Thursday, December 02, 2010

Embracing change

A little story of changes and why having options is awesome.

My favorite browser was Chrome, obviously. Until I got a tablet PC and Chrome sucked at multitouch and gestures. Then my favourite browser became IE… of all things. Then I wanted to disable flash to get more juice out of the battery and less crap on the screen… now my default browser is Firefox.

My favorite Twitter client was Tweetdeck until I got really bored with its inability to browse wide when I turned the iPhone around. Now my favourite tweet client is Twitter’s.

A few things to note from this:

  • The “bar” keeps rising as useful features become standard.
  • Change is accelerating and the world is a better place because of this.
  • Competition and voting with feet is insanely healthy (or healthy for the insane?).
  • I think that most people put up with missing features only for a while and what really kills software is slowness to evolve as well as lack of frequent releases.
  • One must always have some cheap features on a short term roadmap, to ensure that clients will get something continuously

It also begs a few questions:

  • Do you think that people become accustomed to seeing through the software they use and focus on the actual problem, switching said software often?
  • How does this translate into a change-hating enterprise environment?
  • Why do we still have politicians?

P.S. I wrote this using vi inside a Word document, on my tablet, while commuting to work; published it by tethering my internet connection through the iPhone while listening to an internet radio station stream…how cool is that? Can that be considered “giving back to the internet”? Are we Borg?

P.S. 2 - right after, iPhone crashed 3 times trying to sever the tether...not sure what that means...