Cooper's Last Gasp

I believe we are in a new economy—and that the dotcoms never even participated in it. Instead, they were the last gasp of the old economy—the economy of manufacturing.

…writes Alan Cooper in this wonderful article. The article talks about the economics of the new economy. While in the industrial age, reducing cost was difficult and was a selling point, in the new economy it is a given. After all, how much does it cost to duplicate software? Thus the emphasis in the new economy has to be on quality and user experience.

Further:

The only available economic upside comes from making your product more desirable by improving its quality, and you can't do that by reducing the money you spend designing or programming it. You must invest more time and money on the research, thinking, planning, and design to make your product better suited to your customer's needs. Instead of reducing what they spend to build each object, software companies must increase what they spend to build all objects. This is the essence of the real new economy. The intangible but extremely complicated patterns of thought are that software has value only when it's accompanied by the programmers who write it. No company can treat programmers the same as a factory because programmers demand continuous attention and support well beyond any factory.

[via Viswanath Gondi]

Posted by Navneet at September 20, 2003 01:48 PM | TrackBack | Comments disabled due to spam