Les Jones

Tech > Joel Sposky Interview

Salon has an interview with programming and user interface guru Joel Sposky. Excerpts:

Another problem is that everybody tries to learn about business from Google, Microsoft, eBay and Amazon -- and they're such wacky exceptions. They don't really apply to you. I say, Microsoft makes their own gravity -- they could ship a brown paper bag called Microsoft Brown Paper Bag 1.0 and hundreds of thousands of people would buy it. Or at least try it.

That's something I've said before: Amazon is not a good example for someone starting an e-commerce venture. What I mean by that is a small outfit just starting out can't operate exactly like Amazon. For instance, they can't lose a couple billion dollars before making their first quarterly profit. Some Amazon features - like user reviews - don't work on sites with large numbers of products and small numbers of customers. Study Amazon's interfaces for usability ideas, but don't assume your fledgling e-commerce site can model itself after the world's biggest online retail operation.

On how wi-fi has solved some software problems with massive amounts of hardware:

But the funny thing is, Bosworth has been talking about this same problem [making Web interfaces available offline] for a long time -- he's just obsessed with the person on the airplane. And, lo and behold, airplanes are actually getting Internet connections. And Wi-Fi is spreading like crazy. What's kind of surprising is that it has turned out to be easier to rewire the entire world for high-bandwidth Internet than it is to make a good replication architecture so you can work disconnected! It's actually far more likely that this problem will be solved that way, oddly enough.