As I write this post, we're beginning the soft-launch of the Innio website and our first multi-user Concerto instance. This will cap several years' worth of efforts to both get the Concerto product out there as a reasonably mature digital signage system and structure a business around it. But as the writer of most of the prose around here, you've heard enough from me about the product (as well as why and how we came to it). But Innio is more than Concerto or Fleetdeck. We've built our tiny company as a platform for solving problems within our collective expertise. Perhaps it's a proclivity for over-engineering around here, but this platform approach is pretty identifiable in everything we do.
We didn't write layout files for our website; we used a framework to genericize its use across all our products and sites. We didn't make Concerto multi-user; we created a platform for making any similarly-architected application multi-user with a few lines of code.
Inconvenient as this sometimes can be for timetables, it allows us to do something vitally important for our company -- make it more properly a vehicle of our interests and ambitions. If I want to write an inventory application, I can tap into the platform aspects of Innio and use the tools we've created to do that very easily. So too can any of my partners take their ideas into production quickly -- potentially creating products quicker, smaller, better, or more convenient (or all of the above) than the existing players.
For quite some time, the consensus in the software development world has been centered around iterating through software designs frequently to create an optimal product. In many ways, our company is structured to enter the business world with a comparable philosophy. Namely, that trying to intelligently guess what customers in a market want is no substitute for creating many options for customers and learning from our market in an environment designed to keep the cost of iteration and experimentation low.
Well, I'm off to go write this collectible inventorying application I've had stuck in my head.