Good Enough For You

The company I work for, we do something on the Internet, I think we provide some kind of service, but I'm not really sure what, I can never follow all that technical stuff, so let's just say we rent out uniforms. Our uniforms, honestly speaking, they're not that great. I mean, they get the job done, no one's going around naked, or getting a pair of coveralls with three arms and no neck hole, but they're a few season's out of date, fashion wise, they're a little tattered, and they have some annoying quirks, like the zippers don't always work like you'd think, and so on. Frankly, you can get uniforms that are a lot nicer from other companies. Yet, people keep giving us money, the company's not doing too badly, and my paycheque hasn't bounced yet. How come? Well, I think it probably has something do with the sandwiches at my lunchtime meeting yesterday.

Now no offense to the good people at the catering company, but these sandwiches tasted like failure and sadness. But that's the service they provide, something that meets the minimum acceptable standards for "food", delivered on time, cheap and in volume. The question isn't why do they sell terrible sandwiches, the question is why does anyone buy them.

It's what happens whenever someone is spending their money on a group of people that they're not really responsible to. You're presented with option A (for Awesome) and option B (for Boo) and you think to yourself, "well, B's good enough for you".

It's the same for our webmail, erm, I mean, uniforms. We don't wear the uniforms, we all have our own clothes. the people that buy our uniform service, our customers they sure as hell don't wear the uniforms, it's their customers, that get the uniforms as part of the package they buy from our customers and they have to put up or shut up.

That's a lot of levels of buck-passing, between the people that make the product and the people that actually have to use it. It's pretty easy to disengage from your customer's customers because you're so insulated from them. It's easy to imagine them as the great unwashed herds, and put out something that's good enough, for them. But the problem is, making software that tastes like failure and sadness isn't really satisfying, and as much as I'd like to improve the product, if the corporate will isn't there, if the focus is not "how can we provide a really quality experience" but rather "how can we make software that minimally acceptable, so that our customers think it's good enough for their customers, and lock them in" then it's just not going to get better. Maybe it's not supposed to, maybe it's going to be a race to the bottom. But it seems like there are people out there doing good work and making a living, maybe the secret is to be one of your own customers, or to give them all baseball bats and let them stand behind you while you program.