Have you ever used a product that was just so simple and intuitive that you just fell in love with it? I’m not talking Pet Rock® simple, but something that is truly useful and solves some problem that you have.  Truly great products solve the problem in such a simple and elegant way that it causes dramatic changes in the market and has That is what happened to me 2 years ago when I purchased my first Fitbit.

Imagine a world in which websites lived in a vacuum and couldn’t talk to other business systems or even other websites. What if Amazon.com was built so that you could browse their product listings, but if you wanted to order anything you needed to go to another website, and if you wanted to track your order you had to login to yet another site. What if Amazon.com administrators had to download all the order requests every day and then upload them to another order fulfillment site. How many people would be ordering from Amazon? How many IT people would want to be the one tasked with handling the daily order fulfillment process?

Just a few weeks ago, one of the DNN Corp. sales engineers was in Chicago for a meeting with a system integration partner. That partner had invited a bunch of clients over to see a demo of all the great features in Evoq Social. Our sales rep and sales engineer had gone over the demo to make sure everything was ready to go – and then they went into the conference room to get setup only to find out that the projector didn’t support HDMI and that they didn’t have the right VGA connector in their bag. This had all the makings of a disaster waiting to happen.

I want you to take a minute and think about all of the great products you have used throughout your life. What is it that attracted you to the product? What was it about the product that made it stand out from all the others? Were those same attractive qualities present in the first version of the product? What are the common threads that you see in all those products? When I think of truly great products, I think of the Apple iPhone, the Logitech Harmony Remote, the TiVo, Google Search, and even Quicken. When I look at all those products and where they started, the common threads that I see are a combination of power, simplicity (yes, I know, some of those products have gotten a bit more complex as they have aged) and integration.

For the last 10 years, I have had a front row seat on one of the leading open source projects on the Microsoft stack.  In the process I have learned a lot about building communities, building products and building companies.  One thing that I didn’t fully appreciate before I became involved with DotNetNuke is how much an OS project is not some static entity that is fully formed on the day the code is first released.  Instead, I have found that OS projects are living, breathing entities.  They are born, they grow up and can even become financially independent.