I was talking to my Friend Steve (blog) about customized software today. We both come from a world of custom software development – basically that means whatever you want the software to do you simply request the feature you want and the software developers add it to the program. Or in our cases we simply program the software ourselves – to make do what we want it to do. Nice huh…
Well not so fast. Some companies won’t even think of custom software for some of the following reasons.
- Takes to long to develop
- Cost too much
- Who will support it?
- What happens if the developer gets taken up by aliens?
- It’s untested
So they only buy “canned” software. And then they ask the likes of Steve or me – what would it take to add this or that functionality… Well let me tell you what it would take – most times it would take a complete re-write of the canned software. And when suggest tweaking the canned code – I get that would be a violation of the warranty. So low and behold we go back to the canned software vendor and ask them could you please create this functionality and they say sure for half a million dollars and 12 months of development work – we’ll do it.
Well there goes your cost savings, making sure software is tested first and the time savings. And then when you do get the new functionality – most times it sucks or if it doesn’t sucks it doesn’t work quite the way you want it to so you re-design your own work flow. Now if that wasn’t bad enough – sometimes if you look inside the code – you notice its now riddled with patches to make it do something it wasn’t designed to do. So don’t even think about asking for another feature. And now comes the support - well the new feature you requested is basically unknown to the canned software support team – so they kind of have to learn it with you. And I guess there is no chance that a canned software business could go belly up… yeah right.
Now, I’m not trying to say all canned software sucks – but if you want to be a leader in your industry – using canned software will make sure you’re not!
Steve (his site) and I have been talking about re-doing MediaWombat.com. For those of you who don’t know what MediaWombat.com is – it’s a Flash and multimedia search engine. We crawl the web and look for Flash files (and soon other media types) – when we find media files we index the “insides” – so we can provide better search results.
A few days ago I redesigned the entire look and feel of the site – you can see a preview here. The preview doesn’t have all the features I plan on adding and it doesn’t currently search – and I need to fix some of the CSS to make it look ok in all the main browsers – but if you take a look and click around you’ll see what I have in mind.
I’m excited to get things up and indexing again. Steve and I have quite a few new ideas we plan to use this time around.
Let me know what you think…
Lately I haven’t been able to come up with very many new ideas or concepts. It might be because most of my idea expenditure allotment has been dedicated to developing ideas for a very cool project I’ve been working on at my place of employment. Because of that I think my mind has been bogged down and incapable of much original thought…
So I went for a walk today to visit an abandoned local flooded quarry. I’ve been wanting to visit the quarry for over a year or more but I never seemed to find the time. Since today was such a beautiful day, sunny slight breeze around 65 degrees, I decided it was time to explore the place. It was fun walking there and once I got there it was interesting seeing the marks of “vandals” years past. Marks of infatuation, peace, art and unknown symbols. I guess this place is/was a haven for teens to get away from their parents. We all have our little escapes don’t we? I guess I was really looking for a little escape myself. Unlike the other visitors to this spot, I wasn’t trying to get away from my family, I was just trying to “clear” my thoughts with some new stimuli. I think it might have been just what I needed. Next up I think I’ll ride my kid’s scooter…
My new blogging platform 