REthink Wine Blog

I thought it might be fun for everyone to draw some comparisons between building great software and building great wine. Producing software is as much art as it is science. There are countless books and methodologies that preach the “right way” to build software, but the proliferation of competing ideas only goes to show that there is no one right way to do it. Find the method that best fits your goals, your situation and your character, and go with it.

Like wine, great software starts with a vision. That vision is sometimes formed collectively by a group, but often enough it comes from one or two individuals who play the role of software architect. In wine you have the winemaker.

But vision is not enough, you need passion. Not just from the visionaries, but from every member of the production team. Everyone needs to feel that they are working on a great product, whether it ends up in a glass or somewhere in the Internet.

Like wine, great software starts from good DNA. There’s no cloning or genetic engineering in software, but venture capitalists often talk about company culture as the DNA that drives a successful technology startup. (Although sometimes I wish we could clone ourselves to get double the work done.)

Great wine comes from the terroir. Software is built on a solid foundation of tools and technologies. The better your tools, the better your software will grow. Of course, there’s variety of good tools out there. Things like the base programming language and APIs that you choose will greatly impact the flavor of your software.

And then there’s the climate. That’s one thing that you cannot control. The software equivalent of climate is the business climate. Fire drills, changing requirements, emergency support requests and the like are the software equivalent to rain, frost, and shortened growing seasons. Fortunately for us technologists, there are a lot more ways to mitigate climate impact on software development as compared to wine production. That’s where management steps in to plan, anticipate roadblocks, minimize risks, and block and tackle so that the software can continue to grow unmolested.

Then you have your cycles. Wine has an annual cycle dictated by the seasons. At Inertia, we typically have a quarterly release cycle. But because we are largely an e-commerce platform, we are also beholden to the holiday shopping season, which is why we never release new software in the busiest quarter of the year.

There’s been tremendous buzz following the announcement of our compliance tool. Here’s at least one forum thread:
http://dat.erobertparker.com/bboard/showthread.php?t=138976

Several valid questions and concerns have been raised, and while Paul has taken the time to address them in the aforementioned forum, it behooves us to bring some of these points back and answer them on our own blog.

1. Are there any hidden costs?

We do not plan to charge for compliance ever. Some question Inertia’s motives, and rightfully so. After all, we are a corporation, out to make a profit. But compliance is not our core product. Rather, it is meant to bolster our core offering of direct-to-consumer and direct-to-trade software and services. You can think of the compliance tool as a gateway drug. We’re hoping that once you try it, you’ll get hooked and try our other services. It is also meant to reduce our own costs in providing the core services to our existing clients.

2. Will Inertia sell my customer and order data?

In our 5 years of existence, we have never sold a single byte of data to e-marketers or anyone else. We are not out to make a quick buck. We are in it for the long haul. We want to grow the direct sales market, which benefits us, the winery, and the consumer alike.

3. Do I need to hire a programmer to integrate with the compliance tool?

At a minimum, you can upload your orders as a spreadsheet. As long as your existing POS or e-commerce system allows you to get order data out as a spreadsheet, you should be able to use our compliance tool. If you are partnered with a fulfillment company, we can provide them with an API that will enable all of their winery customers to use our system with no additional work to the winery.

Why am I in the wine industry? Yesterday brought some inspiration. I came up with some incontrovertible truths (with apologies to Pythagoras, Descartes and Kant).

1. Wine = Lifestyle
2. Lifestyle = Family
3. Family =

Happy Birthday to my baby girl, Malaya, one year and counting, as of June 10th, 2007.

Some of you may already have seen the “green address bar” in your browser while buying something on the Internet. The version 7 release of Internet Explorer adds support for Extended Validation certificates (EV certs), and pages that are served using these certificates show up with a green address bar as a visual indicator of “additional security”.

The idea behind EV certs is to prevent phishing attacks. Presumably, sites with EV certs would have been vetted by the Certificate Authority (Verisign, Thawte, etc.) to ensure that they are legitimate, incorporated entities with a real world presence. Newer and future browsers will have the ability to distinguish between a regular SSL cert and an EV cert by showing a green address bar, among other things. In theory, this will give the consumer an additional visual cue to determine whether the site they are transacting with is legitimate.

In reality, this will only prevent one type of phishing attack, one in which the rogue site pretended to be a legitimate site by having a similar looking or sounding domain. For example, someone could register the ebey.com domain, get an SSL cert, and put a web-front that looks like ebay.com. Most of the time, the rogue-site operators don’t even get a regular SSL cert from a legitimate Certificate Authority. They use what is called a self-signed certificate (anyone can sign a certificate). This causes the browser to first asks the user if the site should be trusted. Most users click “OK”, then they see the golden lock on their address bar, which they have been trained to trust that everything is good, even though the address bar says ” ebey.com”.

Another attack is to show a .jpg image of a browser application in a popup window. To the untrained eye, this is undistinguishable from an actual browser window. At that point, the attacker can photoshop the golden lock, and even the green address bar to fake the presence of an EV certificate.

Security is an arms race, and hackers will always find a way around the system. More often than not, the successful attacks function on a pyschological and social level, rather than breaking state-of-the-art technology.

As to whether an e-commerce website should start using EV certificates, I think the market will bear the answer. It’s ridiculous to insinuate that a site using an EV certificate is more secure for the reasons mentioned previously. However, browsing habits do change over time, so if people get used to the idea of looking for that green address bar before clicking the “buy” button, then all arguments regarding security are moot.

My personal opinion, having spent years in the digital certificate industry, is that EV certs is a great way for Verisign, et.al. to extract more revenue from online merchants. After all, EV certs cost around $2500 per year. If you’re making a profit of $25 per bottle, you’d have to sell 100 more bottles just to recoup the cost of the EV certificate. Clearly, this is not an option for a lot of boutique wineries.

In Ancient Roman times, March was the start of the New Year. So, as any good pundit would offer, here are the top 5 wine and technology predictions for the New Year:

1. The Rise of Web Service Components. Standalone widgets to address winery e-commerce problems, such as address verification, age verification, tax calculation, shipping calculation, compliance checking, price posting, license validation…  These are already available in some form or another, although some may not be accessible as a web service. IBG will offer major components for free.
2. An industry-wide Service Oriented Architecture. The multitudes of service components will have to be orchestrated by a central agent. IBG will be there.
3. Direct to Trade. Trade restrictions are really just logistics problems by another name. IBG has solutions to these problems.
4. Supply chain visibility on the sales side. You already know the production side–where your grapes come from, where they are pressed, fermented and bottled. But the grapes’ journey does not end there. Imagine seamless flow and visibility of data between the tasting room, the fulfillment warehouse, the shipper, the state authorities, the distributor, the retailer, and all the way down to the consumer. IBG will lead this effort.
5. Growth of online wine communities. As the American wine market matures, less credence will be placed on the Robert Parkers, the Hugh Johnsons and the Wine Spectators of this world. Wine lovers will flock with others that have similar consumption profiles, and the Internet provides the tools to make community building possible. IBG will provide tools to build such communities, and to close the gap between wine producers and consumers.

Sometime in 1995, Amazon.com launched and quickly became the iconic online seller of products. They started out selling books, and quickly moved into electronic media such as software, music and movies distributed in CD or DVD format. A bit later they began to offer furniture, toys, electronics and household products. In a little more than a decade, they have expanded to offer seemingly every product under the sun. But there is one product that you will not find anywhere in Amazon.com, the one that literally grows under the sun, and that is Wine.

The reasons are quite simple. There are regulatory pressures on alcohol. Unless you’re living in a censored society, books are far easier to buy than wine. Wine is also hard to ship. Liquids in bottles are heavy, and they require climate-controlled environments to maintain quality. But most of all, wine is inscrutable. You cannot define, nor critique, nor review wine in absolute terms.

Even if you were to cast aside differences in personal taste, the experience of wine can never be objective because the wine itself changes. It varies by brand, by varietal and by appelation. More to the point, it varies by vintage. The 2004 harvest will taste different from the 2005 harvest, even if you clone the grapes and grow them in the same soil year over year. Within one vintage, the same bottle will taste different if you open it today as compared to a year later. Even a glass from the same opened bottle will taste different if drunk now or an hour later.

Compare drinking a glass of wine with the experience of reading a book, or for that matter listening to music, or watching a movie. Sure, you can read the same book twice and get a different experience from the second reading. But it’s still the same book. (There is a counter-argument in the form of reader-response criticism, Stanley Fish and all that mush we might have learned in college, but we won’t get into it.) With a book, the same sequence of words are in the page every time you read it. The molecules in a glass of wine are evolving by the second.

For this reason, wine is a challenge to product-ize and difficult to sell online. There is however a time-proven solution to this type of problem that any good marketer would know: sell the brand, not the product. One can see how this works against the Amazon business model. As an online buyer, I might go to Amazon to buy “The Da Vinci Code”. In my mind, “The Da Vinci Code” is the product, and Amazon is the brand that I trust to deliver that product. Okay, maybe the author carries some brand cache here, but if something goes wrong with my shipment, I’m blaming Amazon, not the author.

Amazon’s everything under one store model erodes and undermines brand recognition, the key to selling wine online. The IBG model is: to each brand, its own store. That is why we are here.

During one of my trips to France, I took a road trip with my wife and her family, driving up from Provence up to the Jura region and then to Paris, with a pit stop in Lyon. Flanked by the Rhone and Saone rivers, Lyon is considered by many to be the gastronomical capital of France. The city boasts numerous 3-star Michelin restaurants, and is famous for its cozy, limited seating restaurants called bouchons.

Our pit stop involved some minor site seeing, and my favorite French pastime: lunch. Unfortunately, it was midsummer, and most of the Lyonnaise had gone south to profit the Mediterranean waters. This included the proprietor-chefs of the tiny, family run bouchons, and we were heartbroken to find that not a single one was open for business. We had to settle for a brasserie.

Brasseries in France tend to be bigger, fancier restaurants. They lack the coziness and an individual chef’s personal touch that the bouchons are famous for. So we missed out on the local color and ambience.

But the food did not disappoint.

I ordered Tete de Veau. For those unfamiliar with the dish, it’s basically the face meat of a young calf (veal), optionally with the tongue of said veal. The meat is boiled for two hours with some carrots, a bouquet garni, and a touch of vinegar, and served sliced on a warmed plate. It is traditionally served with steamed potatoes and carrots, and flavored with a sauce ravigote, which is basically a green sauce consisting of a boiled egg, parsley, cornichons, mustard, vinegar, salt and pepper–ground through a food processor. Sometimes the sauce is substituted for a simple vinaigrette.

The meat was very subtle tasting and gelatinous, and got a nice kick from the sauce. I had it paired with a crisp, citrus-y Chardonnay whose appellation I cannot presently recollect. It is also commonly paired with a Jurancon Sec, another dry French white from the southwest region. A Viognier would probably work out as well. (Mental note: I’ll have to try this.)
This was one of those cathartic food-wine pairing experiences from which I learned that it is okay to drink white wine with red meats. The acidity from the wine cuts through the rich velvety texture, while enhancing the subtle flavor of the boiled meat. To the Xtreme double-black-diamond eater: I highly recommend trying this pairing. You might have difficulty finding this dish at your local French restaurant, in which case, you’ll have to make it yourself at home. For those reluctant to try something offal: you can try pairing an acidic white with your favorite version of Bollito Misto, a similar Italian dish.

Happy Eating!

cartoon episode involving Gnomes that introduced us to the following three phase business-plan:

1 Collect underpants

2 ?

3 Profit!

We’ve seen variations of this plan, both real and fictional. The point being, it’s easy to identify the beginning state and the end goal. It’s not so easy to figure out how to get from one point to the other. For this blog, I’d like to introduce a variation that applies to software development. It goes something like:

1 Collect requirements

2 ?

3 Profit!

Software engineers that survived the dot.com bust are quick to recognize this all-too familiar scenario. Apparently, some companies thought that Step 2 involved hiring a bunch of software engineers. After all, if you hire enough smart people, you just might find someone who knows the answer to Step 2. Unfortunately, throwing money at a problem is a bit like torture: it might get you an answer, but it’s not necessarily the right answer. It may result in actual running software with buttons, levers and flashing lights, but it may not solve the problems at hand.

That said, there are development practices that aim to demystify Step 2. They go by fancy names like Rational Unified Process, Extreme Programming or Scrum. I won’t go into the merits or drawbacks of each of these, as their respective proponents debate enough amongst themselves. But I will say that one common theme is to stress expertise, communication and iteration. Expertise means there should be at least a few members of the team with industry experience who know what they are doing. Communication is important, not just between team members, but business stakeholders (the people that use the software). And Iteration says that producing great software is not one sequential well-planned journey. It should allow for revisions on the initial design, based on incremental releases and feedback by users of the software. So rather than a three-phase plan, we have something that looks like the following:

10 Collect requirements