We’ve said “if you’re not paying for the product you are the product” lots and lots recently but we really meant “if you’re not paying for the product you are paying for the product, just in ways you don’t recognize” and I’m thinking about that right now because we used to pay for operating system and application software updates and maybe that was a more valuable part of that system than we have given it credit for being.
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Of course, this communication flow of yore was paced extremely differently! Updates weren’t released multiple times a day in a rolling fashion, they were glacial in comparison. They might release a hotfix to address a bad bug before the next release was scheduled to go out, but a release a year was plenty, if that. In fact, at two of the early tech jobs I had, we had two separate software development teams, one for working on the release and one for producing hotfixes as part of customer support. then the hotfixes would get merged into the release tree once the release team had fully blessed the fix (it received a cursory review by the release team before the hotfix could go out, but they’d do a more rigorous review before merging it into the release tree wholesale).
@djsundog thinking a lot lately about all that earnest propaganda around Achieving Velocity and Accelerating Delivery and whatnot in the years ramping up to our current hellscape
But that slower pacing, too, seems to have some under-examined value that is only coming to light under the severe lack of its presence.
It does not escape me that the shift to “move fast, break things” mode (which Zuck was only saying out loud what had already started a lot of other places because he’s never had a novel idea that I can tell) was driven by the same folk pushing LLMs down everyone’s throats.
When all targets are moving targets and going fast is more important than being correct, things are bound to be pretty haphazard.
So, much like I rail about decisions to copy the designs of the social media platforms we’re trying to avoid here in our voidspace, why are we continuing to copy the software development platforms of the corporations we loathe the output from? Why build our communal efforts around their craptastic profit maximalist worldview?
Slow the fuck down. Make small useful things in small groups. Things that build on other small useful things built by small groups. Release it and then start thinking about what’s going to go into the next version, if there needs to be a next version. Keep an eye on what folks are saying in case you need to issue a hotfix. Stop dribbling out every little tweak and idea you have and look to having a shared, cohesive, comprehensible vision for what correct looks like for your software instead. Then take the time to make it correct. You’ll be happier, your users will be happier, I’d be willing to bet on it.
The way I remember it, when Microsoft released Windows 98, there were a whole bunch of Windows 95 users who looked at it and it’s upgrade price ($79?ish? I think?) and said, “what, nah, that looks like ass and it really doesn’t do anything new that I can’t already do on Windows 95, no thanks” and simply did not buy the upgrade, and then soon thereafter Microsoft released Windows 98 SE to add more new stuff to try and get some of the reluctant Windows 95 users to be interested in the upgrade again. This is from memory and not necessarily historically accurate. But it’s merely an example of the difference in communication between the userbase of a piece of software and the software’s producer, and it’s a very different communication than that of “you can reach out directly to the producer at any time for any reason to express yourself personally to them and they will simply tell you to fuck off to your face”.