roeland´s working blog

'Asylum' and 'we the media' review

2005-10-30T07:37:00.000-08:00

I think the 'asylum' book was quite interesting, especially because it provides a new view on (software)designing (for me at least). Although I found it fun to read, I think the main audience of this book should be software engineers, because they're the ones making the most mistakes when it comes to interactive designing as Alan Cooper puts it. He pointed out some things about nowadays software that actually makes allot of sense, but didn't occur to me as a flaw while using the actual software, such as the repetitive question whether I want to save the document I'm working on, or apparent inability of a program to remember the most used functions on my behalf, thus making me scroll trough the menu bars over and over again.
I found ‘We the media’ a bit less interesting to read, simply because of the repetitive, and almost historical way of describing the blog-history. It nonetheless introduced me in the blog world as I never would have seen it without this book. I thought blogs were only used as a way of sharing opinions with people you already knew, but not on a worldwide scale. Apparently I missed out on the whole blog thing, although I do spend allot of time surfing the net. It could of course be that I think of blogs only in the layout we used for this course (from blogger.com), while they actually come in many tastes and colours.

2005-10-14T06:53:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned I a mail to Mattias two days ago, I (and other students with me) haven't received our copies of Boohoo yet. I ordered it together with Christoffer Inman two weeks ago, but Amazon didn't seem to have a large enough stock of the book.

Thanks to Joel I have been able to read some of the book already (I'm on page 100 now, chapter 5), but because of our exam on Swedish language Wednesday and our paper for Swedish society deadline which was this morning, I wasn't able to read much more than this.

For what it's worth:

I like the concept of the book: explaining how and why one specific company who tried to take advantage of the internet's rising popularity seemed to have failed in doing so. However, the first hundred pages seemed noting more than a summary of all the banks, Venture capitalists and analysts who might have come in handy in the process of starting the company. This made it feel more like a crash course in corporate finance than an interesting tale on the burst of the dot.com bubble.

Because I already know what will happen (the company will be one of the first major dot.com bankruptcies), you read the book from a different perspective: I was trying to figure out what they might have been doing wrong on their way to the top. But because there are mentioned so many accountancy firms, bankers, investors and so on, I almost lost my interest in reading any further. I think this book might have been a nice guideline for other dot.com companies starting up right after the Boo.hoo disaster, but nothing more than that. I sure hope the company will have their launch soon (in the book that is) so the story will get more interesting for me (as a laymen in Business terms)

Of course it is almost ironic that the book we're reading tells the story about a online store, with all its problems to overcome (find suppliers, create a stock, advertise,...), and that I haven't received my copy of these books I ordered trough another online shop, Amazon. They all seem to have the same problems when it comes to delivering: the client is never sure whether the item (s)he just ordered is actually in stock, and will be delivered in the specified time. I know for sure that from now on I will be even more sceptical when it comes to e-shopping.

I will post an actual reviw on the book as soon as possible,

thanks for understanding

My thoughts on ‘revenge of the nerds’.

2005-09-30T02:36:00.000-07:00

I must say there aren’t too many things in this film I didn’t already know about. But what it did stress was the ‘false minds’ of the big software companies (Apple, Microsoft, …) in using ideas someone else had come up with (e.g.: the Graphical User Interface that was firstly invented by Apple for its Macintosh, but Bill gates was the first to implement it in a hugely successful PC, therefore claiming it as their big breakthrough). What also appeared to me was that none of the real pioneers in the computer business were given any recognition when they made their first and most significant products: Gates writing the code for BASIC, Steve Jobs building the first ‘successful’ home PC (the Apple I). Both of them had to persist immensely in order to get their idea from the drawing table up to the market. Ironically it was only after each of them received some competition from other companies who saw their chance for the big money that the real geniuses in them arose: an amazing marketing strategy. The fact that this doesn’t necessarily mean ‘honest business’ soon became clear when people started making clone-PC’s based on the already popular IBM computer.

If it wasn’t for these pioneers, we wouldn’t have had this class at all, let alone stand the way we have them: PowerPoint presentation with recorded producer output, beamers, marratech, pingpong, streaming video’s,… Of course these products aren’t perfect and they’ll most likely never be. But we can’t just blame that on the technology: it still has to be built by real people with real limitations.