Blackfriars Marketing commenting on Bill Gates’ claim that Enterprise Software gets little respect (via the Wall Street Journal).

As someone who has worked on ‘business’ and ‘enterprise’ software for most of my career (the difference being one of scale as far as I can see) I wholeheartedly agree. I got sick of being told that the user-interface was ‘good enough’. Half a second of frustration quickly adds up if you are sat in front of an application for eight or more hours a day(*).

especially when we confront real systems at work that increase workloads, enforce meaningless restrictions that don’t help customers, and sport user interfaces that feel Kafka-esque in their user hostility. It’s not surprising that enterprise software gets no respect; it is surprising that there aren’t more cases of employees throwing their computers out windows in frustration.

(*) Incidentally, that always used to be my response when people said that Windows had achieved parity with the Mac user experience. Give two experienced users a tight deadline, one on a Mac, the other on Windows, and see who swears the most. Frustration => Unhappiness => Staff Turnover (for the buyer) and No Repeat Sales (for the vendor)

How everyday tasks sell iPhones

I now have run into two people at my church who have decided to get iPhones after seeing how easy it is for me to use mine for seemingly ordinary tasks. Both people already own either a Palm PDA or a Blackberry, but don’t use most of the functions because they are just too hard to master. They see me do a quick weather lookup or Google search with a couple touches, and you can see the light bulb go on over their heads saying, “That’s so easy; I’d love it if my phone were that easy.”

Aim high but grow slowly.

I had no idea how I would do this, but I figured if humans had the capability to put a rover on Mars and launch satellites into space, then there must be some way to clear out 80,000 emails in 3 weeks. If it is humanly possible, then it’s not impossible. It’s just a matter of figuring out a way to do it.

After just over a year in business, we still have a long way to go in ‘proving’ anything, but because we’ve used the same grassroots approach to building our own business (which has been successfully busy from day 1 without going into any debt), we are walking the walk. There are no shortcuts to gratification here and, in fact, some days are really hard.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/understandingwebdesign

Architecture (the kind that uses steel and glass and stone) is also an apt comparison—or at least, more apt than poster design. The architect creates planes and grids that facilitate the dynamic behavior of people. Having designed, the architect relinquishes control. Over time, the people who use the building bring out and add to the meaning of the architect’s design.

In other words - it’s about you as much as it’s about me.

http://parlezuml.com/blog/?postid=517

People who practice test-driven development are doing design. It’s important - actually, it’s critical - to understand that. If you fall into the trap of thinking that TDD is about unit testing, then you’ll probably miss the point.

Too many teams believe they’re doing TDD, but are actually just writing unit tests for code they’ve already written, or writing one unit test and then writing 500 lines of production code before they move on to the next unit test.

Absolutely. Applications that have unit tests written before the actual code tend to have looser coupling, cleaner design and concentrate purely on what is required (rather than evolutionary dead ends).

or why you should call a slut a slut

Do you think it’s because I said ‘slut’? Are people really that conservative? Maybe I should tone it down a bit. But if I tone it down a bit, I won’t be being myself. I don’t want subscribers who don’t like me for who I am. Then again, I want to write a book. I want people to buy it. I don’t care who they are. Am I pissing off the Bible belters?

Naomi’s a fantastic writer, linking red wine, sluts, naked men and balls into a series of articles about business. Recommended.

I’ve said before that it is often the tiny details that make all the difference.

And Euan has found one such detail:

It knows that my home number is used by both my wife and I so when I get a call it says it is from Penny OR Euan

UPDATE:

Whereas the genius that is Stephen Fry says:

In the end the iPhone is like some glorious early-60s sports car. Not as practical, reliable, economical, sensible or roomy as a family saloon but oh, the joy. The jouissance as Roland Barthes liked to say. What it does, it does supremely well, that what it does not do seems laughably irrelevant.

However it’s not as good a Fry quote as:

I was walking through a field the other day and stopped to pick a buttercup. Although quite why someone had left their buttock lying around I will never know.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/04/location_information/

A pre-paid SIM, paid for in cash, should be standard-issue for anyone planning a crime spree, though few criminals have the foresight for such an investment, and forwarding your old number to it would be something of a giveaway.

Turning off your mobile, and removing the battery for the properly paranoid, should be good enough to ensure you’re not being tracked.

If it’s already too late, your only hope is that your crime doesn’t warrant enough budget to track you down, or that no one notices it for the 12 months the network operators are hanging onto their data.

http://www.userscape.com/blog/index.php/site/google_is_genius_and_everyone_else_is_stupid/

By building lots of apps they get people scared. Google is entering my market.. ahhhhhhhhhh. The distraction factor is huge. The more time and resources companies spend on fighting Google on these fake fronts is less time and resources on the only one that matters, search.

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/10/search_engine_o.html

As a generation of young Facebook developers will soon find out for themselves, it’s very easy for platform owners to compete and win against independents. It’s no accident that the most successful software built atop Microsoft Windows is Microsoft’s own Office suite.

See also Joel Spolsky’s Fire and Motion