Too Much Suckage

In looking around the web today, a theme occurred to me that is near and dear to my heart.

There is too much suckage.

Tech impresario Tim O'Reilly says it in one way.
Brilliant tech market strategist Umair Haque says it another way.
Startup igniter Paul Graham says it yet another way.

But the point is that the web world is really delivering crap right now. Paul and Umair blame VCs. Umair blames the rest of us as well. Tim doesn't blame anyone directly, but by telling us what we should be doing, and what not to do, which is what everyone else is doing, he really is blaming all of us as well.

The point is this. For the last several years we have been focused on free doohickeys to poke and prod and tweet and tag. And some of that is good. But damn! How about actually trying to do something really useful like making things that people actually *want* to pay for and actually charging them? Or if its free, at least figuring out how to do some stuff that has the potential to really make a difference.

Are we all so devoid of creativity and insight that the best we can come up with is some new mashup on some old mashup all mashed up?

When I initially named this blog at the beginning of 2007, I called it "Why does everything suck?" not because the genre of products people were making sucked, but because my view was, and still is, that product design is generally so poor that a product like the iPhone can come along and blow away incumbents who have billions of dollars in marketshare to lose. The iPhone phenomenon is only possible because there was way way too much suckage in phone software.

But now the problem has spread to not just the micro/design issue, but to the macro/markets issue. We are building lots of useless me too stuff. It doesn't matter how well you design something if it is useless anyway. There is only so much Minwax you can apply to a turd.

And so, I join my fellow complainers in saying enough with the suckage. Lets do some stuff that actually matters again. Please!