July 2004 Archives

A week ago one of our salespeople approached me with a simple question. Some of the people in his client company were unable to browse to our company’s Web site. He was rather embarrassed at the prospect that our company’s Web site (and by extension, our company) could be viewed as shaky and unreliable.

While I am biased, I believe our Web site is highly reliable and it operates as flawlessly as they come.

One of my chief passions in life is programming, and some of my best times at work is spent working on software projects. Unfortunately a good part of my day is spent managing and trouble-shooting various servers and technologies at work, so it’s difficult to find a sufficient block of time to immerse myself in development work.

So what’s a developer to do? Switch to faster and more productive platforms to get the job done.

Microsoft is a classic example of a company that has gone through the stages of its business life perfectly, and it has done that in a super-accelerated pace.

Think about it. Microsoft started its life as a tiny company, a glimmer in its founders’ eyes. As it gathered momentum, it turned into a speculative public company, then it became an aggressive growth company, followed by a plain growth one.

I have been an MSN Messenger user since I started using IM (Instant Messaging). Being somewhat of a luddite (I have been accused of that several times), it took me a while to warm up to IM and since I was a Hotmail user, MSN Messenger was a no-brainer path. But in those early days ICQ was all the rage, so there weren’t too many people to IM to with MSN. I installed it on my home pc and coaxed my wife to chat with me at work.

Sometimes it’s great to see Web sites go out of their way to make themselves appealing with sexy graphics and nifty multi-media. Yes, we are visual creatures and perhaps no sense is as much under assault than our visual sense on a daily basis.

However, as the novelty wears off, it’s refreshing to see that some sites go for simplicity and clarity. Google and Ebay have relatively simple and clean sites and perhaps that has contributed even more to their popularity.