Why is progress in computer software so glacial?

It seems that we're still living out the tail-end of Romanticism. Nowhere is this more evident in the UK than in the popular obsession with cookery, and everything which appertains to it. Cooks, cooking, and cookery books dominate the bestseller lists and the TV schedules. It's the country's prime artistic medium and means of self-expression, and the public is infatuated with celebrity chefs and their dymamic, anti-conventional, artist-hero personas. Gordon Ramsay is Byron, and Heston Blumenthal is Shelley (in the sense of Shelley's experiments with electricity and magnetism, not his interest in proto-socialism, casual sex with jailbait, and advocacy of vegetarianism).

Behind the scenes, of course, things are rather different from the romantic-hero image. Deluxe restaurants are slickly-run operations, far more regimented and rigorous than the average business. The working day is very long, and precisely scheduled. There are complicated and well-protected supply chains. Marketing is vital. There's a clear line of command, and everyone's job is a small cog in the big machine - clear, repeatable, endlessly repeated. The temperatures are sweltering but, in spirit, the chef de cuisine, sous chef, chef de partie, rotisseur, second chef, aboyeur etc. all need to be "cucumber-cool machine minders" (Auden, Horae Canonicae).

Apart from a complete lack of public interest, the position in IT is almost identical. The public perception - inasmuch as there is one - is of the lone hacker, the guru. The reality is a series of highly segmented jobs, of increasingly minute specialisation. No one "knows about computers", or is competent to do more than a handful of jobs in the field. The system administrators can't program, and the programmers would cause utter chaos if they were allowed to fiddle with your company's IT infrastructure. Each of the programmers has an area of specialisation about which the others know little or nothing. The boss can't do any of what his team does. (The more someone earns in IT, the less likely they are to be able to fix your computer.)

In this segmented world, most of the larger entities which produce software - either for internal use, or for sale - separate out the jobs of designing the software and writing the actual code. (Most of them segment things still further, and have one person to identify a "business need" and another to design the software which meets that need. Someone else then codes it. Salaries go in descending order.)

These designers (mostly) can't write code. They (mostly) know no more about programming than you do - barring a sort of cargo-cult knowledge acquired from sitting next to the bearded blokes in T-shirts every day.

Therefore, the designers don't know what's technologically possible and impossible. They only know what they've seen done before. Their designs are necessarily mimetic. They'll produce solid, sensible designs in an accepted mould all day long, but they're never going to innovate. Their employers like this. They're risk-averse. That's why they segment the jobs. Which is fine for them, but it means that progress in computer software en masse is glacial.

Therefore, innovation and improvement in computer software almost always comes when there's no - or very, very little - separation between the people designing the software and the people writing the code. That tends to imply small, young companies - early Apple, or early Google. They keep the fire burning as they grow larger by buying other small, young companies (though Google have tried to institutionalise the phenomenon through their famous "20% time").

Or Matchpeg. We'll never have a job title including the words "Analyst" or "Architect". "Product Manager" is also verboten. Deliver results.

(Part of an occasional series on matters technological. It beats doing real work.)

Why doesn't web-based software make use of the right mouse button?

A brief investigation of why it's so rare to see web applications which make use of the right mouse button. Yes, there are lots of reasons not covered here, and numbers #1 to #3 are pretty obvious. Part of an occasional series on matters technological. It beats doing real work.

Reason #1: effort

Handling the right mouse button in web pages is a bit fiddly. Some developers don't know how to, or can't be bothered. It's lots more work than just putting in a hyperlink.

Reason #2a: transient user base

On the whole, people spend much more time using desktop application A than any web-based application B. There's a pretty small number of business-critical, use-it-every-minute-of-the-day web applications. Very few clock up even an hour of usage per user per week. In other words, very few web applications have any "power users".

The traditional problem in desktop software is how you advertise to the user that right-clicking is available.

This problem gets much harder when you're dealing with a web application which people only use occasionally, haven't been trained on, and want to be able to use "intuitively". You don't have time or receptiveness on your side to explain that right-clicking is available.

Reason #2b: not what users expect

And so there's a feedback effect. Developers don't put right-clicks into web-based software. Therefore, users don't expect them. Therefore, developers don't put them in.

Reason #3: blame Apple

Everyone demonstrates web-based applications running on Macs. Many (most?) Macs have single-button mice. Ctrl+click is a pain in the neck.

Reason #4: effort (part 2)

Firms which produce web-based software tend to have less formal documentation procedures than firms which produce desktop software. Documentation is not cool; it's not Web 2.0.

The alternative to providing a right-click (e.g. plus pop-up menu) will often be a whole extra configuration screen/dialog. This extra screen would need to documented and designed in advance, approved, coded, sent back for re-design when the uber-product manager doesn't like it, re-approved, re-coded, and probably needs all sorts of extra pages in the help file as well.

In other words: if your documentation procedures are strict, putting in a right-click is generally less hassle than the alternatives. So, desktop software tends towards having a minimal number of "busy" screens (whereas web applications tend towards lots of simple screens, for a number of other reasons including minimising/shaping bandwidth usage).

NEW feature - analysis of workflow item progress

We've added a new feature to the analysis of workflow items. In addition to analysing the results of a search by current owner, creator, workflow stage etc. you can also now analyse the progress of the workflow items.

After doing a search for workflow items you simply click on the "Item progress" menu-bar link. This shows how long the items have spent at each stage, and with each person. It's obviously a simple and very quick way of highlighting bottlenecks in your processes - people in your team who are overloaded, processes which are inefficient etc.

Like all such pages within the system, the progress analysis can be saved as a PDF document.