Let’s get things nice and sparkling clear about what users want.
They want to download torrents of the latest episodes of their favorite TV shows. This is why torrent and P2P clients have billions of downloads. They want the utilities they need to watch, compress, decompress, and transfer around their media. This is why codec packs and utilities like WinZip have hundreds of millions of downloads. They want to keep their machines reasonably free of spyware. This is why applications like AdAware have hundreds of millions of downloads.
They want to communicate with their friends, be it through instant messaging, social networking websites, or whatever.
They do not give a shit about your blog or your productivity/organizational application (they don’t care about this blog or the little project I’m working on on the side, in particular). They won’t give a shit about it, anyway, unless you have an unusual angle, like Perez Hilton where you can get an eyeful just by scrolling, and without reading or taking the time to appreciate all the hard work the site’s creator puts in.
If you’re going to talk about what users want, look at how they’ve voted with their mice clicks: AdAware and celebrity gossip is in, Web 2.0 is out, not that it was ever in.
Maybe this is an indication that just because millions of people want something doesn’t mean that it has any intrinsic worth, eh?
Maybe spending your precious spare time on something that’s really tedious and difficult isn’t a good idea just because millions of dumb IE 6 users want it. Maybe, instead, you should spend your time on what you enjoy and value.
What you do to pay the bills or make your clients happy is a completely separate matter: you’re probably going to be logging quite a bit of time in Firebug because that’s quite possibly the most pragmatic way to do an application 5,000 people in a large corporation are going to use.
But when you finish the work day and you want to create excellent software for yourself, where you get to do the things your clients won’t let you do, why would you willingly make a Pentium 4 feel like a 386 with JavaScript hacks?
Okay, it’s clearer what you’re getting at now. You don’t want a better web framework. You’re talking about what you would rather spend your spare time on. I find I’m kind of in the same boat: I like stuff that most other people don’t.
At one point I was trying to find a common ground. I was looking at web frameworks like RoR and Seaside, and figured maybe I could satisfy what customers want, and geek out at the same time. Maybe that’s still possible, but I have other ambitions at this point.
Comment by Mark Miller — February 26, 2008 @ 10:38 pm |
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