DISQUS

Owning an iPhone myself, I'm getting a little sickened by what I'm hearing about the direction Apple is taking the iPhone in. I'll reserve judgment until the road map is released, but closed systems don't breed innovation or happy customers.

All this social networking is making me tired. FaceBook was nice when it was new and fresh. Now it just feels like a chore to sift through all those profiles and keep tabs on the world. I feel like I have other---more important---things to do than read my friends' incongruous wall postings and delete the latest barrage of app spam.

Enterprise software works. CIOs evaluate it on those terms. What sells enterprise software is the list of features the software offers.

I think the "sexyness" problem comes in when the end users of the application try to actually get work done using it. Enterprise software vendors put considerably more thought and resources into developing the sales-driving target feature set than they do an intuitive interface with a well thought out work flow.

Rather than pointing fingers at vendors, perhaps we should look to the CIO. If they were demanding intuitive software that not only performed a task but actually made the task easier to perform, vendors would respond in kind.

PHP is great in that you can write your code fast and get it up and running in no time. But the real challange is not the language itself, but rather forcing yourself to stop, think, plan, and then implement your code. It's an exercise in self-restraint. Cheers!