Were you aware that a Wendy's hamburger doesn't finish cooking until the moment you order it? Wendy's hamburgers are not premade nor are they precooked. They are cooked and then made the moment you order them. They aren't microwaved or placed under a heat lamp. They are never frozen and unthawed.
A Wendy's hamburger does not come into existence until the moment you ask it to be.
Double with cheese with no pickles and extra ketchup? Like magic it is there.
How do they do it?
Wendy's keeps detailed records of store sales, hour by hour every day of the week, every week of the year. Each day, the manager reviews the previous year and gets a rough idea of how many hamburgers were sold last year on the same day during each hour. Then, with this as a guideline, the grill cook is instructed about how much hamburger meat to begin cooking. Meat is placed on the grill and begins cooking before a customer walks in the door. The process anticipates that a customer will walk in the door and when they do, the hamburger meat will have just finished cooking. This way, when you place that order, the patty is lifted straight from the grill to the hamburger bun, because the cook started grilling it before you got there.
This is called Mass Customization. The ability to create a custom experience through mass production.
Historical data and a flexible process means that Wendy's is able to crank out fresh hamburgers made to order with almost zero wait time. The hamburger is there when you want it.
Cloud Computing
Traditional software companies often develop their software based on two different inputs. Market research that says what marketing believes a customer wants, and engineering input based on what a software engineer thinks people will want or what they think is cool.
The software is built to specs, shipped out the door, made available for download, and that usually ends the feedback loop. Was marketing correct? Was the engineer correct? Did that feature help sell the software?
Hard questions to answer when your software leaves your control and you really have no actual data that tells you what your customer likes or dislikes about your software.
Software as a Service, that exists in the cloud changes this dynamic.
In the late 90s I was with Allegro and helped launch the first anti-spam/anti-virus as SaaS using Mimesweeper from Content Technologies. Mimesweeper was traditional software as described. Sold with a certain number of features to customers wanting to block spam and viruses from their email.
When we turned it into a SaaS offering, we had a revelation. We were able to watch and monitor how each customer actually used the software. Which features they turned on and more importantly which ones they turned off. We immediately discovered that the Anti-Spam rules were being turned on by a large number of our customers, but then after a couple of days, were turned off. We contacted our customers, asking them why, and discovered that the anti-spam tools, while functional, didn't behave in a way that made our customers feel comfortable. With their feedback, we passed this information on to Content Technologies, who then made modifications to the software, which Allegro then rolled out immediately to our thousands of customers. Instant feedback was provided when we observed features being turned on and then staying on.
The cloud changes the relationship between vendor and customer. Like a Wendy's hamburger, software becomes instantly available, and if there is a need that is unique, the possibility exists for a custom creation to be made that fits the exact needs of the customer. Because the observation of usage allows a vendor to immediately know whether a feature is as useful to the customer as market said it was going to be.
Future cloud computing will involve this mass customization.
