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Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Create for Dummies

Marketing something you've created is one thing, making it sell is another thing, I've always been a firm believer of developing and creating for dummies. What is that you ask? what has made Google Web applications sell over Yahoo(my first public email was on yahoo and I believe for almost everyone at least born before AD1985), why more and more users prefer the latter and fundamentally they are the same, email is email, Chat is Chat. Some years ago Apple was a none existent company but now its the largest technology company in the world surpassing Microsoft in the stock market two weeks ago simply by selling Hardware!. You can say they have large marketing budgets- okay that's true they are money rich, however you can put up the best Ads on the web and billboards, get people talking about it but it never sells- oh and by the way they did not start out money rich.

I believe in living by one simple principle as my Computer Science Teacher once said "Keep It Simple Stupid" KISS, programming 101 don't over think the solution there is always a simple way out. Now back to Google and Apple, the main reason that their products sell is the simple fact they are easy to use, no training needed you just buy one and get on with it emailing, chatting, itunes, texting. look at the iphone, a recycled HTC phone but with no buttons no crazy OS running on it , no stylus, just simple.

Corporates have for years suffered trying to upgrade their staff from Office 97, Office XP, Office 03, Office 07 and now Office 10, don't get me wrong,  I love Microsoft products they make the best office productivity tools in the world, but they can be so dumb complicated some times even for a developer it takes some serious will power and time to get moving or even change over (we know everyone has a degree of resistance to change- rule of thumb). Half of you reading this Blog have either a blog site, twitter accounts or are a Facebook account (oops! apart from the security settings craziness), why? because they are simply made any dummy can use it.

So next time you Develop or Create anything keep "KISS" as your motto, remember your trying to create a solution not another problem, so invest in some good User Inter-phase.

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