Siu Lun

Saw a facebook update today from Belle Liu of Beansbox that mentioned about “Rework” book from 37Signals.

I don’t usually read, what I do read is usually the PHP.net manual, AS3 language reference, API documentations etc… I did read some entrepreneurial books before I started my own company though.

The classical “The E Myth Revisited”.

But anyway, I read the excerpt at the Rework website, I’m interested since it’s from a fairly successful web-services company in the US. I wanted to know what they’ve been through.

Having a look at the excerpt, there are certainly things that I agree with, and have strengthened my believe in, such as the “Workaholic” section about how workaholics are no good because they make other feel inadequate, it reminded me of a former-colleague, where she excels in is she stays for long hours and works hard, but she complains about people who leaves on-time to their face and makes them feel inadequate. Very true.

Other points in the excerpt however I found to be mostly obvious, probably only because I’ve been through the same, there is one thing however that I don’t agree with.

“Underdo your competition”. Unfortunately, I found basecamp’s features to be lacking a little to be of ‘real’ benefits. The only reason why that would work is that you have a simpler interface that is easier to grasp, which appears more user-friendly, at the beginning.

“leaving the complex stuff to your competition” is not a good idea. I mean, let’s switch a bit on the industry, if this applied to Intel, AMD would’ve ruled the world today. CPUs are complex.

Let’s switch it more closely related to the web. Apple. If Apple’s iPhone 4 lagged behind in features, functionality, speed, lost that all important technological advancement. They would be losing market share.

However I recognise that, that is a business characteristics 37Signal approaches, and since they’re not doing badly, it must’ve been a good point; not necessarily.

Anyway, thanks to Belle . I’m actually interested in reading the rest of that book, but I don’t think from what I’ve seen so far, it’s worth paying for it.

Later.

Just a post on life lately. Something got me ticked off today as the stock market plunged (I’m not in it so *phew*), and news reports and attributing part of the blame on N.Korean tension.

if N.Korea really sank S.K ship. Why would they react angrily for the accusations and said it would send a team of their own guys to investigate, fear of sanctions? But if it was done by a rouge agent, they can easily admit to it and dismiss the whole thing as an accident. Or is there more sinister forces in play. Somebody’s stole N.Korean torpedos and fired it off a private sub? There are questions, and we should seek answers before jumping to conclusions.

What has N.Korea got to gain by sinking one ship, if they’re not going for an all-out-war?

For all I can see, I’d say a rouge spy has infiltrated the ranks of N.Korean army and did that on purpose to ignite a war.

Wouldn’t surprise me if it was US top secret material, or maybe even more sinister than that. Maybe part of the plans of the ‘elite’ families of the world. Who knows, but I think right now, it’s uncalled for. South Korean broadcasting propaganda over the border and stopping trade would only provoke N.Korea.

I love people who innovate the web, I love people who tries new things, but there are certain things, even though you try, just doesn’t make sense on the medium that you’re building on.

Over the past year, agencies around the world have been creating websites that uses 3rd-party plugins (that are not mass adopted) in campaign websites which they want push the boundaries of the interactivity possibilities.

Two of the most prominent plugins are D’Fusion (Transformers website), and an up-and-coming Unity web player (Unity is what a lot of iPhone 3D app developers use btw. Used on: http://www.honeydefender.com/).

I personally believe these two plugins and the commercial websites that are being built are more of an experimentational nature by the tech lead in the agencies than of actual benefit to the brand to which they’re building for.

Any agencies would be able to tell you from the years of experience they have now of constructive Flash based interactive websites that barriers of entries is a killer for many of their websites. Clients (brands) will ever only want the reach offered by the web, otherwise, why bother investing in websites?

These 3rd-party plugins in Unity and D’Fusion are barriers of entry. They’re so much of a barrier that normal web users will not bother to install. Granted, once installed, the experience and possibilities is over what Flash can offer normally, however, they still suffer the same downfalls Flash has with heavy interactive websites.

Namely.

Speed of loading
High minimum specification of machine
Bandwidth requirement

Given the barrier of entry, and the level of interactivity achieved vs the investment made into those websites, it really begs the question, why did they not just build a OpenGL application? This is further enhanced by the fact that most of these ‘interactive’ websites do not even take advantage of the fact they’re on the net and they can communicate in real-time with data – though one can argue that you can do the same in an OpenGL application.

I’m beginning to question the relevance of online deployment that are not made to be indexed and discovered.

I wonder what the client truly think of the websites built using those plugins, the question is: was it worth it?