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April 01, 2004
Small, niche software
http://www.shirky.com/writings/situated_software.html
I think this is a lot closer to the kind of software that I want and like to develop. CPT definitely teaches toward the large scale application (probably rightfully so), but I bet a lot more of us end up working on applications like these. Not that those concepts aren't valuable, you just have to be able to pick out the valuable portions and apply them in different ways then you are taught.
One disagreement with the article is with MySQL. People have been developing these niche applications with Microsoft Access for a long time.
We've been killing conversations about software with "That won't scale" for so long we've forgotten that scaling problems aren't inherently fatal. The N-squared problem is only a problem if N is large, and in social situations, N is usually not large....
Now, though, the combination of good tools, talented users and the internet as a social stage makes the construction of such software simpler, the quality of the result better, and the delivery to the users as simple as clicking a link. The design center of a dozen users, so hard to serve in the past, may become normal practice.
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Businesses routinely ask teams of well-paid people to put hundreds of hours of work creating a single PowerPoint deck that will be looked at in a single meeting. The idea that software should be built for many users, or last for many years, are cultural assumptions not required by the software itself.
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Indeed, as a matter of effect, most software built for large numbers of users or designed to last indefinitely fails at both goals anyway. Situated software is a way of saying "Most software gets only a few users for a short period; why not take advantage of designing with that in mind?"
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Now, though, I think we're starting to see a new software niche, where communities get form-fit tools for very particular needs, tools that fail most previous test of design quality or success, but which nevertheless function well, because they are so well situated in the community that uses them.
Posted by mikel at April 1, 2004 08:18 AM
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