Innovation kills profits

Every time I turn around, I'm hearing about built-in limitations; products that won't perform fundamental tasks only because such enhancements might threaten a company's ability to further deepen its pockets at your expense.

The Rokr iPhone from our friends at Motorola and Apple is another example. The crumby thing can't even download an iTunes song or play an MP3 as a ringtone, features that would have made sense.

Deliberate disabilities like these will bite these non-innovators squarely in the posterior.

The Observer | Business | John Naughton: Why the iPhone won't rock your world

500 Internal Server Error

The supposed new plugin for MSIE -- the one that adds security and tabbed browsing like Firefox does -- is apparently the victim of that darn 500 Server error.

500 Internal Server Error: "Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error."

Software Best Practices -- or Pipe Dream Novelties

I make no apologies for asking people to unplug their computers, stack them in their basements or garages and leave them alone. Because there's way too much junk tech making it to market.

I know there have been a lot of tremendously innovative and pivotal technologies developed in the last fifteen years...and there's been a lot of money wasted on junk programming too.

Before any feature goes into any application, it ought to be well-written, bullet proof, sound, secure, as lean as possible and agile enough for gradual amendments and improvements. In fact, until you adopt that concept, I’ll keep my money.

The reasons features are released so fast & furious -- before a rock-solid proof of performance is demonstrated -- I'll never understand. It's bad business because it makes people not like your products. Write programs one module at a time, then invite anyone to try their damndest to break them. Write applications that break them.

Here are two dirty little secrets:

1) Decision-makers know that well-written software doesn't need to be upgraded or reversioned every year.
2) The Cardinal Sin is letting any technology, computer program or operating system leave the warehouse with bloating or security or functional flaws.

I’ve just outlined why we need the Open Source community and the products developed by it: flaws are exposed, discussed, shared and fixed. Now, if more developers would learn to operate in this transparent environment, they will have happier customers willing to spend more money with them.