I was in Pasadena visiting with Andrew Maltsev of Ejelta to discuss design of the new web forum object to Xao Software. Of course you might be thinking,"Yet another forum? Isn't phpNuke enough?" Well yes and no. In designing the forum object, we took a close look at what everyone else was doing. Remarkable most of the forum software out there looked remarkably similar. It was as though every developer that decided to develop a forum package did the exact same survey and wrote their feature set based on it and called it a day.
This seems to the common way to write software today. Open Office & WordPerfect are perfect examples of trailing the leader, MS Office. In a way this make it easy to set your feature set and decided your development path. The problem is that as a result software that fills a specific niche begins to look the same, and act the same. This can be a benefit as similar user interfaces allow users to easily use either application. Of course this doesn't really lead to new radical feature set development but something just close enough to be familar and different enough to be frustrating.
So does design dictate software features or does the software function in our version of "nature vs.nuture." The answer is very clearly both. Forums look a certain way because that's the way that people expect forums to look. Slashdot which offers a great deal of personalization of the software for each individual user. Most everyone I know who visits Slashdot views it in nearly the same way. I think the effort customization takes exceeds it's minor benefits. Clearly software in a specific niche is going to look the other critters inhabiting the same part of the software ecosystem. However just because there are certain functional requirements that dictate design, doesn't mean we should stop there. Most of the time however, that is exactly what happens. However many software packages are designed by following a leader in the market and hoping that me too will minimize adaption headaches. So once an evolutionary niche is carved out by a piece of software, evolutionary momentum drags everyone along it's path.
Of course it doesn't have to be this way in design. After Andrew and I discussed the required features based on our observation of competing products, we immediately launched into a discussion of what we disliked about their products and what sorts of shortcomings they have. This then lead into some pretty innovative feature ideas. One lead to an entire new business idea (currently under development). So just matching a current offering is one thing, finding it's flaws another.
This is why so often dislocating technologies do not come from established industry players. Established players such as Microsoft Office are too far wrapped up in their model to think radically. Since such dislocation often threatens an existing revenue stream or entrenched development team so they creep along slowly and stealthly until some notices, "We aren't selling as many licenses as we did this same quarter last year." Eventually this new technology stealths in like a small mammal and completely dislocates and destroys most of the previous market. Of course part of the market will still exist dinosaur like for a number of years.
I think we beginning to see the some of the dislocating technology right now for the traditional office suite, namely a suite of web enabled tools such as wiki, and web based calendering. Over time these will likely evolve into a useful replacement for Office and "Office Like" technologies. Office and it's clones are mainly about document production. While it's useful to produce a nice looking document, it's much better to actually product useful work. In a networked economy, more network centric apps are more useful. It's still the early stages though and MS might adjust. I think its much more likely that that this sort of growth will occur underneath MS's radar. MS major issue with Office is that no seems to be upgrading. This is hardly surprising as far as I can tell there is no major difference between Office 97 and Office 2003. So their interest is on selling upgrades as opposed to inventing the next paradigm for collaborative work. Indeed inventing the next paradigm will require them to "knife the baby" and potentially destroy an existing revenue stream.
