Technological Philosophers vs Project Management
Not just anyone with great idea can produce the next web service which everyone will die for overnight. These are the ideals of “technological philosophers”. This process is a fallacy and dream that is as rare as becoming the next sports superstar. Reality is that it takes months of planning, design, development, and financing for a team, never mind an individual to create a web service comparable to the Roman gods. In an interview with Aaron Patzer, the founder of Mint.com (http://vimeo.com/6960507), he states that “It’s all in the execution. A good idea is really a dime a dozen.” This is said where the entire video is explaining the execution of his good idea.
With this fallacy in the minds of hundreds of individuals nationwide, and it can be quite infectious to the persons actually planning and financing projects. This is why you must plan everything accordingly before going out there and embarking on a development venture. Research what you are planning to do, learn about what can be done, and market for what will be done.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, neither was Google.
A person who is unfamiliar with the processes of development might look at a web service which they feel is simple such as Google. After asking a few people around me what their implementation of and indexer and search engine such as Google’s would be, the general consensus is as follows.
I would simply index all the sites that I could link to from every site I found where websites are purchased.
I would download all the information from that site and store it.
I would then save it to search each time somebody tried to search from the search engine user side.
Then for the user search site I simply need a box for text and a button, and a logo.
I would search the stored text on my server when someone requested it.
This is a perfect example of the expectation of results from technology without paying mind to the implementation or complexity. It just works.
This mentality is killing the perception of the development process and engineering. This can be attributed to the UX practice and design becoming so efficient that new generations of people are expecting results. Applications are scaled to be simple for the non technical users. Now, proclaimed “technical users” are users who simply know the in’s and out’s of different GUIs, not the logical operations of a given application.
The divide between this mentality and project creation through completion must be closed. Rule of thumb for early development. Functionality > Appearance. Any product in it’s early stage is not the best looking product, but it works.
Google is a multimillion dollar company which now develops and maintains hundreds of applications across multiple platforms. Everything, but the search engine aside, the planning and implementation involved in taking this search engine from a research project in 1996 to what it is today has taken extensive research, design, and implementation of back-end development.
The same goes for any other major web service, application, etc.
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