It targets people. It focuses on users. And Apple lets them decide how and where they’ll use its products.

This sounds simple, but in my experience very few companies think this way. Most startups write business plans that dredge up IDC data on market size, then define their target market (e.g., “Global 2000 enterprises”). Few seem to realize that there are people employed within these target markets, and these people will be the ones who actually embrace or reject one’s product.

Indeed, I’d go so far as to suggest that this is one of the primary failings of most enterprise software today: It’s built for enterprises, not for people employed by the enterprises, a theme echoed by noted developer Michael Nygard.

Not all companies screw this up. The open-source world offers a few good examples of companies that understood their target market was the individual, not the tribe/company.

Marc Fleury’s JBoss, for example, understood its target market was the developer buried within corporate IT. All JBoss’ early marketing was focused on developers, not CIOs, and its product development was focused on making developers happy. Only later did those developers return the favor by pushing JBoss into serious production, requiring the CIOs to get involved.

Along the way, JBoss took its share of criticism for this indifference to decorum and CIO concerns, including accusations that the company “astroturfed” to drum up developer support. True or not, the accusations don’t diminish JBoss’ clear success winning over developers by catering to developers.

The same is true of SpringSource, which fought off the accusation that it wasn’t “enterprise ready” by being “developer ready” from the start, and focusing relentlessly on pleasing its target market: the developer.

This is how great companies are built: they focus on individuals and build exceptional products for them, and let these individuals determine how best to make use of the technology.

Nice summary of the value of people-centered design.

But the most interesting thing Pleasants noted was that he recently heard (from his own source, apparently) that half of all users on Facebook now play social games. More impressively, 40% of total usage time on the service is spent on these games. That’s meaningful, of course, because “a huge amount the Internet is on Facebook,” Pleasants stated.

When moderator Michael Arrington asked about changes Facebook has made recently to slow the viral spread of these types of games, Pleasants acknowledged they’ve all taken a hit. But he says they’re working with Facbeook on new ways to drive growth. But he made sure to say they had to do it without spamming.

When talking about what’s next, Pleasants notes that they’ve released two new games in the past week alone. When Mike suggested that most of the games are just a combination of blindly pushing buttons, Pleasants noted that things were evolving, and that games were about to get more social.

Interesting to see where social games are going. Note that 40% are doing games, but still sharing photos and ideas socially remains the biggest piece of activity on Facebook.