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September 19, 2003
Cooper on Interaction Design's Business Case
I hadn't seen this yet: Alan Cooper's The Last Gasp in Visual Studio magazine. There's not too much here that Coop readers haven't heard before, except for his clear explanation of the business context around software development, in particular cost-measuring accounting techniques that may be applied (badly) to software projects. He puts software architecture/design into that context, and shows how cost-cutting in the design stage, while seeming to save money, doesn't.
Reducing programming's cost isn't the same as reducing manufacturing's cost. Programmers' salaries appear to be a variable cost from an accountant's viewpoint, but they are much more like a long-term investment-a fixed cost. 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. ... Although it's certainly possible to do too much design, there is no advantage in reducing it.
The dotcom flameout, Cooper says, was mostly due to an attempt to focus on variable-cost reduction, a stratagy which fails miserably in software-based businesses. Instead, businesses should focus on product quality and well-designed architectures.
Posted by Andrew at September 19, 2003 09:40 AM