On Being Out of the Box
And actionably being out of the box.
Hello Gobbledeers,
A bit of housecleaning first…
The first episode of the Gobbledy Podcast launched this week - I’m going to release 10 (one every other week), and we’ll see how it goes from there.
Today’s episode is a conversation with Joanna Wiebe from copywriting agency (and creator of copywriting courses) Copyhackers. Joanna has a ton of experience working with software companies to improve copy, and we had a fun conversation about the challenge of actually getting buy-in from senior management when you want to blow up your current messaging. Joanna’s willing to push the envelope on software copy (which is why I hired her at Doodle) and then she got to watch me bang my head against the wall trying to get people comfortable with the envelope pushing. Win some, ya lose some.
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(Housekeeping complete)
One day back in 2014, I was in a meeting at the Tommy Hilfiger offices (my editor says I should mention that I was in a meeting at Tommy Hilfiger because I worked for Tommy Hilfiger) with a group of analyst types (ATs) from IBM. The ATs were there because we had just bought IBM’s Websphere ecommerce software to run our website.
One of the ATs kept responding to every question we had about how the software would handle our requirements with, “it works that way out of the box.”
I turned in the AT’s direction and asked, “Where is the box?”
AT: What?
Me: The box. Where is it?
AT: The box of what?
Me: The box that it works that way out of.
AT: The box with the software in it?
Me: Yeah. And this project is supposed to take like 6 months. How many boxes are there? There’ve gotta be dozens.
AT: There are no boxes.
Me: The functionality works that way out of the box because there are no boxes?
AT: No, there used to be boxes, but now there aren’t. (Pause…turns to AT next to him and asks: Wait, are there boxes somewhere? If the client wanted them?)
AT #2: No. There are no boxes at all. But (AT #1) is right - it does work that way out of the box.
When one of my daughters was 2 or 3, if she saw my wife chewing gum, she would want some gum for herself. Because a 2 year old should not be chewing gum (which is not to say that we did not allow her to chew gum. We have twins, and back then it was mayhem all the time and sometimes you give a 2 year old gum…) my wife often said to her, “I’m sorry, there’s no gum.”
And my daughter did not believe her (which was astute, because her mother was absolutely flat-out lying to her face), and she would say, “See it, no gum.”
Wife: You want to see that there’s no gum?
Daughter: Yes! See it, no gum!
Wife: But how can you see that there isn’t something?
Daughter: See it, no gum!!!! Want to see it, no gum!!!!!!
I tell you that because I wanted to see it, no box.
The Analyst Types were, however, correct in that at one time there was a box, and something was in it.
That “something,” however, was hardware, not software.
The first instance I can find of “out of the box” (the granddaddy of the software gobbledy industrial complex) being used in reference to tech was in the July 1979 issue of Interface Age, a long-defunct home computer enthusiast magazine. They noted:
Your computer comes out of the box like a newborn babe. It has to be told everything very precisely. That's what programming is all about. It is your responsibility.
Oddly enough, they were using it with exactly the opposite meaning as we understand it now; the computer came out of the box without any functionality. The software was what provided the functionality. It wasn’t until a bit later that the software was included with the hardware, allowing it to provide functionality to the buyer when they took the computer out of the box.
Then, in an August 1980 issue of Computerworld, Datashare ran this ad:
It was still being used to refer - literally - to the hardware being taken out of an actual box, but the implication was that being in the box was holding you back, and that a good reason to buy a wildly underpowered set of connected workstations for $54,000 (about $190,000 in 2022 dollars) is because once you get it out of the box, you’re seeing value from it.
Based on my research, the first software usage seems to have been just a few months later in an October issue of Computerworld. An ad called VisiCalc1 (another early spreadsheet product made for the Apple II) “an easy to use program that can be run straight out of the box with a minimum of operator expertise.”
That meaning is what we’re blessed with today.
Also you can blame that ad for the way that every software salesperson you’ve ever met talks.
One more note about “out of the box” - here’s the Google Ngram graph of the usage of that phrase from 1985 to 2019. I thought it was interesting that as software moved to the cloud in the late 2000s, the usage of the expression leveled off, then began to decrease. As our IBM friends pointed out, there was no longer a box to be out of.
While we hear a little less nowadays about software that works out of the box, what we hear much more about today is software that creates actionable insights.
“Actionable” has had a long illustrious career as a term meaning “giving sufficient reason to take legal action.”
“Actionable insights” showed up in the business world as computing power allowed raw data to be more widely shared in organizations. From what I can tell, the first time the phrase pops up is in a 1957 paper out of the University of Michigan (Go Blue!), talking about how mathematics principles are being used by marketers “to help them gain better and more actionable insights out of the significant data” now available to them.
That article then says that marketing is “an art that rests on a science,” an insight that was well ahead of its time, and somehow gave more legitimacy to the discipline of marketing back in 1957 than marketing typically receives in 2022. It did not predict that most of us marketers would be looking for a new job every 22 months.
Actionable insights popped up sporadically over the following years, often in articles talking about a future where data drives better business decisions.
I thought this chart was worth a gander: as the web put increasing amounts of raw data into the hands of business users, we were fed the idea that data, itself, isn’t particularly useful unless you somehow received “actionable” insights that you could use in your business.
In that chart, starting around 2012, with the explosion of SaaS products, you can watch a buzzword take flight. Huge numbers of new software products were built to help companies make sense of data, and marketers for those companies seized on “actionable” as shorthand for “you’ll get some ROI if you buy this product.”
I’m not necessarily suggesting you should remove “actionable insights” from your marketing material, but there’s a point at which - and you see it in the graph above - a phrase becomes so ubiquitous that readers just skip over it. When researching stuff for this essay, I read a piece that calls these “nullwords” - terms that aren’t wrong, but they don’t add anything at all. They fill up the page while not saying anything.
My actionable insight? Replace that phrase with actual examples of the insights you get from your product, whether or not those insights come straight out of the box.
The only person I actually know who might even possibly care about this detail I’m about to share is Gobbledy charter subscriber and purveyor of coffee subscriptions, Matt B (seriously - check out Beanbox.com for an amazing selection of coffee gift options…and non-gift options): Although the ad mentioned Visicalc, it was actually for a program called REPORT WRITER, which was a version of Visicalc that a company re-wrote to run on CP/M DOS.
"Nullwords" is an excellent term. Thank you for this actionable insight.
This is an extraordinarily long article, with lots of words that I'm confident are very interesting. Regardless, about halfway through that conversation, you should've asked AT #1, "Who's on first?" Because im a perfect world, AT #2 would've chimed in, "Third base." Alas, another opportunity lost.