Lack Of A Viable Business Model Is Stifling Software Innovation (TechWeb)

Posted Jan 15, 2003 23:05 UTC (Wed) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link]

Winer can be seen as somewhat self-serving touting Weblogs; that's what his ompany does.

Not knowing who Winer is a priori, I have to admit that this statement seems to be the most cogent and relevant one in the entire article.

If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you sell hammers, you are going to tell everybody that everything is a nail.

If Weblogs become the answer to everything, I will personally eat my shirt. I don't doubt they will be useful, have a role, but somehow the idea that Weblogs being a significant player in solving communcation problems seems more absurd than the the idea that soon we'll be writing everything in Java (which we were told a few years ago).

-Rob

Posted Jan 15, 2003 23:50 UTC (Wed) by dwheeler (guest, #1216) [Link]

For more about software and innovation, see "http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation".

There are clearly both OSS/FS and proprietary innovations.

Posted Jan 16, 2003 1:25 UTC (Thu) by maphew (guest, #1147) [Link]

Our organization currently pays $15,000/yr in maintenance and upgrade fees for a certain desktop software program which very obviously has never been through any usability testing. The company behind this software has been in the business for over twenty years. There are a number of other closed source programs we use which are also vexing and unusable, this is just the most egregious example.

Good usability is orthagonal to whether the program in question is closed or open source. Usability comes from the skills and interests of the people involved, not from the business model.

Posted Jan 16, 2003 13:33 UTC (Thu) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]

I would actually have given WordPerfect for DOS 5.1 an award for usability - and for ease of learning. You fire it up, start typing, then hit "print".

Okay, maybe you need someone to show you how to start it (pretty simple if you were familiar with using a computer back then), and how to print (but again, with a crib sheet it would have been familiar territory).

Windows is built on Seymour Papert's "How people learn" doctoral theses. Which is all very well, but the way we do things changes with experience - children read phonetically, letter by letter, usually aloud so they can "hear themselves think". Once we've learned the basics, we more and more read "symbol by symbol", whole words as a single item, which is why adults don't speak as they read - they read in a completely different manner to children.

That's why linux is so great - it's got a jack-hammer for the experts and a plastic hammer for the kiddies - with everything inbetween. Look at KDE and Gnome working hard to provide a complete kiddies toolset. Look at Linus and crew working hard to provide the power tools, dumper trucks, and JCBs..., and look at everything inbetween. Windows provides a kiddies toolset with all the sharp edges rounded off for extra safety...

Let's leave usability testing to usability experts, and lets not dumb down our tools to the point that nobody wants to use them. Learning is a difficult experience, and "intuition" is best summed up as "it behaves the same as what I'm used to in other stuff" - which isn't often the case in Windows as MS keeps changing everything ...

Cheers,
Wol

Posted Jan 16, 2003 19:48 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

The real mystery is why anybody pays attention to this Winer person. He's demonstrated repeatedly how he fails to understand Free Software, and why it has been so successful.

It's always easy, and usually safe, to predict failure, because most attempts at anything interesting fail for a variety of incidental reasons. It's more of a challenge to identify ideas that have a chance to succeed, and that might be tried often enough to overcome the incidentals. The test of an analyst, therefore, is whether he has predicted successes that occurred. Correct predictions of failure indicate only a sour attitude. Predictions of failure that prove incorrect are especially damning. They demonstrate a lack of insight.