Woke up this morning to find two posts that echoed a common feeling:
Jonathan Schwartz: “As a software guy, here’s a simple (though often irritating) rule behind user oriented software: The language in which a product is written has nothing to do with the value it conveys. Coming from the company that produced Java technology, that probably sounds a little odd. But it’s a simple truth, especially when it comes to users: if the app’s no good, it’s no good, even if it’s implemented in Java. Or PHP. Or Rails.”
Ted Leung: “While I was watching the videos, some part of my brain overrode a bunch of things that I’ve spent a bunch of time writing about on this blog. Did I care that Aperture is written in a low level, mostly static language like Objective-C? Nope. Did it bother me that I couldn’t get the source code, or access the community of developers? Nope. I’ll probably change my mind about that once I return to my senses. But the visceral reaction that I had to Aperture is a big reminder that the final result matters a lot, not just the process and technology.”
OpenOffice and Aperture are creating value for customers and that’s what matters, certainly. On the other hand, I’m feeling just a bit let down because I cannot run OpenOffice on the Mac (not with the same quality as on other platforms anyway) and cannot run Aperture on Linux. And I cannot run Google Earth on either the Mac or Linux. But I can run Google Maps, Flickr and Basecamp on either OS X, Linux or Windows, without effort. And sometimes this is just what I need, even if the experience is less than perfect.
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