Sawdust & Diamonds
The holidays are upon us, which in our household means lots of secrets. The wife and I each have our little hiding places to tuck away unwrapped items certain to amaze and delight, and that involves a lot of planning and preparation. Unfortunately the arrival of December brings with it stress, which is why today’s post is all about the failure of software packages (and the folks who provide them to the consumer marketplace) to do what they’re supposed to do, as well as the dashed expectations of organizations who rely on technology to improve their bottom line.
We start with Andy Budd, who just endured a miserable customer relations debacle with MacrAdobia over his Photoshop license. It appears that the newly-purchased software wouldn’t launch on two separate machines, even though he paid for a license to cover both seats, because the anti-piracy buffers interfered with his successful installation. After several useless hours on the phone (during which Budd magnanimously endured a customer service rep hanging up on him), one might speculate the value of treating customers “like thieves and pirates” as less than constructive.
Further along, we have Matthew Stibbe’s excellent interview with Nicholas Carr, the author of Does IT Matter? and the RoughType blog. In a recent interview with Stibbe, Carr wonders if the desire for technological innovation is as profitable in the long term as it is captivating in the short:
Innovation rarely translates into meaningful competitive advantage. Most of the innovation is coming from vendors who can package the valuable new technology and blow it out to as many people as possible. It’s true that your company can buy some new piece of technology but it is also available to everyone else. The price of technology goes down with incredible speed. The early movers end up spending much more on something and fast followers get it cheaper. The speed with which commoditisation happens gets faster all the time so the window for getting any kind of advantage gets small … Today there are huge numbers of ways in which IT innovation gets communicated and shared, whether through a zillion IT conferences, web sites and magazines. This wasn’t there twenty or thirty years ago.
Finally we hear from Bokardo (one of my new favorite reads) on the Seven Reasons Why Web Apps Fail. This is an older post but still relevant, calling into question a business rationale that relies on mass consensus rather than individualization, particularly as it applies to apps whose content structure is affirmed via public input:
One of the big promises of aggregating the wisdom of crowds is building systems that use the input from huge user populations to come up with value. However, as people get used to how the wisdom is aggregated, they figure out how it all works, and the more public the mechanism for aggregation, the easier it is to figure out … in order to successfully harness (this advantage), each member of the crowd needs to be making an independent vote.
To end on a positive note, if you’re a New York Times subscriber make sure you check out their 6th Annual Year in Ideas issue in the Magazine section. Some terrific examples of information design in there, plus this nice illustration by Julia Hasting.