Re: How to make money fast (in science fiction)

>>>>> "CG" == Chuk Goodin <cgoodin@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> writes:

    CG> On Thu, 03 Apr 2008 08:31:29 +1000, James A. Donald
    CG> <jamesd@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

    >> However, irrespective of the particular events at Microsoft,
    >> software tends to get slower with time.  The reason is that
    >> anyone who introduces a feature that makes things very slightly
    >> slower for everyone and all software gets credit for particular
    >> benefits of his feature, but does not get discredit for the
    >> very slight slowdown, which mostly affects the vast majority
    >> who are entirely unaware of this feature, and have absolutely
    >> no interest in it.  Multiply this by ten million programmers
    >> and ten million features, and pretty soon the computer is
    >> wading through cold mol*****.

    CG> That is a good point. So what we need is better accounting for
    CG> resources and more programmer responsibility, not necessarily
    CG> faster hardware.

And when purchasers have the option and are aware of their choices,
they don't buy the bloatware.

The problem is that Microsoft figured out some time back that the
people *buying* their software and the people *using* their software
were largely disjoint sets -- most companies in the 1980s and 1990s
had IT department that made purchasing decisions and told the rest of
the company what they were going to use.

So Microsoft targeted the purchasing-department mindset.  An example
of this: Voice Annotations in an early version of Word for Windows.
They were completely unusable unless you had a high-end sound card and
ample disk space, but they were a feature that WordPerfect did not
have.  One or two bosses in the company would find this to be a useful
feature, and would insist on it; WordPerfect didn't have the feature,
and so was excluded from consideration for future purchases.  And the
bosses would use the voice annotation feature once or twice, get bored
with it, and go back to the old way of doing things.

What Microsoft saw was that adding features, even useless features,
gave them a competitive advantage; and it didn't really matter how
slow it was, because people used what the purchasing department
bought, and the purchasing department bought software based on feature
lists and not on usability or user experience.

Charlton


-- 
Charlton Wilbur
cwilbur@[EMAIL PROTECTED]