My husband and I were musing, as we drove past a White Castle round about lunchtime, about the inverse correlation within a culture between the average body size of its citizenry and the availability of high quality food. In Paris, I don't recall seeing any overweight locals. I also didn't see diet aids or artificial sweeteners. Contrast most of the US: unprecedented numbers of obese children, a wide selection of no-cal sweeteners on every restaurant table, which is sized amply to receive the family-sized platters each brimming with what passes for a single serving. The only conclusion we could draw is that poorer quality food doesn't satisfy, so people eat more, hoping that they will eventually feel sated.
Returning to my desk, I was delighted to find Philippe Winthrop's posting, "Apple Is The New McDonald's." He's commenting on Apple's AppStore selling its one billionth app, and asking his readers to consider the relative values of quantity and quality in technology applications. There are a couple angles here - the control inherent to Apple's business model vs the democratization inherent to the AppStore model is an interesting one, but I'm interested today in the cultural phenomenon of the 'app.' The $0.99 application is to software development what YouTube is to film making or what Twitter is to Dinner with Andre. Or, what chicken nuggets are to coq au vin. With a steady diet of fast-food technology, the consumer starts to think it's the real thing, and the real thing is seen as elitist and over-priced.
Increasingly, software is seen as something that can be hacked out by teenagers who cut and paste code very quickly and very cheaply. It is seen as ubiquitous -- if the last app crashed, there's lots to choose from - download another! User expectations fall with the standards. Originally conceived as a means to protect the robustness of systems while extending their flexibility, apps are clogging telecom arteries and bloating systems while weakening them.
Making good software is hard. Every hacker with an SDK can't do it well. Even best-in-class developers do their best work working within the rules of a professional technology organization, where they are accountable for creating software that innovatively meets users' needs while ensuring stability not only of its system but also the systems it is designed to interface. Yet, that's not the answer anyone wants to hear these days. Cheaper, faster, cuter -- that's what the market wants to hear. Oh yeah, and if it has a half-life of about 3 days -- all the better. There's always more to choose from. Hungry yet?
Monday, April 27, 2009
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1 comment:
Great post. It really gets to the heart of the issue and frames it in terms of a wider behavioral phenomenon, which is something the software world could use more of - a wider view of where all this stuff is going and why. I remember when the apps for phones (PDAs, back then) first started coming out. I have some on my phone now and while not all of them enhance productivity most of them do in one way or another. I remember then the floodgates opening as the phones got better and the screens got cooler. Hundreds and thousands of apps but very little real variety. Like burger meat being squished out of a tube onto a sizzling, greasy grill. Pickles with that? Mustard? Onions? Sure, but they're all just sitting there on top of the same greasy slab of half-burned meat and nested in a mass-produced bun pretending to be bread. I like a good burger the same as the next person...well, maybe not quite as much...but I have to wonder about the substance of what we're seeing thrown at the market. Does the fast food industry, through marketing and through delivery of lots of immediately available, relatively cheap calories, suppress the market for higher quality food? I think the answer is an unqualified yes. Is the same set of dynamics at work in the technology sector? I think probably so. I realize that there's an element of what could be called elitism in the mix here somewhere, but then too, the culture can't move from fast food dependence to some other model unless someone, people like Ms. D, point us and our thoughts in some other direction, away from the White Castle (sorry WC fans) and towards that fresh baguette with the little pat of fresh creamery butter, consumed on the way to the Muse d'Orsay, or, maybe, the gym.
Cheers,
Anon
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