Development Companies – Strengths and Weaknesses
It’s been a manic month here at BinaryComponents – we’ve finally released our latest web application -
- blatant plug there – and of course there’s still a ton of work to be done on it. It’s times like these that make me wish I had a team of ten, to make progress through the inevitable barrage of bugs that have surfaced, and to design the dozens of themes we so desperately need. Most of all, I’d like a sales team (hell, even a sales person), to do all those sales-and-marketing things that I as a developer stereotypically don’t want to do.
But thinking about it… would that actually help? I mean, I look at certain big companies, and sometimes it seems that no matter how big you get, your corporate culture prevents your company from developing certain skills or teams.
Microsoft - have never understood the web. Name one well-regarded Microsoft website. (MSN, maybe?) Think about sites like MSDN -clunky, slow, table-based. Think about the Internet Explorers – buggy, different-for-the-hell-of-it, and widely hated. Intranet, sure, they have nice tools for rapid development of functional intranet applications, but if you want to develop an attractive internet application, well the tools are against you.
Google - haven’t got their testing together. Look through Analytics, Adwords, and Adsense, and you get a feel that no-one really tests them, either individually, or as a group of related tools. I can rattle off a few bugs in those sites (ad-position-popups don’t work in Firefox; inconsistent top-right navigation; inability to change timezones; inconsistent redirects breaking the back-button; inconsistent sign-in between normal accounts and checkout).
Adobe - don’t do Windows dev. Yes, I know they release products for Windows. They don’t feel right. They don’t feel native. They feel like rushed ports. They seem unable to support 64-bit machines, and their releases for Vista were way too late.
Valve - don’t do estimation. Their chronic and severe lateness with every project is a standing (and unfunny) joke that they seem unable or unwilling to change.
Of course, you can argue that these (wildly successful) companies don’t need skills in these areas – they’re all making huge profits despite that – and perhaps you’re right. Perhaps Adobe see Windows users as an annoying minority. Perhaps Microsoft want the web to be a broken environment, to protect their Windows sales.
I just see it as a shame – that no matter how big you are, there will always be some things that you just can’t achieve. And I see it as worrying – perhaps BinaryComponents will never have strong sales skills.
