The forest for the trees

As you might have guessed from reading JK’s recap of the last few years, the progression through the chain of Emispec, FEI and Enoetic that has now led to AppFive has been a pretty wild ride.  I was a fairly public face of Emispec — if you received either ES Vision field service or a demo, there’s a good chance we met personally — so I should chime in as well.

As JK indicated, everyone at Emispec was very much forward-looking.  We’re looking to renew that vision in AppFive, with a focus on developing software applications.  Yes, we put great effort into designing good architectures and platforms, but what got all of us excited at the end of the day was making programs that manifested themselves in the physical world — whether that was through automation of the column and its associated detectors, analyzing experimental data to reveal new insights, or relieving users of some microscopy workflow tedium.

Times have changed since the Emispec days, and pulling back from the microscopy world for a few years to work as Enoetic was the “forest for the trees” moment that made this crystal clear.  From end-users to programmers, what people expect from software has changed.  If nothing else, the web’s collaborative-mashup culture has introduced the concept of “reuse through interaction” as opposed to “reuse through inheritance.”  That’s significant.

Now I’m not advocating a Facebook or even a web-application for EM, but what I am saying is that AppFive is excited about helping our customers:

• Break their big jobs into smaller tasks
• Picking the best tools to get those tasks done
  • The best tools might be software applications you’re already using
  • Or we can make custom software for you
• Unifying any disparate tools into a single experience

So even if you don’t need all-new, custom software — if you’ve ever been sitting in front of your computer working on a microscopy experiment or analysis and wished your software worked a little differently — we want to hear from you.