I want it now daddy!
That is what drives us. It is what drives every financial meltdown. It is the gorging on stuff that is trivially accessible, while foregoing that which, regardless of value, presents too much challenge. It is the seeking of the low hanging, but tasteless, while eschewing the slightly beyond easy reach but ever so much more delicious. At some point the market always figures out if you have a basketful of flavorless fruit. The apples look like apples, but taste like cardboard. And no matter how easy they were to pick, no one wants cardboard apples.
But the easy way out is, unfortunately, vastly more appealing than the more circuitous route. And so it is with the crisis of confidence in the banking system, and the much less discussed crisis of ideas in the tech economy. Why put several years of design and re-thinking and engineering into something when you can graduate with your freshly minted MBA, partner with some PHP hack, and join the Web 2.0 generation. After all its what all the cool kids are doing.
The market should have punished this trend long ago. And it did briefly after the Web 1.0 bubble burst. But then we got stupid and we forgot how ridiculous we thought the quest for revenue-less eyeballs seemed in the last tech melt down.
So what is worrying me is that there is lots of talk in the tech community about impending danger, but as I see it the focus is all wrong. Yes, in these times it is always prudent to cut expenses to maximize your runway. But the problem is not running out of money. The problem is not doing something that is worth any money. And truth be told, its not that hard to figure that out. The problem is the incredible denial that so many people engage in when they are picking all those cardboard apples. Just because your buddy sold a bucket of cardboard apples to someone who P.T. Barnum might call a sucker, doesn't mean you can too. Its like musical chairs. When the music stops there will be more people than chairs and if you have a basketful of cardboard apples, you are going to be left standing.
And so my message now is about patience and quality. Stop focusing on getting rich, and start focusing on doing something that makes a real difference to someone in the real world. And while you are at it, building something that cannot be copied by a couple of teenage PHP coders over a few weekends would probably be smart too.
3 comments:
For once I'm almost, almost mind you, agreeing with you on this one... with one major exception: give me one web application or service than can not be easily implemented in PHP!
I know there's a lot of ambiguity over the word "easily" but still. I can't think of any webapp I use that isn't either already PHP powered OR could be. Facebook, gmail, Amazon...
PHP is popular for many reason one being that its very versatile and extensable language. You don't have drivers to access your UNIverse DB, roll your own in C and install to your PHP. Same goes for many things, just check out PECL and PEAR.
Surely someone of your experience knows that in virtually all the popular programming languages of the day that just about anything you can do in one you can do in another.
But at least its nice to see you having a dig at "revenue-less eyeball"-ers again. Another glib throw-away comment about how large numbers of business have non-profit or non-income models... like social networking sites "funded" by adverts
I am really not complaining about PHP. It could be any language. The point was about the trivial effort required to build so many things, not the language, which I would agree is not really the issue. The thing is that PHP is sort of the lowest common denominator language, but I have nothing really against it.
Good post, but since much of what drove the bubble was venture-funded greed, how do you get out of this pump-and-dump cycle?
Is it that we need more companies with the creative and work ethic of 37signals?
Post a Comment