In my short years as a software business owner, one thing I've learned is that in order to innovate and truly change the way large numbers of people think and conduct business is to first have the deepest of passions for what you do. In the software world, you have to first have the most basic fundamental understanding of how software operates its impact on the way someone interacts with a screen, and ultimately the benefits it can provide for a person. In developing new ways of businesspeople working together and bringing together organizations in new ways, some of the highest-selling products and the most popular features are always the ones that required the purest ways of thinking and feeling.

For example, one of the most used features in all of our products is a very small, out-of-the-box, island called a Rich Text Editor Island. The only thing this small application allows you to do is to place formatted text onto the screen to be shared with co-workers. It doesn’t have a fancy workflow attached to it or even stored past versions of its content; however it remains the most popular feature across our 15+ products used by over 40,000 people nationwide. The reason why this is our most highly used feature is that it plays to a very deep need we all have as human beings that we need to feel significant in some way and we need to feel certain about things. The certainty aspect relates to us needing to feel like we have the ability to publish a web page without having to know HTML or “codes” as MySpace users call them. The other attribute is our need to feel significant. By being able to easily publish formatted text on a screen and then share that with others, we automatically feel empowered. We are empowered to think of new ways of using this newfound power and it’s very exciting for a businessperson who is accustomed to only working in Microsoft Office most of the time.

Passion is what drives software designers to create the very core of our innovations. Google Groove, Google’s Search engine, Apple’s iPhone and more are all projects stemming from small tight-knit groups of very smart and practical people who had extremely high levels of passion for the problem they were trying to solve. These products and more solve very fundamental needs and as such have mass appeal and drive tremendous value towards the companies that created them. It is so much fun to create products that really make huge impacts and make businesspeople feel empowered by software, building on the passion of its creators.