Good meeting this morning. Lots of talk about trends, needs, and client wants. Steve, Sean, John, and I were on the meeting. We were talking about software needs, trends, expectations and how those things keep changing. Steve was pitching the idea of a full white label type approach. This would be something like where we would license our software to a company, help them setup a standalone server(s), give them raw code and let them build and deploy whatever they want to do. This would be similar to open source in that we would give them a full copy, provide them updates, and let them tweak and use whatever they want to. Basically, let independent companies build out their own software solution based on our base code. In reality, that is still quite a ways out, but fun conversations.

Everything keeps changing, daily. Maybe let them (our clients) have it and do their own upkeep for their own systems. We could keep evolving the master branch and allow our clients to pull in new code, if they want it. It just needs to keep perpetually evolving. As a direct quote from John - "Our clients eat with their eyes." We need to keep working on a better look and feel. Also, this look and feel needs to keep changing every few years to keep it up to speed and up to snuff. If you want it to look modern, you need to have an update plan in place to keep it up.

Lots of talk about our competition and what level they are playing with. Because the whole world uses stuff like Amazon, eBay, and other giants, we are virtually competing with those entities and the expectations are similar because we play in the giant web world. Every has a smart phone and get to use mobile apps, nice interfaces, and other cool things every day. That is the expectation. That is really hard to keep up with and/or even play the game. Our users are expecting eye candy, graphs, charts, quick aggregates, slide in/out drawers, show/hide options, drop-down, slide-up, modal pop-ups, and cool one-pager type apps.

We just need to keep going. Eventually, even if it looks pretty, people really need functionality. However, if they can choose pretty and easy, they always will until it bites them due to lack of functionality. The old adage of form and function - which one do you or do our client value? It keeps changing as well.

Steve was talking with John about some future projects dealing with the look and feel. John is going to be taking over the adilas docs now that Chuck had to take another job. We talked about the use of a global style guide and keeping that up. Once again, every couple (2-4) years, we will need to keep upgrading the look and feel. It is part of the game.

As a side note, some of these things are good info for our future project of moving over to a project called fracture. Along those same lines, fracture may end up being a morphing process (using the old and making it become something new) vs a full re-build from the ground up. Both ways take a lot of work and there are pros and cons to both. Until we get more funding, our current goal is to capture the info, ideas, and data. We will then keep chipping away at the current infrastructure and virtually morph into the fracture model vs a full re-build. We would like to re-build, but that may not be practical. It all depends on needs, funds, timing, and goals.