jBoxer

Facebook has a new design. Every programmer I know loves it. Almost everyone else I know hates it. I could’ve written those three sentences a couple years ago, copy/pasted them every six months, and they would’ve fit perfectly every time.

Of course, the pattern has always ended the same way as well. People forget about it within a month, and when the next change comes around, it’s “It was PERFECT the way it was, why are you changing it?!”

In fact, I’ve seen a bunch of people asking “why does Facebook keep changing the interface?” Most people are asking it rhetorically, with the implied answer being “to confuse users.” However, if asked honestly, it’s actually a pretty good question, with a pretty good answer.

Facebook has gotten where it is today by innovating. Prime example: the News Feed. When they added the News Feed, no one else was doing anything like it. Despite massive user riots, they stuck to their guns. Two years later, everyone loves it, all the social networks have copied it, and there would be massive user riots if they scrapped it.

Facebook has stayed at the forefront of social networking innovation by constantly throwing everything at the wall, keeping what sticks (News Feed), and scrapping what doesn’t (“How do you know this person?”). It’s in their best interest to do this; they make their money from venture capitalists and advertisers, not from charging users.

If they charged users, changing the interface so often would be a bad move; users would stop paying as soon as they became confused with a new interface, and they’d lose money. As it stands, users who are confused with a new interface can take a break at no cost to Facebook, come back in a few weeks (as they always have), and the advertisers and venture capitalists (who only care about long-term success) are happy.

Obviously, Facebook and its investors have become accustomed to the pattern: make a change, suck up the complaints (possibly while making some adjustments, like the additional privacy options after the News Feed was added), and reap the benefits of being a bastion of social networking innovation for another six months. Eventually, maybe the users will get used to it as well. I’ve actually seen a few status updates along the lines of “I guess I probably won’t hate this so much once I get used to it” after this update, so who knows?

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Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror made a post about the Google monopoly, suggesting that we should be concerned.

I don’t 100% disagree with him, but this section struck me as especially egregious:

I’m a little surprised all the people who were so up in arms about the Microsoft “monopoly” ten years ago aren’t out in the streets today lighting torches and sharpening their pitchforks to go after Google. Does the fact that Google’s products are mostly free and ad-supported somehow exempt it from the same scrutiny?

This is an interesting argument, but there’s one critical difference: Google does not partake in monopolistic activities.

One of the big problems with Microsoft was when they pre-installed Internet Explorer on Windows with no way to remove it, leveraging their OS monopoly to gain an unfair advantage in the browser market. They got sued, added a “remove software” option to let people remove pre-installed software (IE, Windows Media Player, etc.). Now, even though their OS market share has barely shifted (definitely under 5% shift), few people complain about their monopoly anymore.

I’m not saying they’re okay now (or even that what Google’s done is in the best interest of the internet), but the reason no one complains about Google’s monopoly is because they created it legitimately, and they don’t do evil things with it.

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Patrick Smacchia writes a blog post about how buying a Solid State Drive will produce a worthwhile increase in developer productivity.

He cites a few self-run benchmarks. A couple are impressive: a certain build shaves off 2 minute and 14 seconds (a little under 50% faster), and running 1846 NUnit tests brings a 2 minute and 40 second process down to 37 seconds (about 80% faster). The rest… not so much. Most are cutting scant seconds off of already quick processes.

I do believe that there are some expenditures that are worth it. Developers spend 8 hours a day sitting, so buying them extremely comfortable chairs makes a huge difference. Similarly, developers spend 8 hours a day looking at their monitors, and buying them each two large monitors allows them to keep their work and minds better organized.

This SSD claim does not seem to pass muster. Look at the difference. An internal 80GB Intel SSD costs $559.99. How much does a normal 5400RPM internal 80GB drive cost? Well, I can get this Western Digital one for just over $40.00.

That means the Intel one costs almost 14 times as much. If I’m buying this for my developers, I want to make sure it’s cost-effective. Let’s say I pay my developers an average of $52.00 per hour (to make the numbers easy). That means, to justify the extra $520.00 I’m spending to get this SSD, it needs to save them 10 hours over the course of their time with me. That’s 268 of those builds mentioned earlier, or 293 of those sets of NUnit tests.

Is this an outrageous number? No. But it’s also not an obvious win, like buying a pair of large monitors or a comfortable chair. It’s scraping the bottle of the barrel, to say the least. Unless he’s got a super awesome chair, a couple 24-inch monitors, and all the other productivity staples, I’d say his money would be much better spent elsewhere.

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