Horace Dediu is one of the most influential and insightful analysts in the mobile market these days. I just started listening to his podcasts. The one I linked to above is an interview with Bob Moestra, who is executing on a simple Clayton Christensen idea.

The short summary is thus: products are hired to do a job. The key to each successful product is figuring out why the product was hired and then executing product, marketing and sales around that job.

Christensen’s example is one of a fast food chain that found that some customers were buying milkshakes in the a.m. Why? Turned out the commute was long and boring and they wanted something to do. Eating a bagel or sandwich was too messy. Drinking a milkshake kept them busy without risk of a sullied shirt and filled them up until lunch. The milkshake was being hired in the morning to help fill travel time and an empty stomach.

In the tech space one obvious example of a product that has figured out why it is hired is DropBox. DropBox is hired to give access to all my files wherever I am. The folks running DropBox have done a fabulous job engineering all facets of its business around this idea, even with new features like automated scripts for doing stuff on available files. What I admire about the company is that it realized not only what it was being hired to do but also that all the other noise needed to go away. No settings, no special processes, nothing. Just drop it in a file and go.

Even our very own powerOne has a clearly defined job: give you answers to your math and finance questions fast and easy. Believe me, we have tried over the years to expand its job but it has never worked. The product’s job is give a result fast and easy. Everything else is superfluous.

(As an aside this is why companies go astray, I believe, as well. Those developing it forget why it was hired. I also think this is why Siri is beta. It isn’t because it is not feature complete. I think it is because Apple doesn’t quite know what job you are going to hire it for.)

A couple of years ago I went to a TechTalk sponsored by Apple in Seattle. One of the things I took away from there was a distinct phrase that Apple uses for each one of their products:

Your differentiator your solution for your audience

In other words, what job is your product being hired to do by what audience.

Once we figure this out, the rest is staying focused and executing.

Oh the humanity! Thousands without my powerOne calculator a week after the storm!

I monitor instances of “powerOne” all over the web with some tools that Google provides. It is neat to see what people are saying and who else is using the term “powerOne.” Sometimes, though, it will catch two words that are close in proximity and Google will show that post to me. In early November the above post was waiting for me one morning when I opened my Google Reader app on my iPad (an app called Reeder).

Obviously not funny for those without power. But if read slightly different…

• Should adjust naturally to screen size changes
• Should be easily portable to other operating systems

I jumped an airplane the next day and spent the week in Ohio with my grandmother, my dad, stepmom, and family. It was a weird week. The pain and remorse and what ifs that often goes along with death weren’t there. He lived a full life and died a fast and painless death.

My grandparents have been an integral part of my life. If it wasn’t for them there would be no powerOne calculator and no Infinity Softworks today. Besides the constant advice and input about business issues from a man who ran his own company for 30 years, there were two events in particular that made Infinity possible.

The first came when I finished my undergraduate degree and was trying to figure out what to do next. I wanted to get Infinity Softworks off the ground but couldn’t do it and pay back my student loans. My grandparents gave me a great opportunity, paying for me to go to graduate school (and thus defer my loans) while working on Infinity Softworks. In other words, Grandpa gave me a full-time job while I started and grew Infinity. By the time I graduated with a technical MBA in 2001, Infinity Softworks was ready to grow.

The second time Grandpa came to my rescue was in 1998. My business partner decided he wanted to leave the company and I didn’t have the money to buy him out. My grandparents lent me the money, even offering to be a partner instead of a lender. I paid him back in nine months even though the loan was for two years.

I will miss my grandfather dearly. He has been a great role model and friend for 37 years.

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This is the eulogy I gave at my Grandfather’s funeral:

When I think about my grandfather I think primarily about the six places where we interacted.

The first was the house in Massillon. My predominant memory there was passover and the endless stretch of tables that spread from the family room to the dining room to the living room. Passover at the Freedman house was always such a fun affair. Everyone participated, from the youngest child to the oldest adult, reading from the Haggadah, eating and talking and of course, the thing all of us kids spent all of dinner anticipating: finding the matzoh and the special treats that went along with that. Grandma, to this day, I still have a couple of those towels you and Grandpa gave me.

The second was the house in Canton. This memory revolved around my grandmother and food. Grandpa and I would sit at that table in the kitchen eating your matzoh brie and tomato slices — Grandpa always loved a tomato slice — until we were too stuffed to eat any more.

My third memory is of the golf course. It is my father and my grandfather who taught me to play that wretched game. Grandpa never could hit the ball far — 150 yards straight ahead — and I always played from the fairway to the right, eventually meeting up again on the green. We always kept score but Grandpa always told me, when we get home and Grandma asked how we did, tell her we tied.

My fourth memory is of this place, Shaaray Torah synagogue. I was young when I moved from Ohio so my memories here are of my very early youth, of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, when it felt like a million people were here for the high holiday services and chairs stretched through the sanctuary and into the room next door.

And Shaaray Torah was always linked, in my mind, to the Jewish Center. I have lots of memories of the Jewish Center. One is of Grandpa playing racketball until Grandma made him quit because he was playing people half his age. And I always wondered what was through that Men’s Club door at the top of the stairs, the doors that we were too young to go through, until one day Grandma sent me in there to tell Grandpa something and I found out there were only naked men in there. But my overriding memory is of Grandpa swimming. I was in the pool near my home one day a year ago and a fellow swimmer stopped me and complimented me on my beautiful stroke, how I cut through the water with barely a splash. All I could think of was that I inherited that from my grandfather. He should have been born with gills and fins.

But my last memory — Tappin Lake — is the most powerful. Interestingly, though, it isn’t Grandpa specifically that I remember about that place. Instead it is the textures, the sounds and smells. Grandpa used to get this dark tan from being in the sun all summer and it was so amazingly offset against the wispy, white hair of his. It was the sound of the reel-to-reel video projector that played all those cartoon shorts Grandpa would rent from the library. I still remember how happy we were the day Joshua and Matthew were finally old enough to work the projector so we didn’t have to wait for an adult to switch movies. It’s the smell of Grandma cooking or the barbeque going, the sound of sizzling food ready to feed the army that descended on weekends. It was the oddity of Grandpa mixing two cereals together in the same bowl. Grandpa used to love to torture the poor soul who would sit in front of the driver’s seat on the boat. He’d blast that horn right in your ear as we went under the road and out into the wider lake. It was the smell of gasoline in that little shed to the back of the house where Grandpa kept the skis and fishing poles that rarely caught a fish. It was those chimes that were outside the kitchen window, the smell of fresh cut grass, the sound of the revving motor as Grandpa yelled “Here we go!”, the rope tightened and up we went on skis.

I have other memories, too — looking around to see my 91-year old grandfather on his hands and knees playing horsy with my daughter, the fact that he would always ask me, “How’s my little boy?” whenever we would talked even though I was taller then him by the age of eight, the advice he gave a budding business man.

But these are small. It is these six places, each and every one of them infused with Grandpa’s unique sense of humor. I will remember that most.

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For the record, I had six notes on my page — a bullet for each place — and the final paragraph. The rest I did off the top of my head. I made it through the entire eulogy until the last line. The word “humor” stuck in my throat. I stood there for a few minutes unable to say anything. I even stepped back from the podium trying to regain the ability to speak. I regained my composure just long enough to say the last sentence and get off the stage. People who came up to me later asked if I had planned that pause. They said it brought everything right back to the present and made it feel like he was in the room.

I wrote numerous baseball games, increasing in complexity over time, and even wrote a simple football game. As mentioned, some times these games were stats based and sometimes they were just luck of the roll or draw kinds of games. I always started with a handful of teams — and the Cleveland Indians as my favorite team were always among them. Then I would take the rest of the league, throw every player not already on a team, and let the five or six team league draft. The 1986 Indians just beat the snot out of everyone. They had such amazing hitting and that pitching staff with Bret Saberhagen, Jack Morris and Roger Clemens (Hey! They were drafted fair and square!) was unstoppable.

I programmed through high school but quit for a couple of years in college before I came back to it. While running numbers was apart of my undergraduate business classes and the idea for the template format came from that work, I never dreamed of spending the next 14 years working with calculators and numbers and formulas.

The interesting thing is that as the market has changed from disconnected handhelds to connected smartphones and tablets, as the market has evolved from $160 software to $5 apps, as market leadership moved from two platforms to eight, my ideas around calculation have evolved as well.

The days of large software applications like powerOne that takes six months or more to move across platforms, is a thing of the past*. My thoughts over the last few months have turned to new ideas, light-weight ideas, that we can bring to market quickly and evolve rapidly on multiple platforms. And yes, they still involve calculation.

I hope you will stay tuned.  We have some great things coming that I am particularly excited about!

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* Before I get an avalanche of emails and comments, it doesn’t mean we are stopping work on powerOne or not considering Android. Just working on some other ideas right now.