“We’re surrounded by anonymous, poorly made objects. It’s tempting to think its because the people who use them don’t care – just like the people who make them. But what [Apple has] shown is that people do care. It’s not just about aesthetics. They care about things that are thoughtfully conceived and well made.”
Jony Ive (referenced here).
As you undoubtedly know, Jony Ive is the industrial design genius behind many of Apple’s ground-breaking products like the iPod, iPad, etc. You could say he knows a bit about designing products.
I’d love to see what he would make of our OSS. I suspect that he’d claim they (and I’m using the term “they” very generically here) are poorly made objects. But I’d also love the be a fly on the wall to watch how he’d go about re-designing them.
It’s doing an extreme disservice to say that all OSS are poorly designed. From a functionality perspective, they are works of art and incredible technical achievements. They are this MP3 player:
Brilliantly engineered to provide the user with a million features.
But when compared with Apple’s iPods????
The iPods actually have less functionality than the MP3 player above. But that’s part of what makes them incredibly intuitive and efficient to use.
Looking at the quote above from Ive, there’s one word that stands out – CARE. As product developers, owners, suppliers, integrators, do we care sufficiently about our products? This question could be a little incendiary to OSS product people, but there are different levels of care that I’ve seen taken in the build of OSS products:
What other areas have I missed? In what other ways do we (or not) take the level of care and focus that Apple does? Leave us a comment below.
Have you ever had an OSS or BSS project that’s impacted by poor data quality? The problem of data integrity gets raised on almost every
“One of my favorite things about designing software is designing the defaults. The defaults define the experience for everyone out of the box. And, therefore,
Have you ever been tasked with mapping out the processes for the telco you work for? Either as a way of documenting current state, or
In the last week alone, I’ve had two potent reminders that the world of OSS is simply (pun intended) too complex. This manifests in many
Here at Passionate About OSS, we are exactly that – Passionate About OSS (Operational Support Systems). We’re also passionate about BSS, NMS, or any other names you call the tools that help to operationalise your network.
2 Responses
Time for a bit of root cause analysis.
What did Apple NOT CARE about? I daresay the desperate scramble to have the biggest, bestest feature set to sit in the promotional material.
If a technology vendor pushes out enough apparent capability, no matter how minimally built or shallow in real functionality or difficult to use, and tells you that is super-good then it must be. The temptation is huge – and many give in to it.
Sadly, history pours fuel on the fire – yes, the holy grail – market share. Apple has a strong band of followers, some almost fanatical, but numbers…?
The story repeats in other parts of the technology/software industry and I think it isn’t going away.
Hi Steve,
Exactly right.
My next blog, scheduled for release, dives a bit deeper into that using a long-tail diagram to help tell the story.
Your implied question still vexes me though – Do current functionality-based selection / procurement practices in OSS perpetuate the need to tick hundreds of boxes (ie the right side of the long tail), even though many of those functions don’t have a material impact?