While Dave Winer’s BloggerCon takes place this weekend I’m still trying to rest up from the CTC conference in Boston earlier in the week.  I gave a detailed – and probably too information packed – talk about Web 2.0 in the enterprise that focuse…

A tech support person I know fequently tells the ap developers about execution problems and the developers typical response is “the customer is using the application wrong.” I am soryy, but that is NOT an acceptable perspective. The customer can not by definition use the application wrong.

I admire people like Winer (who’s link I followed over here). I like the notion of “users and developers partying together”. I think developers have a responsibility to give the users good things. And that developers can’t know what these good things are without paying attention to users.

But the idea that development is a *commodity* – which is essentially what you’re saying here -, that it’s like the water supply which can be turned on or off or piped-around at the will of the user, is wrong, wrong, wrong.

The reason is, that good software creation, like any other creative activity, requires a deep knowledge of the nature and constraints of the medium. You can’t invent the transistor without a profound understanding of physics. Nor write a great novel without being a master of your own language. Nor a great painter without knowing paint. Nor invent radio or television or the computer without a background in the relevant science.

Without knowing your material you’ll never see the statue in the block of marble. Never have intuitions about the *possibilities* that the medium holds. Users can, at best, offer advice for incremental improvements : “I want something like X but with these annoyances fixed.”

But that’s never going to give you radical new things. There are no great innovations in software that have been driven by user demand. (Name one!) They all come from geeks who knew what software looks like from the inside, who saw something in the computer and said “hey! I could make it do *that*, too. Kewl!”

Users and developers have common enemies : dinosaur software companies, companies who like to specify and buy software which they hope will *impose* particular work-practices on their employees, market-forces which require cutting-corners to get the product out of the door today rather than get it right.

Let’s work (and party) together to fight that.

But the other … don’t fool yourself. Users have been dreaming of getting rid of developers, like, forever. They never succeed.

Every time the users abandon us, we go away and create yet more cool stuff, on our own, for ourselves. And eventually the users come crawling back, because they want more of our pure, raw innovation, rather than more of the stale old fluff which is all that they and the marketing people (who “undertand real users” better than those disfunctional geeks) are able to come up with by themselves.

But anyway. I don’t disagree with the basic tenet that much of what’s out there is CRUD, CRUFT, etc. etc. But hey, let’s not just pick on software, why convine ourselves. Do you like drive-thru’s ? They infuriate me, but for some people, no biggie. The point is this. I guess somewhere some software ( or several ) have made you feel….well, less than appreciated. Maybe you wished some software better catered to how YOU, Chris, would do something.

Wouldn’t it be nice if a lot of things in life were like that. But, if you step back and put into perspective that you’re not the only person being catered to when you’re in that drive-thru lane, voila, instant understanding that the world doesn’t revolve old numero uno.

I can’t disagree with your argument at it’s core, because after all, software is useless if no one uses it ( and aren’t there plenty of examples of that out there ). But,( yes there was a “but” coming ) not all software is created alike. Sure, we can’t expect you to speak more specifically about what sort of software, or perhaps what “ABOUT” software is it that is of issue, but if we take the tenet about open versus closed sourced software, or agile versus cmmi, the subject becomes differently.

Everyone, and I mean, everywhere I’ve worked. Contractor or fulltimer, everyone thinks there’s a SINGLE “this is how we develop software” method. Well, wake up and smell the coffee Mary and Joseph, we’re not on Fantasy Island anymore. The idea of “release early, release often”, yeah, that’s worked for Microsoft. NOT ! For the vast majority of cases, most of the arguments for that “agile” ( and what a misnomer it is ) paradigm don’t cut the mustard in the face of the way most “users” think. Maybe if the target users ARE technically minded, then it does start to apply. But most user’s truly are neither interested, nor want to become involved with something that requires much more beyond simple mandates.

The subject is way, way beyond a simple, let’s wrap thing in an Open Source way of thinking. Yeah, sure, we’ll do develop agile, give’m lots of releases to give us gobs of feedback. Ennngh ! These are humans we’re talking about. Beings who most of the time are more concerned with issues more pressing than “did the check box uncheck itself when we select that email, and selected, “. C’mon, get real folks.

Chris has one bright idea ( I’m sure you have more, but you mentioned one basic idea everyone’s missed thus far in the comments ). Basic functionality. Start there. Don’t talk about what other whizz bang things you can code, we all know you’re a wizard at perl, a prince of python, because that’ll all be besides the point.

“Does the OS boot ?”, “Can I add a few numbers ?, “Can I write a letter to my mom ? Or better yet, could my mom write me a letter with this ?”. Answer those questions first. Then we’ll talk about adding that wonderful flip through applications like they’re pages on a screen, or how to make 1 = 2 ( for most values of 1 ) with Pivot Tables, or create FORMS ( which must be filed in triplicate ) with the word processor.

Now someone hand me bottle of insecticide, I think I see a “feature creep” over there !