…the current process de jour does not — despite how many big companies subscribe to it — lead to the best, most innovative products. The actual answer is in prototypes and frequent demos. Those takes always seem to end up as some kind of scaffolding for a pissing contest, an attempt to denigrate someone else’s line of work.
Everything is different now, but I am still at my desk. Except with the websites. They separate themselves from the others, because I don’t feel much better at making them after 20 years. My knowledge and skills develop a bit, then things change, and half of what I know becomes dead weight. This hardly happens with any of the other work I do. I don’t bring this up to imply that the young are dumb or that the inexperienced are inept—of course they’re not. But remember: if you stick around in the industry long enough, you’ll get to feel all three situations. Experience, on the other hand, creates two distinct struggles: the first is to identify and unlearn what is no longer necessary (that’s work, too). The second is to remain open-minded, patient, and willing to engage with what’s new, even if it resembles a new take on something you decided against a long time ago. This situation is annoying to me, because my thoughts turn to that young designer I mentioned at the start of my talk. How many opportunities did I have to reproduce what I saw by having legible examples in front of me? And how detrimental is it to have that kind of information obfuscated for her? Before, the websites could explain themselves; now, someone needs to walk you through it.
What started as an avant-garde, standard-compliant browser is now a sprawling platform that spares no area of modern computing. If it works as intended on Chrome, it’s ready to ship. This in turn results in more users flocking to the browser as their favorite Web sites and apps no longer work elsewhere, making developers less likely to spend time testing on other browsers. A vicious cycle that, if not broken, will result in most other browsers disappearing in the oblivion of irrelevance. And that’s exactly how you suffocate the open Web. It also happens that Google’s business is search engine advertising and AdSense. Everything else is a measly 10% of their annual revenue. That in and of itself is not an issue, but when the line between the browser, the search engine, and online services is blurred, we have a problem. And a big one at that.
