My family had a lovely Thanksgiving dinner with a husband and wife–choir director and friend of my wife, respectively–this past week.  The wife is a professional chef and produced a feast three times the size of what would still be overkill for the eight adults and three small children in attendance.  This included two enormous fried turkeys, about 9,000 metric tons of stuffing and some interesting experimental dishes like battered, fried cranberry glaze.  Honestly.

However,  one of the husbands in attendance left several hours earlier than everyone else.  Far from minding his caloric intake, he was heading out to line up for a huge discount sale on an HDTV at a retail store the following morning.  Plates were prepared for him and he also took a van to park on site with bottled water for all the other campers.  Sure, he might be slightly crazy, but at least he was well prepared and not as crazy as the other people who arrived even earlier.

I’m not a big shopper.  I never have been.  I tend to stay home around Black Friday to avoid the usual (probably hyped) tales of people fighting over spots in line, tension in parking lots and the other types of things that happen when excited people assemble in large masses.  I’m definitely an online shopper, with a few notable exceptions such as clothing and groceries.  The past few year’s end media sweeps have frequently discussed the competition between online shopping and physical store shopping for holiday market share.  If you look at my ilk, you might see that clearly the Internet has a big impact on physical store shopping.  But, if you look at my friend and his van full of bottled water, there are clearly reasons to hit the stores.  The shopping experience.

In this case, there are few key factors in the shopping experience:

• A deep discount on a popular piece of electronics.  This kind of promotion relies on a good supply chain, among other things, to get the word out about the discount and to have appropriate inventory levels to stores based on a specific publicized date.
• The collective “geek” or “Otaku” factor (to slightly mis-use a Japanese term) of camping out, as if one were after hot-selling concert tickets.  This is driven by digital communications: message boards, bargain hunter websites, word-of-keyboard through social networking.

So, rather than being a competitor in this case, the Internet became the engine that drove him (metaphorically) to stand in line for the sale.  Although there’s not much research in this area, I also wonder how often someone goes in to a store to check out a product in person and then goes home to buy it from the company’s website.  That’s probably far less common, due to adding shipping costs and the fact that web-only promotions are not widespread and deep enough to get over the “have it in my hands today” factor.  Perhaps there’s more we can do to use physical shops to drive online sales and online activity to drive store visits.  The relationship between brick and mortar and bits and bytes shops is still in its infancy.

Happy holidays, and let’s hope for big retail numbers and no supply chain headaches, online or offline, this season!

I’ve been using RSS for a very long time. When I found out that there was a convenient way to read the multitudes of websites I wanted to track in one place–and only be bothered when something was new–I was excited. Having used RSS for a long time on Windows, Mac and Linux, I’ve gone through a significant number of RSS readers trying to find one that suited my opinionated stance on usability and simplicity.

So, for a very long time, I’ve used nothing but Newshutch. I started with desktop readers but quickly gave up on those because I switch computers frequently. It had to be web-based. I tried a few web-based readers and found them to be clunky, obnoxious and unwieldy. But Newshutch won my heart quickly. It was usable, simple and made smart use of Ajax. When I used it, I wasn’t thinking “I’m using Newshutch,” I was thinking “I’m reading news.” Catching up on my feeds a few days ago, I came across a Newshutch blog entry titled “Newshutch Service will end on November 10th, 2007.” Shock. Horror. My favorite reader is going away and I’ll be condemned to use one I already know that I don’t like.

I read the farewell blog entry and I have to say that it won me over. The title starts out with “We’re pulling the plug on Newshutch.” The first two section headings are “We lost the hunger” and “No regrets.” The Newshutch team goes on to explain that some trouble with moving to a new hosting service (which didn’t affect me at all) forced the team to admit that they had lost the passion for Newshutch. It started as a creative disruption service to prove that RSS readers could be better. They did have some success in that area. At least one VC group came after them with an offer despite having no understanding of the business model. But to compete with all the other feed readers like Bloglines that I tried and abandoned, they would have to work on Newshutch constantly. Working constantly on something they were no longer passionate about would produce sub-standard results for Newshutch users and there would be no winner at all.

I think that’s an admirable stance. Why would I want to continue using Newshutch, knowing that quality and innovation would decline over time? I don’t pay for the service, so Newshutch doesn’t need to keep collecting revenue from me while basically only making critical corrections. They’ve re-designed the app to make the feed list export feature prominent and clearly stated that it will go away and that they will start to work on other projects now where they can make more of an impact and feel more passionate along the way.

Kudos. They even included a footnote to the blog entry recommending the least offensive (based on Newshutch philosophy) of the other feed readers that are available. I’ve ended up dropping back to Google Reader. It’s not bad, but it makes me miss Newshutch. I accomplish both things with the same tool, but using Google Reader always takes a bit longer, is harder to read and requires more hunting around for buttons and generally feeling a little dis-orientation. I’ve blogged about Backpack before, so I loved the comment that “If I was Google I’d drive a cargo container of cash to 37signals’ or Dan Cederholm’s offices and say ‘Congrats, you’re the new EVP of UI at Google.’” Compared to Gmail, which I love, Google Reader just feels less pleasant.

So, to bring this all back home… it’s a good thing to stop and reflect. As a Product Manager, I may have some frustrating days, but I still look back at the week and feel passion about the Trading Grid. Especially the portal and other related projects that I’m hooked into. Innovation and thought leadership are exciting, but if I didn’t feel some hunger about my little product, I wouldn’t be here blogging. I hope you feel equally hungry about the success of your B2B program and I hope you think of GXS as a big, satisfying bowl of soup to feed that hunger as the weather here in the US starts to cool down.

And if you’re reading this in Newshutch, I’m sorry for your loss. I’m working on a project which produces some RSS feeds. When I draft some help content and I can’t unofficially recommend Newshutch to anyone who doesn’t have a reader yet, I will continue to feel your pain.