>Microsoft created a tool a few years ago called Lighswitch that allowed end-users to throw together CRUD apps quickly,
Lightswitch relied on Silverlight and VB Studio, which made it useless for almost everyone.
The problem with bazaar culture is its obsession with tools and systems, and its lack of interest in users. When you get a product that inverts that - like Wordpress - it's often incredibly successful, in spite of its many the technical shortcomings.
The hierarchy of value in bazaar-land is:
1. New tool/framework/language/OS (that looks good on my CV)
2. Elegant, powerful product for customers
3. Fully productised, reliable, scalable, and easy to maintain combination of 1 & 2.
2 and 3 are more or less on equal levels. 1 is far, far ahead.
Because the culture is so tool-obsessed, a whole lot of makework and work-around fixing is needed just to get things to build, never mind work well for customers.
Basically there are dumb tools, dumb products, and occasionally elegant commercial products fall out of the combination - but usually only when they're designed by someone who cares about the user experience.
Hacking culture massively undervalues the user experience, and massively overvalues tinkering and tool-making as ends in themselves.
There's a basic disconnect between the talent needed to write code that works, and the talent needed to design a user experience that's powerful but elegant - whether the user is a non-technical user, or another developer.
The cathedral/bazaar metaphor is utterly unhelpful here, because neither really captures the true dynamic.
Lightswitch relied on Silverlight and VB Studio, which made it useless for almost everyone.
The problem with bazaar culture is its obsession with tools and systems, and its lack of interest in users. When you get a product that inverts that - like Wordpress - it's often incredibly successful, in spite of its many the technical shortcomings.
The hierarchy of value in bazaar-land is:
1. New tool/framework/language/OS (that looks good on my CV) 2. Elegant, powerful product for customers 3. Fully productised, reliable, scalable, and easy to maintain combination of 1 & 2.
2 and 3 are more or less on equal levels. 1 is far, far ahead.
Because the culture is so tool-obsessed, a whole lot of makework and work-around fixing is needed just to get things to build, never mind work well for customers.
Basically there are dumb tools, dumb products, and occasionally elegant commercial products fall out of the combination - but usually only when they're designed by someone who cares about the user experience.
Hacking culture massively undervalues the user experience, and massively overvalues tinkering and tool-making as ends in themselves.
There's a basic disconnect between the talent needed to write code that works, and the talent needed to design a user experience that's powerful but elegant - whether the user is a non-technical user, or another developer.
The cathedral/bazaar metaphor is utterly unhelpful here, because neither really captures the true dynamic.