« September 2005 | Main | November 2005 »
Joel Spolsky talks about priorities and the perils of consultingware and procrastination.
Good stuff. It is hard to resist getting pushed around by customers. The basic message of "good enough" prioritization of features is spot on. One minor nit: isn't reading this article a form of procrastination?
The Better Desktop initiative by Novell looks interesting. I first saw it on Tom's Hardware Guide and took a few minutes to peruse the site.
They have some very good, basic usability 101 kind of information on the site. There doesn't seem to be anything here that would offend Jakob (although, he can be very touchy). I didn't view any of the videos, but the data analysis of the tasks tested was interesting.
Usability is one of the last barriers to making open source mainstream - code written by geeks for geeks is not going to work for Grandma. Not only is this site useful to open source developers, but anyone who writes software and does not have access to a dedicated usability lab. So, maybe (hopefully) it will raise the bar for everyone.
Jason at 37signals posted a set of observations about "less is more" the other day.
Interesting stuff and I think that many people can learn from it - find a specific problem and attack it with the fewest number of people possible. The basic premise is very close to the way I like to work.
However, the class of problems that can be solved in this way is smallish and economic theory would say you that you won't make exceptional returns in this way because the barriers to enty are low. That doesn't mean that you can't make a living doing this, just that it is unlikely that a durable, profitable company could be formed.
Google won an age discrimination lawsuit recently. The guy who lost was fired from a $200,000 pa job and 119,000 Google shares at a $0.30 strike price - $37.6 million. I imagine he will have some difficulty finding a new job with similar renumeration.