Why I Believe in Categories, Just Not Category Design
Imagine you’re walking down a beach and find a watch. You pick it up, inspect its intricate mechanism, admire how precisely all the pieces fit together, and conclude that something so complex and precisely engineered couldn’t possibly have arisen by chance: there must have been a designer.
Wait. That’s intelligent design. In today's post, I’m supposed to be talking about category design, but my reaction to the two ideas is surprisingly similar. I’m instinctively suspicious when people look at something complex that emerged from a messy, evolutionary process and work backwards to infer the existence of a designer. In biology, that process is natural selection; in enterprise software, it’s what I think of as the rugby scrum of the market, where technology, customers, vendors, partners, standards bodies, investors, analysts, and the media all push against each other until something resembling a category eventually emerges.
Now imagine, on that lovely beach walk, that instead of stumbling upon a watch, you stumble upon a mature enterprise software category, with a clearly defined buyer, a recognized problem, an established scope, a handful of resident vendors, and a generally accepted name. It’s tempting to look backwards at something that coherent and assume somebody designed it.
But nobody did. It emerged. It evolved. Sure, vendors and their actions were part of the process, but so was the whole rugby scrum of players and market forces pushing against one another until, over time, something recognizable as a category took shape. Marketing consultants may want to tell you that the whole thing was designed — and then (cough, cough) charge you a modest fee to help design the next one — but I think that’s mostly bunk.
Look, I’m old enough to remember when category creation was a strategy. Find a problem, build some software to solve it, assign it a three-letter acronym (TLA), preferably one ending in M for “management,” convince a few analysts to write about it, and off you go. Better yet, because the Valley was smaller then, if you had stumbled onto an interesting new problem, chances were that five other companies had stumbled onto it too, each backed by a different VC who, in those halcyon days before explicit kingmaking, might even allow a “may the best company win” mentality to prevail. But I digress.
