Alan Cooper and the Goal Directed Design Process The heart of the problem, he concludes, is that the people responsible for developing software products don’t know precisely what constitutes a good product. It follows that they also do not know what processes lead to a good product. In short, they are operating by trial and error, with outcomes like customer satisfaction achieved by little more than blind luck. By Hugh Dubberly, first published AIGA GAIN Journal, 2001
posted by infini on Dec 13, 2012 - 28 comments

Microsoft’s low-octane swan song was nothing if not symbolic of more than a decade littered with errors, missed opportunities, and the devolution of one of the industry’s innovators into a “me too” purveyor of other companies’ consumer products. ... How did this jaw-dropping role reversal happen? How could a company that stands among the most cash-rich in the world, the onetime icon of cool that broke IBM’s iron grip on the computer industry, have stumbled so badly in a race it was winning? [more inside]
posted by Egg Shen on Jul 26, 2012 - 124 comments

Marc Andreessen thinks Software is Eating the World
posted by vanar sena on Sep 15, 2011 - 86 comments

"Developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no." - Not long after saddling it's own iOS client with some unpopular new "features" Twitter is saying no to the development of new competing clients. Existing clients such as Twitterific and Echofon should be unaffected.
posted by Artw on Mar 12, 2011 - 42 comments

Google began inviting volunteers to a public preview test of their new Wave web-based collaborative email and document communications platform yesterday, which enables users to "communicate and work together in real time." Initial reviews this past May seemed positive. (Previously) [more inside]
posted by zarq on Oct 1, 2009 - 75 comments

The future of Google, Apple, and Microsoft.
posted by Tlogmer on May 13, 2005 - 40 comments

I think I just melted my irony meter. The radically innovative new plan at VA Linux is to reach profitability by selling proprietary software. (Larry Augustin has invented Microsoft!) But not just any software; they're going to sell the software which operates SourceForge, one of the largest repositories of open source software in the world. And this is now going to become the core business; they may even change the company name. I can't wait to see what the folks on SlashDot think of this! (VA Linux also operates SlashDot.)
posted by Steven Den Beste on Aug 23, 2001 - 18 comments