This is a jewel of a comment.from Marc McNeil:
Why should you be able to go home and see your 13 year old son playing with a Sony PSP, with awesome graphics, great design and compelling experience, but when you get to work the brand new Enterprise Application looks like it was designed by amateurs, is difficult to use and is yet another cumbersome product that IT have rolled out with apparently little input from the people who are actually going to use it (“No-one asked my opinion…”.)
dancing mango :: Is good corporate software design too much to ask?
technorati tags: quality, software, programming
It’s easy to figure out…when software is your primary source of revenue, there are market forces at work. If your PSP game has crappy graphics, you go under. If your free email service with 10 competitors doesn’t accept emails bigger than 5mb and only gives you 20mb of disk quota, you go under.
Internally, the groups that create these wonderful rules and peices of software have no competition. It’s the worst sort of monoculture. No matter how bad something is, people will be forced to use it, and what’s more the sponsoring executives or managers will spin it as a success.
It’s essentially impossible at most companies to convince people that these things matter to the bottom line, and that’s the real challenge.