complexify.com

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Posted by complexify at 06:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I noticed this banner on Yahoo! Mail yesterday:

Clicking on it brought me to an error page, unfortunately...

Posted by complexify at 08:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bill Gates is reputed to have said that "Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana." At least one company appears to be taking that message quite literally.

It sounds almost like a joke, but today an executive of a consulting firm mentioned to me that the head of Hewlett-Packard's PC division took his managers to visit Dole. He figured they could learn something about inventory management, given that PCs have the same shelf life as bananas.

The metaphor only goes so far, however, since bananas are only bundled with other bananas. HP, on the other hand, was considering bundling PCs with printers at no additional cost, hoping to make up for the cost through the future sale of consumables. As a printer manufacturer, HP has as much in common with Gilette's razor blades as it does with Dole's bananas.

Posted by complexify at 08:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The title of this blog notwithstanding, complexification for complexity's sake is an awful thing. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in application design. Yesterday, I was invited to participate in a "30-minute" conference call with the developers of a web-based application. An hour and a half later, I was still on the phone, listening as the application specs grew while
feature creep ran amok.

Some people wanted to retrieve and modify data on the application's first screen; some wanted the feature in three other places. The compromise, not surprisingly, was to place it in all four locations. By catering to each user's needs, however, the application's logic and structure took a turn for the worse.

When technology enables features to be added easily in multiple places, the temptation to take the path of least resistance may ironically create products that are overly complex, non-intuitive, and hard to use.

Albert Einstein is remembered for many complex achievements, but his Zen-like maxim on the balance between simplicity and complexity is often overlooked: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." Too often we err on the side of complexity, failing to realize the full cost of overshooting the goal.

Posted by complexify at 04:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm not normally afflicted by writer's block. There's something about the first post on a new blog, however, that is far more imposing than a blank sheet of paper. This resistance in writing for an online audience, I now realize, is not writer's block but rather stage fright.

Such a fear is irrational, of course, for a new blog's audience can generally be counted on one's hand. Despite the impermanence of web content, however, terms such as "trackbacks" and "permalinks" remind bloggers that dormant posts may one day spring to life when BoingBoing-ed, Slashdotted, or del.icio.us-ly discovered.

As the modern equivalent of the unedited, unvarnished vanity press, blogging places squarely on the author all the blame for bad writing (or, more optimistically, the praise for brilliant turns of phrase).

In a future post, I'll lay out my modest plans for this small patch of Internet real estate. In the meantime, after a month of procrastinating, I'll simply press post, hop onto the stage, and have a blank blog no more.

Posted by complexify at 03:59 PM | Permalink

After some CSS work (of the trial-and-error variety), I've finally managed to get a three-column layout. Now I just have to tweak it to fix the colors and everything else. More soon...

Posted by complexify at 06:08 PM | Permalink