A Lament for New Software

Jessie Scanlon of Business Week speaks with former Alias chief scientist Bill Buxton on his new book, Sketching User Experience.

While companies were very good at what Buxton calls "N+1" development, or pumping out improved versions of existing products, most were quite bad at developing the new products that are essential for sustainable long-term growth.

In the CAD business, "developing new products" is known as copying what everyone else is doing. CAD vendors see growth in PLM! Maintenance contacts! Stealing customers! Acquisitions!

Entire article is here: Why Products Fail.

Comments

[Evan Yares]

Buxton is largely right.

Too bad.

[Randall Newton]

Joy's Law of Innovation, stated by Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, can be summarized as "innovation happens elsewhere." It is why open systems and open standards are so important. As applications become stable and stale, it is the innovation that happens elsewhere that can give it new life.

[Tony in SV]

Well, I have one complaint: he's still focusing on the "shrink-wrap" software market. Most software development is in-house, and it has a very different set of concerns and problems.

There's much more to software development than Apple, Adobe, Alias, and Microsoft.