On May 3, 2008, at 5:41 PM, Kontra wrote:
They don't need to *claim* that they make it so, but if, for example, you observe that the vendors of expensive enterprise software (in the high six, seven figures) get a very significant portion of their revenue from product-specific training, coaching, certification, installation, etc., and that the very low priority they place on the obvious simplification of their products, you can hardly avoid the conclusion that it's not in their business interest to de-complicate.
99% of the time, complex products are built poorly because the team building them lacked people who knew how to design software more elegantly. Nothing else. All that other stuff you just laid out there doesn't go away because a product is complex or easy. It's just part of the domain that software lives in due to a lot of other factors.
Whether people in our industry want to hear it or not... when software is designed badly and excessively more complex than it has to be, its because one of us did it or the team building the software lacked a competent design team. Period. Don't go around blaming engineers, don't go around blaming the executives or marketing or whatever else you want to do. It's just not true.
As for the UNIX example cited by Dave: The bottom line is that once you learn those arcane commands, it's actually EASIER... Yes... EASIER... to use UNIX especially by those how know how to type quickly. I understand people don't enjoy learning arcane commands, but UNIX was built by engineers for engineers, so its just too bad. If you want to play in their world, you'll play by their rules. When engineers want to play in my world, I make them learn my rules (like paying attention to typography, color and behavioral details), so I consider it a fair deal.
And FWIW, I don't know UNIX very well and prefer a GUI over a command line, but even I can watch a programmer fly through doing a whole slew of actions that with a GUI would have taken them 5 times longer and realize that for them, it's actually easier to do it their way.
By many standards from people I hear in the software design industry, I think more than a few would consider the piano the most obtuse instrument on the planet. I mean... my word! Not only does one have to learn scales and music and all that, then you have to learn how to play the damn thing with all of those keys! And the keys aren't even labeled. The nerve!
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