I have a fairly extensive collection of DVDs covering a wide range of genres from sci-fi through horror to romantic comedies (I admit it. I’m a sucker for Meg Ryan.) I don’t get much time to watch them, and so many of them have sat on my shelves for years gathering dust. But curiously, when one of those films comes on the telly, I will more often than not make myself a cup of tea and watch it all the way through, adverts and all. Take tonight, for example. They’re showing Artificial Intelligence, which I’ve had on DVD for a couple of years. Whenever I feel like watching a movie, I usually skim over it and plump for one of my newer titles. Frankly, I don’t much feel like watching it again when I have hundreds of other movies to choose from. But when it’s handed to me on a plate, with a fixed start time, I suddenly decide “hmm, that sounds good” and I end up watching something I paid £16.99 for on TV for free. (Well, almost free.)
Why am I telling you all this? What has this got to do with software development? Well, think about your end users. If the applications you developed were available in the shops, amongst a choice of hundreds of similar applications built by other developers, would they buy it? Would they use it? Given a choice, would they choose your software?
But when they sit down at their PC, and your software is already installed and essentially handed to them on a plate, they’ll probably end up using it anyway. We’re funny like that. I don’t really know if Windows Media Player is better or worse than RealPlayer, but it’s already there and I use it by default. You should never underestimate even the most independently-minded person’s propensity for taking what they’re given, without question.
This is surely great news because if you’ve built a fairly mediocre application, all you have to do is make it readily available – and more accessible than anybody else’s solution – and the users will probably end up accepting it as the default.
Well, actually no, it’s not that great. If you’re the only hotel for miles around, and you’re always fully booked, you might be forgiven for thinking that you must be a really great hotel. The worst hotels I’ve stayed in have usually been the ones where there was little competition. And competition is the key here. If our software is the only choice – or the most accessible choice – we might be forgiven for thinking that we’ve written some really great software. In many organisations, the software they spent millions of pounds developing is the only choice by decree. Users are getting it, and they will use it, whether they like it or not. And they will probably put up with it – warts and all - simply because it’s there. Avoiding competition is a good way to get bad at what you do, and for the sake of both the developers and the users, perhaps organisations should open their IT projects up to more competition and be a little more savvy about choosing the best solutions, rather than always pushing the internal solution.
A Contractor from London
Published: Friday, February 10, 2006
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