Innovation in Software

Parts of this industry annoy me to the point of anger.

I was talking to a friend and business partner a few weeks ago about a site he had seen one of his clients commission. This was not a complicated site – standard ‘about us’, ‘services’ static HTML job. There was one part of the site which was a bit more complicated, which involved being able to buy something online. This company offers a range of services at a fixed price, and the idea is you want ‘Gizmo A’ it will cost you £x, you pay online, half an hour later somebody phones you and arranges the delivery. Really simple. In Rails, we’re talking 2-3 days work, total cost through Vagueware probably less than £1,500.

Thing is, the company who had been commissioned to develop this site had decided to custom-code everything in a rather odd way. They made it so that you could put one thing in the shopping cart, and you could have any quantity of that thing in the cart, but you couldn’t have two different things in the same cart. You chose ‘A’? Fine you can have as many as you want, but if you tried adding ‘B’ to the same cart afterwards, you were going to be in trouble – it wouldn’t work.

When the client pointed this out to the rude, overly-aggressive developers, they said that to have more than one different type of thing in the shopping cart would be ‘too complicated’ and they would have to settle for the system as it was. It’s not just that this was particularly poor programming on the coder’s part that got to me, or that they could have provided a better solution with an off-the-shelf shopping cart, or even open source system.

No, what angered me was that for this relatively drab website using standard templates, the total bill was into five figures. In pounds sterling.

I was reminded of this story when I replied by email to Seth Godin’s question of ‘Where are the Tweakers?’ and recounted a meeting I had had just a few months ago.

I had met a public sector body whose goal it is to champion the digital media industries in the region. We were talking about various business plans I had in play for Vagueware, and they said there was a real market for people who could do exactly what Seth was talking about: tweak some CSS around a standard blog setting, integrate a blogroll, add photos automatically from flickr.com, maybe setup shopify for them, add some paypal buttons on their blog, help with some basic SEO, standard stuff. Technical stuff they didn’t understand but was simple for a guy like me (and the people I work with) to do for them over a day or two.

They warned me of something though, that I didn’t believe until I actually researched it myself. If you try and sell this stuff cheap, nobody is interested. They assume that if you’re trying to flog something that one guy has told you will cost £20,000 for £1,000 you must be trying to fleece them in some way.

The simple truth is that in recent years the cost of setting up a blog has become… well, free… and the cost of setting up an online shop isn’t much higher. Finding somebody to plug all the bits together is expensive in daily terms (£150/day-£300/day depending on skillset needed), but you don’t need them for very long. The designer will still cost as well, but there are plenty of open source web design templates that you could adapt with a little HTML knowledge.

Nobody is interested in buying though. They insist on spending the £10k-£20k for a basic, uninteresting, bog-standard, 1997-style website. If you suggest they can have so much more for a lot less money, they think you’re a liar, a cheat, a hussler. This is a major problem with the industry: we have allowed so many of the bad guys in, that nobody will believe it’s just got cheaper all of a sudden. Our audience expectation is that technology is expensive and complicated, whilst many of us who are honest, hard-working technologists are screaming that it doesn’t have to be that way. We want as many people as possible to come to the party, but the party insists it’s all too expensive, too complicated.

Recounting these stories the other week to another friend, he told me about the time he and a flatmate were trying to get rid of a bunch of FM radios they had procured as a job lot. They would make a handsome profit if they could sell them at £15 a go. They set up their table… and waited. The RRP of these radios was about £50 so they couldn’t work out why they weren’t selling like hotcakes. After a few hours they bumped the price up to £25 each and the whole lot went within within an hour.

So I am now stuck between a rock and a hard-place. Is it really ethical for me to charge £10,000 to setup a blogger account, tweak the template, whack on feedburner, and show the client how to use digg? Apparently, yes it is. A guy in India could do the same thing for $50 though, and because the audience expects different things from him, that’s the most he’ll ever be able to charge. There is something very, very, very wrong about all this.

How do we change audience expectations when they are so unfair and playing into the hands of those who wish to exploit?