<< March 16, 2009 >>
a break in the void

i've started reading my third christopher alexander novel, a new theory of urban design, and thought this passage did a nice job of describingg why enterprise software is boring, and start ups are awesome:

...the most fundamental question of all: What is it? What is going to be there?

In today's development, this question is asked, and answered, almost exclusively in economic terms. ...

Of course the products which are built, in answer to this question, and after the necessary consumer surveys, are machinelike, abstract, lifeless. They are uninteresting, not vivid. They are incapable of exciting us, or moving us, because they are not human in their quality.

i would love to hear his thoughts on house flipping.

posted by jacob around March 16, 2009