The Insightful Troll

Rants and ruminations.

Finished Software

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Jose M. Gilgado writing on the beauty of finished software:

Our expectations for software are different from other products we use in our daily lives.

When we buy a physical product, we accept that it won’t change in its lifetime. We’ll use it until it wears off, and we replace it. We can rely on that product not evolving; the gas pedal in my car will always be in the same place.

However, when it comes to software, we usually have the ingrained expectations of perpetual updates. We believe that if software doesn’t evolve it’ll be boring, old and unusable. If we see an app with no updates in the last year, we think the creator might be dead.

This one of software’s advantages and also its curse. Good software will evolve at the pace the users demand - the important thing is that the interface stays consistent and honest to the use case.

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