Architecture Astronauts Take Over - Joel on Software
I’m quite dissapointed in Joel’s latest post, Architecture astronauts take over - Joel on Software. While he’s usually right on target he completely missed it this time. Evidently, Joel only has one electronic device in his life, and hasn’t experienced the frustration in making, say, a laptop, desktop, smartphone, and media device all work together well with minimal user intervention. Not to mention the application synchronization. (Why does exporting or backing up all my app settings take so much TIME and WORK?! How many users out there really know how to find their Pidgin logs for backup or migration?)
I’m also very disappointed in Joel, as it seems he was in a rush to get this post out, else he would have done some more reading and found out that synchronization is only PART of what Mesh is about, and that there’s much more to come. And the idea that no one is asking for this is ridiculous, they just don’t know to, especially in the face of so many existing (the i-screams) applications that technically work but are a functional nightmare for a user that just wants their files. How many people were asking for Web 2.0 or the Cloud in 1980?
As an aside I should state that I’m NOT defending or promoting mesh per se, I need to see much more about open standards and interoperability before I’d ever consider using it, but Joel’s criticisms are unwarranted and unfounded.
Shame on Joel for not living up to the high bar that he himself has set.
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 10:24 am and is filed under Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
