let’s open up the naming process to the community.  To sweeten the pot, I will provide a $50 Amazon gift certificate (or iTunes if you prefer) to whoever comes up with the coolest name for my blog.  This is from my own pocket – so its not an NI-sponsored contest.  There are no rules.  As I often have to explain to my guys here too, there is a fine line between cool and stupid, and I am the definer of that line.  You may think something is really cool, but in the end – I have all decision rights in the matter.  If I get a good submission and go with it, I will reimburse the winner (who will also have the ultimate prize – bragging rights).   I will also take votes on the current ideas listed above.

The LabVIEW Community

I recently attended a Community Engagement Conference where I got re-energized to the many ways we (our users and the LabVIEW team) can work together.  I hope to bring some of those ideas to the LabVIEW community in the coming months.  About 10 years ago, I moved into our Web team to help steer our efforts for ni.com.  That experience reminds me a lot of what I heard last week at the Community conference as we all try to figure out this whole community/Web 2.0 thing.  I shared some thoughts with the conference organizer, who (like a good community builder) immediately put them up on his blog (http://blog.customerreferenceforum.com/). 

We have always tried to listen to our customers and “let them in” on our latest ideas and directions at NIWeek.  After spending two days thinking and talking about the potential of reaching out to your community of users, I am convinced we can do a whole lot more.  Rather than talk about it, I hope you guys see it in action over the next several months.  We’ll see (it starts with me keeping up with this new blog – another outcome of my Community conference awakening).

What is LabVIEW?

We first released LabVIEW in 1986 as a graphical programming language on the Macintosh.  By now, you would think that we have a good idea of what it is.  However, as many of you know who are LabVIEW users – the product is constantly evolving (we like to think “improving”) over the years.  In fact, one of the most common misconceptions I hear from customers is when they tell me “I know all about LabVIEW… I used it in my lab in college 5 years ago.”  Inside, I am thinking – dude, you have no idea how much LabVIEW has changed in 5 years.  

The fact is that LabVIEW has evolved tremendously, particularly over the past few years.  We have great plans for LabVIEW – which go way beyond a simple programming language.  The challenge is how do we serve our good customers of today, while at the same time continue to evolve and improve the platform while they are using it?  I am reminded of an actual conversation I had with a few customers this year during lunch on Thursday of NIWeek.   I am reminded of it because, by Thursday – after a week of sales conference sessions, keynote presentations, and editor meetings, I usually try to keep my lunch open so I can sit at a random table to get some feedback from users – to be honest, its a way to get my feet back on the ground and in touch with reality again.  This year illustrated exactly our challenge.  I asked the group at the table “How do you use LabVIEW and what do you like about it?”  The first customer, from a big mil-aero account, said they are working on a large application with LabVIEW and, coming from a C programming background, they really liked the direction we were going in with the project, OO programming structures, and libraries to better serve the programmers of the world.  The second customer said “I use LabVIEW like a calculator to do quick and dirty things.  So keep it simple – I don’t need a lot of the new features you are building.”

So in an attempt to rest my brain and chat up some LabVIEW users, I was once again confronted with one of the ongoing challenges of the universe – how do we present a powerful programming language and a high-level engineering tool in one package?  The interesting thing was that both of these customers were basically happy – but they were using the product in completely different ways. 

This debate was stirred up recently in a great info-lv posting, started by David Moore (from Moore Good Ideas) who started the thread with a post entitled “Will LabVIEW survive?” – which was more about balancing quality and testing with innovation.  It is amazing how these user forums spark up some of the most passionate and thought-provoking debates among our users – usually involving people coming in on both sides of the issue.  While most of the posts and discussions are about “How do I do X in LV?” or “Does anybody have a driver for X?”, we sometimes see these great philosophical debates too.  In the ensuing discussion, Mark Smith from Sandia had a great response where he compared LV to an application for doing relatively simple things (like Excel) as well as an IDE for building applications, and that perhaps we should consider packaging LabVIEW differently based on all of the different features now baked into it.  We ARE constantly looking at new and different ways to package and explain LabVIEW for the world – but we have to be very careful because we have such a rich history behind us and we don’t want to mess things up.  So its a challenge – but perhaps a blog will help.  (If not, at least it will help me move forward on my master self-aggrandizement strategy!)

I am hoping to tap into some of these topics to keep the passion flowing from our users, and provide more of a dialog.  I am already breaking rule #1, which is don’t prattle on too long about something.  We’ll see how it goes.