At the end of a Business Innovation Factory talk, Walt Mossberg and Jason Fried (from 37 Signals) talk about Open Source Software. Video here, at approximately 3/4 from the beginning.
Here's a quick n'dirty transcript of a small part of the talk:
W. Mossberg: Let's spend the last three minutes talking about why open source is a failure. (laughters) And here's what I mean. It's not a failure in the IT department of big corporations, where people from Mars run those IT departments and the same people from the same planet write the open source software, that's fine.
There is one huge open source successful called Firefox which is the only open source program I recommend. As big a success it is, it still has what, fifteen percent of the browser market, something like that.
My theory is open source is a failure because... they can't stop adding features and they can't start making it simple because they're geeks themselves and... they don't associate enough with regular people. Is that wrong or right? (laughters)
They would not know -I mean this is a gross generalization of course- but a lot of people who write open source software would not know a normal non-techy consumer from a bag of Cheetos.
J. Fried: I think it's partially absolutely right, but I've some more to add up.
Initially open source is great for infrastructure stuff, for server software, for database software, stuff like that, the techy stuff. It's miserable for consumer facing products. For a couple of reasons and one is the people keep adding stuff of course. But the other thing I think is far more fundamental is the fact that the experience is not considered. The consumer experience is not at the forefront of open source software. The forefront of open source software is democratized software development. And if you're thinking about building a product and you're thinking about the software development side of it, you're gonna miss the mark. If you're thinking about the customer experience side of it, the interface and the way things flow and the way thing look and the way things work you're gonna end up with a hopefully great product.
The way we build thing is from the interface first. We do the entire interface -mostly- the entire interface of our products first, and then we have the programers hook the stuff up so that works. And we found that model to be great because your fundamental customer experience almost 100% of the time is from what the customers see, because your customers see the interface, that's what they use, they don"t care about the code, what they see is what the software is. Open source is all the way around, the developers build stuff and then they hire hopefully -which they usually don't even, but- they bring in designers to paint the walls at the end. And paint the walls at the end is not how you design something great. Design is to be integrating from the absolute start of the project all the way through the end and open source doesn't have that.
They also talk about leadership and group decisions, but this is for another group ^_^
Comments
Wow, that is a lot of
Wow, that is a lot of generalization from a couple guys who have never worked on an open source project.
Well
I don't know about Mossberg, but the guys at 37 Signals created Ruby on Rails. But it doesn't necessarily means what Fried says is not BS, of course ^_^
scripted as hell
Uh whoa, sounded like a plug off the 37signals product page, i've heard this story before, why should i care?
OSS is not a product it's a tool anyways, duh. They basically had to try and ruffle some feathers or else there entire conversation would be completely irrelevant, which it was anyways.
Don't get me wrong i'm a huge fan of Getting Real, but why bother barfing up the same old BS?
Is this the type of innovation we can expect from this market leader? I see no reason why we shouldn't just totally sunset it's influence.
TravisC
PIM stylez?
Spoke with some people at drupalcamp that were working on a PIM. You out there, you listening? We need a solid collaborative install profile.
TravisC
So right, yet oh so wrong...
Hmmm. Me feels a longer post coming on, but for now...
For the life of me I cannot understand how this is specific to OSS, or even to software:
I was a Sys Admin for eight years, and the first thing I thought when I read this was "Is he talking about Microsoft?" But even there, he's totally off mark, because no software or complex product that requires some level of sophistication is geared towards "consumer experience" out-of-the-box, instead it takes support geared towards the consumer's experience to make a product or service "friendly". What made me good as a tech was not my knowledge of the systems I was working with, but my knowledge of how the people I was serving felt about them (could they work without interruption? were they afraid of, or empowered by their technology?). Take a look at the big box retailers who are making money, hand over fist, selling crap tech support to people who buy crap computers from them. It seems to me that when you start to look at it OSS might suffer more from a lack of huge marketing budgets than it does "consumer experience". On the OSS side, take a look at IBM, whose business model seems heavily dependent on making OSS friendly for large, corporate clients.
And don't even get me started on installing that new TiVO... ;-)
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
More from 37 Signals
From David Heinemeier Hansson to be precise, and this time it feels a lot less like a cheap shot at OSS. He's the creator of Ruby on Rails.
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/695-ask-37signals-why-os-x-and-not-linux
Consider what they are saying
Almost every answer to the quote of mossberg Fried does but one thing: trying to derogate them and treating what they say as nonsense.
Well, surely they speak in a delibarately provocative tone. But what do they want to say? It is just that user experience is considered too little in OSS development. This does not mean that it is treated like a stepchild in some commercial products just as well.
What is definitely true: the success of firefox as an open source product is uneqalled. The only other pieces of software that could come up to this are Linux itself and maybe Open Office.
And the difference is: do we want to see drupal a bit more like a product and sell it to the market? What almost everyone here does is sell drupal services to the market. But drupal itself is seen like a tool that has to be cut into shape. If we are OK with that, why is it that the enormous success of Joomla is an itch we cannot scratch?
Life is a process
Life is a journey, not a destination
I slept on it, and it's just as wrongheaded...
Nobody here is arguing that Drupal shouldn't be more usable (this is, after all, the usability group), but the comments that started this thread don't really say anything about the relative ease of use of OSS vs. commercial software/products.
First and foremost, there is an assumption that most commercial products are "usable", out-of-the-box, by your average Joe, which is just silly. Most software packages are not meant to be usable for people who haven't been taught how to use them (i.e. AutoCAD, SPSS, MSQL, IIS, Oracle, Windows Server, the list really does go on and on) and can't even be used by people who know them without a tech who can install and configure them for the end user. So, from this perspective, for your average web visitor or site admin, is IIS less user friendly than Apache? Is MySQL less user friendly that MSSQL? How about for the consumer of the product? Is the BBC less user friendly than the NYTimes for their readers, and if so is this due to the backend, design, both? I'd say that 90% of what gets termed "usability" when it comes to web sites really is design, and I don't see anything holding Drupal sites back from being designed well (and the theming changes in 6 will make Drupal a lot more design friendly).
I'd also like to point out that what keeps businesses from using OSS has nothing to do with usability, and everything to do with accountability and service (i.e. who do they call to yell at when something breaks, and can they deploy something across their wide and diverse networks and have it behave in a relatively stable way).
I'm not saying that Drupal shouldn't strive to be more usable, it absolutely should, and it has made great strides in that direction. But to say that it is not a success is hilarious, and just plain wrong, esp. when you consider its nearest consumer rivals (and as far as I know, Joomla is open source).
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
Targets
First I think we have to keep the context in mind. I assume when they say OSS is a failure, they mean for a broad audience, and non-tech people. And you're right when you point out that all OSS (and commercial) software is not for a broad audience. I wouldn't expect Apache to become more friendly to my mom, but she's not the target anyway.
Drupal, like AutoCAD, Photoshop and Oracle, has historically been aimed at a niche (correct me if I'm wrong). It's was a tool for "web builders" (us), and the entry price was knowing php, html, css, etc. For us the UI is less important than what's under the hood, and even if we think some admin pages are a bit clunky, if the learning curve can be steep, it won't stop us from using Drupal. But it seems to me that these days the audience is becoming wider, and we now expect non expert people to use Drupal. If we really want them to create their own blog or personal website or even small company website by themselves, the current UI is not good enough. They'd just like it to work in a way that's logical for them, not from a database/module/API standpoint.
Usability is both low level stuff: ergonomics, user testing, etc, that work at an almost unconscious, ambient level; and design, GUI, at a more obvious and conscious level. Both are important of course. I think what most Drupal developers mean when they talk about usability is this low-level approach about control types, organization, while designers will naturally think more about visual aspects. Of course it's a generalization, it's not at all black and white, just a tendency. My point is, for end users perceived complexity is as important as the actual complexity, and most of what's perceived is visual design ("Ooo nice") and familiarity ("Where's the page tree?"). I think that's why other CMSes are more successful for "the people", they feel like they're friendly and easy. And perception is as good as reality.
Agree 100%
...and that's why I'm a member of this group. We need to make strides towards making Drupal more usable, but is precisely its success that has increased that need. The question of who the usability has to be improved for is the key issue, imo. Or, to put it another way, we should be discussing how to make it better for specific types of user, as well as improving it on the whole.
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
Focus on Achieving Great Design in OSS
From my perspective, Fried et al produce lots of wonderful software and lots of hot air. There is a tendency to apply the particular circumstances of their own success to all software in all situations. I just don't buy the idea that there is any one right way to build great software. The question isn't, "Can OSS be user friendly?" but "How can OSS be user friendly?" Firefox proves that point.
Rather than making a blanket assertion that OSS can't produce good user-facing software and then writing Firefox off as an mystical anomaly, it makes more sense to me to look at the actual circumstances that brought about their (and other) success. I did find the video interesting and thought-providing, but perhaps we could move back into the "how" thread.
The question of how OSS communities can best achieve clear visual interfaces and avoid feature creep is a good one, I think. My own inclination is that community efforts should probably be coordinated and prioritized through some kind of centralized decision-making authority (see http://groups.drupal.org/node/6747). Good design (in the code or in the UI) is often about constraining, limiting and as Fried points out, just plain saying "no." It might be helpful, therefore, to appoint or elect a design lead for the purposes of our current improvement cycle. Maybe others have ideas as to how to best achieve this kind of leadership or even other equally effective ways to produce similar constraints?
Another, perhaps more achievable task, would be to draft the open letter to solicit responses from design communities as Amazon has pointed out. I'd personally like for us to put our some kind of request on IxDA, which has massive resources in the area of interactive design talent. Let's see if we can get some of those key players involved in our project. I'd be happy to help out with putting a draft letter together, proofing, etc.
I do think that we also need to consider how best to take advantage of the talent of these people and other designers in our own community once we have their interest. Maybe we just need to get a nice neat list of system features that could be improved and also that stand a chance of actually changing? Does such a list exists already? If not, we might consider putting together some kind of survey and prioritize features that get the most votes for improvement?
This has gotten a little longish, but it does make me think we need to put together some kind of basic plan together as to how to proceed.
Strategy
Our dictator is obviously Dries. Obviously he is not an expect in everything, so beyond that the hierarchy of responsibility tends to focus around respect and a willingness to do lots of work in an area. This is quite well established in the coding side of things, but in design and usability it is very young and emerging. But I am confident it will emerge and we will end up listening to the person who proves themselves to be the best decision maker. But you can't elect someone. That is not how the community works.
Drawing more people into the task of Drupal UI development is a good thing of course. But I would be very uncomfortable if someone was being paid to do so, unless indirectly.
Our current effort to get organised is to create specific issues at drupal.org/project/issues/user_experience
I'm not sure how this will pan out in reality since we are having to experiment a lot with how to organise ourselves. But there is movement now at long last.
-
www.alanpritt.com
Strategy
I agree with pretty everything you've said here, and I do think that leadership will probably emerge here as it has in the past elsewhere. I only meant to throw a couple of out-of-box ideas out there in response to the need for a little more organization. But you're probably right, there is an existing practice to build upon. Regarding fees for service, I hadn't even considered this as a possibility, so I agree with you there too.
don't dictate, invite
You/they are right. However, this is not the cathedral, this is the bazaar. Let's create an environment in which good usability will happen. Coding guidelines for developers already exist. So how about user-interface guidelines, page and form templates, perhaps the Drupal API itself that supports good usability?
There are two D's that explain this
/snark
Interesting how Firefox somehow doesn't count, even though they admit it's a stand-out exception. Is there a better browser than Firefox?
Laura
pingVision, LLC
PINGV | Strategy • Design • Drupal Development
indeed
(After reading about disruptive technology...) it reminds me of adults making fun of their awkward teenage children.
subscribing
subscribing
Bevan/