I was at my wife's office for lunch today and saw the latest edition of Fortune Small Business, which the cover article spoke of Microsoft using Anthropolgists to study small businesses.  Of course Scoble beat me to blogging about it...

Using Anthropology is something new in the industry that hasn't quite made it to the mainstream. The article discusses Microsoft's efforts to better understand their small business customers and what their “friction” points are in their day-to-day operations.  I thought it was funny after reading the article that Fortune didn't do a good job (in my opinion) of helping people understand why Anthropologists are perfect for this type of work.

So here's my attempt:

First let's define Anthroplogy: The scientific study of the origin, the behavior, and the physical, social, and cultural development of humans.

Anthropologists are the ones who travel to the remote parts of the world and interact with tribes who don't necessarily speak any common dialect that's known in the world.  The anthropologist spends months and years communicating and living with these tribes to first learn their dialect, and to eventually understand their culture.  (I can't imagine how difficult it must be to find some starting point for communication and building a dialect from there.)

So how does this relate to building software, and running small businesses?

Well...The end-user is the lost tribe that the programmers don't know how to talk to.

We've tried for years...We've drawn symbols on the white boards, we've used words/phrases like TCP/IP, World Wide Web, Operating Systems, ASP, etc...And no matter what we try, the users don't seem to be able to understand us! (Imagine that)

Enter the anthropologist...They don't speak programmer, and they don't speak end-user, but they can sit with end-users and build a basic dialog, and relay it to a programmer in a way that makes sense to both. 

This accomplishes (atleast) two things.  Microsoft gets out from under the accusation that they build software their way because they know what's best for the user (as the Fortune article mentions), and it creates an opportunity for Microsoft to build software that they may not have realized an end-user needed.

Oh well, I don't know if I made this any more clear, but I thought it was the “elephant in the room“ in the Fortune article about Microsoft using Anthropologists.