A recent article at forbes makes this proposition:

Over the past twenty years, the technology industry, led by companies like Microsoft, have given us powerful databases, operating systems, networks and software applications that have made it easier for us to accomplish more tasks than we did before with less people. And it’s not just Microsoft who you can blame.

Blame Sage, who makes Enterprise Resource Planning and Customer Relationship Management software that has enabled businesses to automate their marketing campaigns, build workflows for alerting managers when inventory needs to be replenished and generate workorders and invoices that are immediately emailed without employing teams of people.

Blame Rackspace and Amazon and other cloud based infrastructure providers, who allow us to host all of our business applications on their servers, thereby eliminating many in our information technology departments and cutting back on wasted time from downed computers and security flaws.

He’s got a point — businesses are becoming more efficient with less people, thanks to the internet and software systems. For example, when is the last time you visited a bank teller? I know I haven’t seen one for years because I do all my banking online and through ATMs. When I shop, I do it online rather than local retail stores.

Not only have I contributed to this trend when I buy, but I’ve been a key player in building these job-sucking software systems. In fact, when I worked at Arthur Andersen, I remember a project where we wrote a system specifically to replace a group of twenty data entry people. One member of my team was responsible for getting the “requirements” from the data entry group. This consisted of documenting their job so that we could then implement it in code. Ouch.

Of course, the data entry team knew that our system would replace them and they were a understandably a hostile audience for the requirements gathering. One especially contentious meeting left our analyst in tears. Was she right to be sad that the system we were building would cost these people their job?

But isn’t greater efficiency the definition of progress? For example, 58% of the labor force were farmers in 1860. Through more efficient equipment and growing techniques, that number has dropped to 2.6% by 1990. In other words, many farmers have lost their jobs as farming has become more efficient. Would life be better for the country and the world if more of us were still farming?

I would argue that the world progresses by becoming extremely efficient at one field so its labor force can move onto another (more advanced) field. The problems occurs when people cannot be easily retrained for new jobs and occupations. So maybe the issue is not with the internet and automation, but with the education system?

Thankfully, the internet is about to increase unemployment in the education system as well with the rise of the Khan Academy. But don’t worry, it’s more efficient so it has to be better…right?

To understand what makes Apple special, we need look no further than the words of Steve Jobs at the iPad 2 unveiling:

I’ve said this before, but thought it was worth repeating: It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. That it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.

In other words, Apple’s secret sauce is making technology not only functional but beautiful. They make technology devices that people want to own not just because they work, but because they are works of art. And, because of that, they have achieved their vaunted “coolness” factor that propelled first the iPod, then the iPhone and iPad to success.

The question is will this marriage of technology and liberal arts remain once Jobs is gone? If history is any indicator, things do not look good for Apple in a post-Jobs world. When he left Apple the first time, the new execs stopped taking the big risks that created the original Apple II and the company tanked. When Jobs returned from the wilderness, the company steadily rose again. You can practically track when Jobs was at the company by looking at when they released their most successful products.

So what makes Jobs special? Job’s special skill is that of taste. In fact, he famously said:

The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste

Jobs role at Apple was not really to design anything (they have Ives for that) or code anything, it was that of the great editor. He decided which products Apple should bet the company on and which features should be added or (more often) cut to make a beautiful product that the market would love. He had that mystical “taste”.

So the question now is: does Tim Cook have taste?

Here are the highlights :

• UTC: The time at zero degrees longitude (the Prime Meridian) is called Universal Coordinated Time (UTC).
• GMT: UTC used to be called Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) because the Prime Meridian was (arbitrarily) chosen to pass through the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.
• Other timezones can be written as an offset from UTC. Australian Eastern Standard Time is UTC+1000. e.g. 10:00 UTC is 20:00 EST on the same day. Daylight saving does not affect UTC. It’s just a polity deciding to change its timezone (offset from UTC). For example, GMT is still used: it’s the British national timezone in winter. In summer it becomes BST.

Lastly, the author makes this important point:

Timezones are a presentation-layer problem! Most of your code shouldn’t be dealing with timezones or local time, it should be passing Unix time around.

I recently checked out google+ and I have to say I like it. It’s elegant and finally brings some innovation to the social space.

But many will say that half the planet is on facebook, surely they are unassailable?We need only look at the quick demise of MySpace to see that social sites can fail as quickly as they rise. Andrewljohnson on hacker news said it best:

Most businesses can’t “die” suddenly. It’s very hard to turn a $850,000,000 business into a $35,000,000 in just a couple of years, unless something truly catastrophic or industry-changing occurs.

The exception to this rule is social internet companies. Social companies are built in a day and can die in a day – we’ve seen it happen again and again, and Facebook’s scale is no protection.

To beat Verizon, you need a network. To beat Google, you need search technology, data, and great engineers. To beat a car company, you need some factories. But to beat Zuckerburg, all you need it timing and a good strategy, and equivalent engineers. And in this case, Google seems credible on all fronts.

This is the first serious threat to Facebook’s existence.

If google is successful, I won’t be mourning facebook’s passing. It’s served a necessary purpose, but it’s walled garden, “incorporating” other’s technology, and evil PR tricks make it hard to be a fan. Google’s no saint, but at least they are mostly transparent and their motto is “don’t be evil”.

As xkcd explains, google+ may be a facebook clone that is just not run by facebook (and maybe that’s all we need)…

One of the things you often hear about Marijuana is that it’s a gateway drug to the harder stuff. In my opinion, the same could be said about the iPhone.

Will the iPhone cause you to sell all of your possessions and end up living in a van down by the river? Not quite, but once you start on the road to Apple there is no turning back.

I know of many people who were hardcore PC users. At work, they used PCs, in their pocket they had a Blackberry, and they were very satisfied.

Then Apple decided to “reinvent the phone” and it became the new “it” device. Everyone had to have one. And once they tried it, they were happy. Very Happy.

In fact, the iPhone was such a good phone it made you wonder, what could they do in regard to desktop computers? Would they be as elegant and fun to use?

There was only one way to find out. So you dipped your toes in with a Mac Mini — it’s cheap and let’s you reuse your existing PC monitor and mouse. It’s worth a try…right?

And, lo and behold, the mac mini turned out to be a great device. The out of box (oob) experience is extraordinary. It’s clear that a lot of love went into the package design and you feel as if you’re opening something special.

When first turning the machine on you are greeted by a flashy welcome screen and it’s ready to go. Backup is suddenly as simple as plugging in a USB drive and letting time machine do its thing.

Editing pictures of the kids becomes fun again with iPhoto. Now when someone in the family needs a new machine you find yourself recommending a MacBook because you know it will be easy for them to use and less support calls for you.

Then when you see the MacBook you are amazed at how nice the screen looks. In fact, it looks much better than the screen on your high-end IBM laptop and you start to wonder — should I get a MacBook?

For a little bit you resist because you’ve used PCs your entire life. Will it be too much of a learning curve and what about all that new software you need to buy?

But the attention to detail and build quality start to pull you in. It’s the little things like the backlit keyboard which only turns on in low-light; the way it *always* sleeps properly when the lid is closed; the way that the help menu shows you exactly where something is with a little bouncing arrow.

Finally, you decide to throw caution to the wind and visit the Apple store. After trying out the high-end mac book yourself, there’s no hope. You’re a goner. Hooked on the drug that is Apple and wondering how you just spent $2400 on a laptop.

And to think it all started with a phone…

I could just see myself chomping at the bit and thinking — how could he not use windows+e to launch windows explorer–there has to be a better way. My brain would keep wondering why he wasn’t typing something the super efficient way that I knew to do it.

And yet, he started doing things that I didn’t know how to do — so you don’t actually need a GO between those SQL statements? huh — who knew? I guess that means I don’t know everything. And therein lies the key of pair programming. You don’t know everything, and if you pair with someone else who is a good programmer you will certainly learn something from them.

Not only that, but there’s something about the shared energy that comes from both of you working to solve a problem. For some reason, you seem to solve it faster. I think it’s because while one of you is trying one possible solution, the other one is thinking about another way to solve it.

Does that mean that pair programming is a panacea that you should always do? I don’t think so. Not yet, but it’s definitely something that I will plan to do more often because I think it’s a great way to encourage and learn from each other.

If you’re a developer you’re probably thinking that you need to eliminate all bugs or make it as efficient as possible. But haven’t you used, and continued to use, software that was buggy or slow (I’m looking at you twitter)?

It’s a given that you need to have a market. After that, what is the most important aspect of your software?

I’m going to make a true, but controversial statement here. Are you sitting down? You’re software does not need to be bug-free.

That’s right — don’t try to eliminate all the bugs before shipping. In fact, as long as the bugs won’t corrupt user data or interfere with the user experience they are probably not worth fixing.

There are exceptions to this case if you are NASA, but most of us are not. And the cost of fixing many bugs outweighs the benefits.

Just get the software out there and make sure there’s a market. Then fix what’s important to the majority of consumers. We live in a different world than the days of shrinkwrapped software where fixing a bug after shipping meant sending another million disks out.

Follow the rule given by Facebook’s lead developer:

Move quickly and break stuff.

UX Rules

Instead of fixing every little technical bug, you should be focusing on the user experience because to many users, your software is the user experience.

Most users will only care about how your software looks and if it does what they want. To illustrate this “iceberg principle”, Joel Spolsky tells a great story about showing software before they had a chance to polish the UI:

What happened during the demo? The clients spent the entire meeting griping about the graphical appearance of the screen. They weren’t even talking about the UI. Just the graphical appearance. “It just doesn’t look slick,” complained their project manager. That’s all they could think about. We couldn’t get them to think about the actual functionality. Obviously fixing the graphic design took about one day. It was almost as if they thought they had hired painters.

What’s the lesson? Focus on UI as a top priority.

The parable of Mint and Wesabe

Think UX doesn’t matter for web software?

Let’s take a look at the post-mortem of a recent battle in the online money management space. Here is the reason that the founder of Wesabe cites for losing to Mint:

Between the worse data aggregation method and the much higher amount of work Wesabe made you do, it was far easier to have a good experience on Mint, and that good experience came far more quickly.

He lays much of the blame of Wesabe on not giving the consumer as good of an experience. And, of yeah, Mint just sold for $170 million.

Bad UX is a Bug

So if we all agree that bad UX should be eliminated from the open web, how do we make it a priority? As developers we are hardwired to care about bugs — it’s just in our DNA. So, what if we started treating bad UX as bug?

Sara Summers tells us how to do it:

So I say to all my devs out there: Bad user experience is a bug.

Working code is absolutely necessary to user experience, but there’s more to it. Building experience means facilitating the best ‘feel’ for your audience. You can begin by making the feature/page/experience you’ve created a bug to be checked. Pin it into whatever bug check-in software you’re using. If what you’ve made doesn’t feel enjoyable, simple, clear or trustworthy, mark it.

In order to treat UX as a priority, we need to treat it as a first class bug. That means logging it in our bugtrackers with the rest of the “real” bugs.

Episode 2 of my Vim for Windows series is up! And it has 50% less “umms…” than the first episode!  You never quite realize how annoying your own speaking is until you record it…

Anyway, I hope people find this tutorial useful on getting started with Vim plugins. I cover installing plugins the standard way as well as using the awesome pathogen plugin manager.

For further reading on Vim plugins, checkout the series Vim Plugins You Should Know About by catonmat.