On Mar 24, 2008, at 9:47 PM, Chris Bernard wrote: > What should be exciting for all of us is that having all of these > companies vie for our attention creates a competitive environment > that is ripe for innovation. I don't think I'd be dismissive of any > of these new technologies at this point and I don't think we're > talking about a zero sum game where picking one approach > automatically discounts ever using another in conjunction with it.
I'll be blunt, Chris, as Doug knows I often try to avoid pulling punches. While that sounds good on paper, it's sheer fantasy right now. It *is* a zero sum game because there are only so many resources in companies to build shipping software products. The amount of time and effort it takes to build a robust software product offering for one platform takes at minimum a year, often much longer. More than one platform? Forget it. Only a select few companies on this planet have the kind of money to toss at that problem and most of them choose not to because it's often a waste of time and resources. Let's not even discuss "innovation," as 99% of the projects done with these tools are simply reinvented versions of past software products or ideas. It doesn't matter what platform or technology you choose: browser with ajax, flash/flex/air, expression blend/silverlight, java, desktop client. They all take the same amount of time in the end and they all have been done before to various degrees. And I speak as someone who has created software pretty much in every various capacity one possibly can. It's getting to be tiresome at this stage dealing with yet another language or platform or whatever flavor is "exciting" this year. To do software right and do it well simply takes time, even if business executives think they are getting stuff out of the door in less than six months. They aren't. That's a facade. Sugar coating the notion of what can be released. It looks like a more polished product offering getting to market faster, when in fact it's nothing more than an incomplete beta. A pretty one I would grant you that, but incomplete nonetheless. The product isn't quite there yet and won't be for some time. It takes a lot longer to get there for real, often not until at least version 3 of any software product, long after an alpha and a beta, public or not, as well as versions 1 and 2 of course. It takes longer to get the product right. It always will. In the end, it's not the technology that gets in the way or makes things smother. It's often something entirely different in the software world. More often than not, it's the designers, engineers and product managers who still haven't come to understand the medium for which they are creating products, much less understanding their customers who are fickle and rightfully so about what features are right for them. And the ones that do understand their mediums and their customers know it simply takes time to get the design itself right. No amount of slicing bread with a fancier, partially automated bread knife, changes that. Not Ajax, not Flash, not Expression, not Code Warrior. > These technologies all have large audiences that can execute > against them today and the ultimate success will be by those that > can leverage the value of their ideas around creating great > experiences in the fastest and most effective way possible. There are no shortcuts. One of you -- Adobe, Microsoft, OpenSource, whichever -- will win the battle at large. That's the nature of business and of technology. The primary winner will dominate, the rest will be viable, but not to the degree of the winner. And designers everywhere will simply deal with whomever wins, as we always do with any technology that is required in our business. Ultimately, I have no dog in this hunt. It honestly doesn't matter to me who "wins." As a designer however, I can tell you I'm done with "innovation" at a technological level. I'm done with learning yet another new thing which is basically the same as the old thing which requires me to re-learn a bunch of things I already knew how to do but now need to learn how to do differently but with some new set of annoying technological constraints that ultimately as just as arbitrary as the constraints I already deal with today. There's nothing innovative in needing to draw a circle to make a button. Sure... drawing one as a true vector is nice. But innovative? Only if you consider that it's about ten years late to arrive and should have been more mainstream ages ago, I guess. But plenty of designers get along fine without the bells and whistles. In software, we are doing nothing more than fancier versions of applications since Engelbart gave his famous demo in 1968, one year older than I am now closing quickly on 4 decades ago. Innovation for us will not come in the form of cooler technology that allows certain mundane design and engineering tasks to seem to be potentially faster or slightly more dynamic. It will come in the form of new input models and devices, like the multi-touch in the iPhone, or fake plastic guitars and drum kits in games like Rock Band, and new display devices with small chipsets that bring pixels way past the computer screen and onto all sorts of ordinary devices in our lives, regardless of size. It will come from what people do with that new technology together, out in the open, not as islands. Especially not as islands of people who stare at their mobile phones all day texting, doing so mostly in isolation even when they are surrounded by others. New ways to draw buttons, or hook up a menu to a data row, or display an error message or dynamically scale a widget to some arbitrary screen resolution is not innovation. It's cool, and it helps us mildly in ways to create slightly different versions of software applications that are slightly cooler. But let's not kid ourselves. That's not innovation. It's just technology. It stopped being innovative once it repeated itself for the third time (e.g., FidoNet --> America Online --> Facebook), but only slightly faster and different only in approach, but not in general use. (And yes, FidoNet and America Online were just as social and all that back in the 1980s and early 1990s to the degree things like Facebook is today. The audience was smaller, and the style of interaction is certainly different, but in the end, they were all about with keeping up and connecting with your friends, both real ones and virtual ones online.) Innovation will come to the software realm when the technology wars are finally over, one of you guys wins, and then you get to define how to draw the circle, and us designers can stop learning how to draw it in yet another way with yet another tool, and hook it up to yet another back-end development platform. My only hope is that day will come while I'm still breathing so I can finally get on with the business of design in the high technology sector. -- Andrei Herasimchuk Principal, Involution Studios innovating the digital world e. [EMAIL PROTECTED] c. +1 408 306 6422 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... 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