This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by Keith Ray. Original Post: Groupware Bad Feed Title: MemoRanda Feed URL: http://homepage.mac.com/1/homepage404ErrorPage.html Feed Description: Keith Ray's notes to be remembered on agile software development, project management, oo programming, and other topics. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by Keith Ray Latest Posts From MemoRanda

Chris Hanson pointed to a nice little rant about the dangers of writing software to appeal to buyers (managers) rather than users. Groupware Bad by Jamie Zawinski. (warning: some profanity)

[...] "So we've got this big pile of code we're going to release, and we're going to build an open source groupware system! It's going to be awesome!"

"[...] what are you thinking! Do not strap the 'Groupware' albatross around your neck! That's what killed Netscape, are you insane?" [...]

If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.

When words like "groupware" and "enterprise" start getting tossed around, you're doing the latter. You start adding features to satisfy line-items on some checklist that was constructed by interminable committee meetings among bureaucrats, [...] that maybe some company will want to buy a hundred "seats" of, but that nobody will ever love. With that kind of motivation, nobody will ever find it sexy. It won't make anyone happy.

So I said, narrow the focus. Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?

[...] "Social software" is about making it easy for people to do other things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking up.