1. I love the “fast pencil” analogy, especially as I have used it for maybe forty years(!) in various consulting, sales, and software design roles. 2. That bei

1. I love the “fast pencil” analogy, especially as I have used it for maybe forty years(!) in various consulting, sales, and software design roles. 2. That being said, there is a thing we used to call The “maturity model.” The customer using a pencil is very low in maturity. But leapfrogging past a fast pencil is often difficult. Sometimes, customers have to evolve their way up the maturity model, so first you give them a fax machines (a fast pencil for sending documents by messenger), then you hook the fax machine up to their word processors (fast pencils for documents), then you wire the fax machine to the word processor so it can send faxes directly, then you introduce email and PDF, then you introduce collaborative editing, &c. &c. Sometimes a customer can leap several levels of maturity in a single bound, but often not. The ones most likely to make a big leap are usually those with the least investment in their existing pencils. So small shops, startups, young users early in their career are often good candidates for “you don’t want a faster pencil, you want collaborative editing.” 3. Nevertheless, I like the fast pencil analogy.