The Web 2.0 Generation

As you might expect, one of the most common questions I am asked is, “What is the Web 2.0?”. When I was asked that by one of my employees earlier today, I figured that it was time to answer it. Much ink has been spilled trying to define the Web 2.0, including huge quantities of techno-babble and buzz words. If you are completely unfamiliar with the concept, In Business actually has a very enlightening article entitled Web 2.0: Come Closer, Said the Spider to the Fly that talks about the basic concepts behind the Web 2.0. Instead of just a technological advancement, the Web 2.0 is a cultural development:

“Web 2.0, he explained, is an emerging cultural phenomenon. It isn’t just using the Internet as a platform to conduct business or as a convenient way to earn a master’s degree in your pajamas. It is the mental acceptance of the web as a dimension, with social components and memberships. It’s seeing it as something we contribute to, as well as benefit from. It isn’t a work-play separation, but a work-play blend.”

For those who are still stuck in the original Web 1.0 paradigm of the late 1990’s, this cultural phenomenon may be hard to grasp, but it is absolutely essential to understand.

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In an extension of one of my previous articles, Why do enterprise interfaces suck?, I have recently had many experiences with terrible interfaces in a search for accounting software for Intelli-Computing. There seem to be a lot of terrible interfaces in the accounting business. The first software that we tried as Peachtree Pro Accounting by Sage Software, which had an intimidating interface that seemed powerful, but was completely unintuitive and felt like it had been designed for Windows 95 and not updated in a decade.

After a lot of trial and error, I eventually settled on a disturbing conclusion: the best small business accounting software currently in existence is made by Microsoft. I was hesitant, but upon installing Microsoft Accounting 2007, I was astounded to find an interface that was extremely easy to use, that simplifies common tasks and shows how they relate via diagrams. It isn’t often that an interface surprises me like this one, and it is truly enjoyable to use.

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As I have worked with different companies throughout the Midwest, I’ve noticed that different cities have different characters when it comes to expressing status and image in business. Madison, for example, tends to be a more laid-back city, where the number of Bentleys and other supercars can be counted on a single hand. Chicago is completely different, however, where I frequently see extremely nice and expensive cars. Driving a $100,000+ car seems to be one of the ultimate status symbols among Chicago businessmen, like the Aston Martin DB9 that I recently saw parked near Wabash Avenue:

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I have recently been expanding the design team for Intelli-Computing, bringing in a few people with unique talents that will allow us to create richer designs and web applications. I have quickly noticed something: designing things as a team is fun and effective, but very difficult to do on a deadline. We had a meeting on Sunday, where we worked together to layout a web application, design the color scheme, and incorporate copy and photos from our creative team. We then developed a plan of attack for our programmers to develop the system, and set out to execute it. This all sounds good, but it introduces a lot of latency when different people are responsible for different components of a project, and one person can’t simply stay up all night to finish the project themselves (which I’ve done many times). We use Basecamp to enhance communication and make our collaboration more efficient, but there are still delays when one person becomes a bottleneck. In this case, it is actually me, since I had another project come up yesterday which prevented be from implementing the site layout for our programmers (in this case Mike) to go to work on.

We only have a team of four people: Matt, Brendan, Mike, and myself. I can only imagine what it would be like to try to manage a production team with hundreds or thousands of developers. I remember reading an article in the Communications of the ACM entitled What Road Ahead for Microsoft and Windows?, back when Windows Vista was still in alpha. It describes how Microsoft had so many developers independently working on so many different components of Windows that the OS eventually grew to 50,000,000 lines of code developed by more than 4,000 programmers. Dependencies led to the project grinding to a halt every time small changes were made, and eventually the codebase was scrapped as the team returned to a base of Windows XP to create the version of Vista that we have today.

In my experience, there is a critical mass of developers that you need to optimally solve a problem, beyond which additional staff actually slows down the project. It is the classic dilemma where too many cooks spoil the broth, which is an age old idea. However, big companies like Microsoft seem to have forgotten it. I see startups with teams of less than ten developers churn out huge amounts of well-written code with a speed unmatched by the juggernauts who employ thousands. That’s one of the many things that make startups so exciting, where teams can still work together to create amazing products without being weighed down by the bureaucracy of a large, established company.

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