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Bill Marriott
Runtime Revolution's new Director of Marketing |
Runtime Revolution, makers of the natural-language rapid application
development tool Revolution, has named industry veteran Bill Marriott to the position of Director of
Marketing. The appointment comes as the company completes work on Revolution 2.9, a release driven by
Marriott in his role as Community Quality Partner for the last year. In
his new role, Marriott will be responsible for developing the sales and marketing strategy of the company
worldwide, as well as providing key input into product management for the Revolution product
line.
Prior to this appointment, Marriott held several positions with leading consumer software companies. He headed up a team which maintained the MSN.com portal for Microsoft's Internet access customers, was one of the first three product managers at America Online, and helped design interactive publishing tools for AT&T. Before his work with Runtime Revolution, Marriott was a software and marketing consultant for organizations ranging from game developers to hospitals.
For the last year, Marriott has been working closely with Runtime Revolution to revise the product to work on Linux, as well as drive several successful interim releases that added new internet and database functionality.
"We've been impressed with Bill's energy, his experience, and his dedication over the months," said Kevin Miller, Runtime Revolution CEO. "As we look to continue our aggressive growth Bill will be a fundamental part of the team responsible for achieving our vision of being the most powerful and easy-to-use rapid application development tool."
Not only did Marriott conceive, implement, and manage the "open beta" test program - which has recruited hundreds of participants and resulted in significant improvements to the product - he also has had an impact on several other aspects of the company's business and strategy. Marriott will report directly to Miller.
Miller said, "Bill has a wealth of experience in our industry and has helped our processes to become more organized and scientific. With his help, Revolution 2.9 will likely be the most customer-focused release we've ever done."
An avid Revolution user, Marriott studied journalism at Northwestern University and jumped into the software industry early on with the first release of HyperCard. He went on to become a writer and technical editor at Apple's software subsidiary Claris, where he wrote hundreds of technical articles and published two quarterly publications on software.
"This is a crucial role for Runtime Revolution and Bill will be leading a number of strategic initiatives consistent with our aim to improve the software and expand the awareness of our product in the market," Miller said.
A conversation with Bill and Kevin
Kevin: Bill, we're really glad to have you aboard now. Can you tell people how you got started with Revolution?
Bill: It's been fantastic working with everyone over the last year, Kevin. I first became a Revolution customer shortly after I left Microsoft to pursue my consulting career. Time and again, I kept bumping into problems that didn't fit a spreadsheet or database solution. These were business processes that needed to be automated in a bulletproof way. Solutions that were procedural in nature and would be cumbersome to implement with other tools. Working with the Internet. And of course, the user interface and graphics presentation issues. It's still the case several years later that Revolution can quickly and elegantly solve problems that aren't handled satisfactorily by bloated office or database suites.
And how was it you came to be working with us on Revolution 2.9?
Well, starting in the summer of 2006, I made a few posts to the forums about things I
thought could be addressed in the software. In that way I'm no different than many of the other users of
Revolution or any other software package. I guess the difference was that these posts opened up a dialog
with the company, and once I understood where I could help, I volunteered to run a beta test program for
the next release, provided that I and everyone else who had an active license as of a certain date would
get that version for free. After some careful consideration of my experience and suitability for the
role, Runrev
took me up on the deal, and that's
what formed the basis of the "open beta" program.
What has it been like to manage the beta program?
Well, it's been eye-opening. The first thing I learned is that there are quite a few different opinions about what is critical for one person versus another. I thought I had a pretty good handle on what should be at the top of the list of things to do. But as we've conducted polls, asked for email feedback, and had other conversations with people, I've seen that everyone has different priorities and even different pictures in their mind about what Revolution is and should be. So, implementing a process where no one person's personal opinion influences the course of development was very important. I guess the second thing that I really appreciated was having a lot of one-on-one interactions with individual users. I've made more friends and been really excited to see how Revolution is being used in so many different ways by people from all kinds of different backgrounds and experience levels. I guess overall I've enjoyed learning about our customers the most.
Why work with us? Why is Revolution important?
Well, quite simply, Runtime Revolution is the steward of a technology - and a
philosophy - that is still years ahead of its time. Namely that it should be possible for anyone to have
command of their computer. We're the leading provider of a unique language which lets you interact with
the system and achieve powerful results using plain English. Sure, there are a couple other "xTalk"
products out there but they aren't cross-platform and have a fraction of the user base Revolution enjoys.
There is PHP and JavaScript for the worldwide web, but that is kind of off the "deep end" where it's no
longer so accessible to the average person without a lot of effort and learning new nomenclature. There
are
other RAD tools, but they are much more difficult to learn. Revolution is not only something that empowers experienced developers to do impressive things extremely quickly, but also is the only tool out there that has a reasonable claim to be "programming for the rest of us" today.
Now that you're at the helm of marketing, what new initiatives can we expect?
Well, first and foremost you're going to see more of what has been happening over the last year, which is a shift in our business process from "gut feeling" to empirical data and fact-based decision making. We're going to continue to do surveys, for example. But we're also going to do more extensive testing and "pre-flighting" of concepts to see which resonate better with our current and future users.
The most important thing I'm going to be working on is improving the relationship with our customers and another reflection of this will be a new website with some facilities there for managing your relationship with the company. As a customer, I found it too complicated to figure out the upgrade options and pricing, to get all the "goodies" available to me as a licensed user, and to solve problems. The "Quality Control" center was the first thing to revamp, and we'll see that kind of approach taken with other aspects of the site.
We're going to find ways to make it easier for more people to keep current with the Revolution software. We're going to update the look of the site over the coming months to be more hip, modern, and uncluttered. And we're going to make the product more accessible to more people by dramatically improving our pre-sales materials and the in-box documentation.
What about the "product management" aspect of your job?
Well, that is a job where you sit between the business and the technology sides of the organization. You help shape and steer the product in a way that meets or exceeds expectations. Already over the last year, Revolution has matured to become a product more people love using. So you'll see that future versions of Revolution continue with that. We've identified and mapped out a plan to introduce some exciting new changes in the product which will make it even more useful for the core applications people are interested in, such as databases, the Internet, and multimedia.
How do you like the team?
They are fantastic. I'm based in the US and of course Runtime Revolution is based in Scotland. We've spent most of the last year working over the Internet, and then over the summer we spent four weeks together working very closely on-site in Edinburgh putting the final touches on our strategy for Revolution 2.9 and beyond. I was impressed by the drive and amount of work that goes into producing Revolution. We built a great rapport, and I certainly understood the challenges we face much more clearly. I think what a lot of people miss is that the incredible accomplishment that Revolution represents makes the company seem much larger than it actually is. I know I certainly didn't appreciate that until I started working with you. Of course it has grow a lot even over the year that I've been here. I see a big part of my job as helping to ensure whatever we are working on has the biggest payoff possible in terms of benefit to the users. |
