Now you know my every neurosis and gripe about consulting, clients, and the web / IT world. Here’s a list that I hope is actually constructive. It’s stuff that might make your life easier if you are in the place I was.
I hated invoicing. It’s boring, it involves inkjet printers, Word templates, and envelopes, and then the result of all that stamp-licking is a check you have to go to the bank with. Of course, the step after that is money, and nobody doesn’t like money. But even the promise of sweet, sweet money couldn’t get me to put those invoices in the mail every month, and so I started to look really incompetent, lazy, and inattentive. What I wanted more than anything was a system that would just take the info, print nice invoices, and get the money into the bank. I never found it. Actual commercial offerings online are competing for AR, HR, or time management corporate accounts, and start at extremely expensive.
Imagine my dismay to discover Blinksale, which looks like it solves all those problems. It launched earlier this week. I don’t think any of my clients would have taken the PayPal bait, but who knows? That could have been my dream end-to-end system, and saved me my biggest consulting headache.
Seriously, we have to fix web browsers. It’s come a long way, but over the past decade, the tit-for-tat has been frustrating enough to make you swear off one browser, then the other, then some versions, then some platforms, then not… Standards have helped a ton, and the next wave of competition should be very interesting, but you can help just by trying FireFox and spreading the word that not everyone uses IE all the time.
More, more, more products that fill the gap between the computer and the user. Everyone always talks about how HTML liberated the voices of the internet, and how publishing became instantly easy, but HTML is a bitch, and nobody wants to write it. What actually liberated the voices on the internet were applications like Blogger, where you typed what you wanted to say into a cute little window, Blogger converted into fancy HTML, Blogger applied the snazzy templates that Blogger designed, and Blogger used the FTP information you entered (once, when you set it up) to FTP the files (that Blogger chopped and sliced into archives, commentable pages, etc.).
See, computers make people’s work easier. A lot of people look at things like accounting, and say "we used to have to do this by hand, and the computer saves us a lot of work." That’s true, but what work are you doing now? Typing a bunch of stuff into the system. Is there a way the computer can help you do that? Probably. Maybe someone writes a program to automate the entry of that data. But wait, that’s more work that a human has to do. Is there a way that the computer can meet the developer halfway? Every incremental step here is fantastic.
Divide, divide, divide. RSS is my favorite thing because the content is separate from the container. That kind of sucks the people who have an interest in the container (banner ad buyers, traffic analyzers, etc.), but great for people who are more interested in the content. It’s a great part of what’s called a services-oriented architecture, where a system is separated into as many independent systems as it can be, and each of those simpler subsystems can be optimized, replaced, enhanced, tracked, etc. I don’t know what’s next, but extricating common functionality out of large systems is what’s happening right now. If I were still actively working with clients, I’d be hammering this into the ground: more system-wide complexity, but made up of very simple components.
More tomorrow
I’m not sure if I’m giving this up to get more time/energy back, or if I need to quit because I didn’t have the time/energy to begin with, but I think mentally it frees up some cycles to work on some other things. After that, I think I’m done blabbering.
