Saturday, December 06, 2003

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Another great Joel column, on Software Craftsmanship. He makes the point that in-house applications will never come close to matching the level set by shrink-wrapped applications: "When software is built by a true craftsman, all the screws line up. When you do something rare, the application behaves intelligently. More effort went into getting rare cases exactly right than getting the main code working. ... Craftsmanship is, of course, incredibly expensive. The only way you can afford it is when you are developing software for a mass audience. Sorry, but internal HR applications developed at insurance companies are never going to reach this level of craftsmanship because there simply aren't enough users to spread the extra cost out. For a shrinkwrapped software company, though, this level of craftsmanship is precisely what delights users and provides longstanding competitive advantage." But for us in-house types, it is even worse than mrely being compared to shrink-wrapped software. What shrink-wrapped applications set the standard by which the average user judges? Microsoft Office, where user base over which to amortize costs is so huge, that they can afford to have a five-person team work for months on perfecting the UI design of a single dialog box! (I made that up, but I'm pretty sure it is true.) And it gets still worse, at least for me. All the in-house apps I have worked on over the last few years have been thin-client. So we are comparing the inherently limited thin-client experience to the vastly richer fat-client, Windows native-GUI experience. Very frustrating. 11:06:17 PM    comment []