Category: Business, Organization, and Management

LAUNCHING SUCCESSFUL TECH

The problem is the same I have chastised microsoft management about for most of my twenty years of involvement with them: technology is only ten percent as useful as the demo apps upon which applications are built. I was right then, and I’m right now. If you look at PHP for example, without the frameworks the language would be nearly dead. But because of the frameworks it lives. (its why I use it). I wrote the “Microsoft Access Solutions Pack” for Microsoft “back in the day” and it consisted of four fully functional applications, plus the utility library I developed for overcoming the weaknesses in the access architecture. It sold enough copies, but the interesting observation is that for a decade the basis of the better applications depended upon those demo apps and that library.

The tech is less valuable than the application framework (plug and play basic app) and the ‘full size’ demo apps are more valuable than the framework.

The reason is very simple, if you can’t produce a framework, and you can’t produce a suite of demo apps, you either aren’t ready to go to market, haven’t actually tested your tech, and have no idea whether it serves any material purpose.

Tech survives at the EDGES, not the CORE of technology, because it is the EDGES that are uncommon, not the cores.

Thus endeth the lesson that is always ignored.

Microsoft chose to improve tools rather than demo apps because they had sufficient network effect that people would invest anyway.

But once you understand microsoft tools were built on basic and vb3 to create that network you understand why they could do it.

Holochain needs an out of the box running framework, making use of well understood design patterns, to dominate the market. Otherwise the cost of entry is simply too high for rapid market expansion. If Demo apps were created on top of that framework, then it would be a done deal. But the instinct of programmers is to work with core tech that has no customers where they have to solve real world problems, so that they’re just masturbating, and so rather than falsify their labors by producing applications that prove the utility of their plumbing they preserve the illusions and preserve their ignorance of application of that tech as a means of preserving their illusions (fantasies). We get paid for application tech, not invention tech.