This set of rules popped into my head today while grazing my Twitter:
For most things this is a no-brainer. To do sometime better takes time while costs more. Easy. But I’m wondering if social media tools, and the Internet culture that creates them, change this.
Back when Stef and I started Created in Birmingham one of the (many) things we wanted to show was how you could get a perfectly good website for next to nothing. At the time most civic-style websites were costing tens of thousands of pounds to deliver and a frightening number of them were, frankly, rubbish with short lifespans. We used Wordpress, which is free, and an off the shelf design, which was also free, and had it up and running in an afternoon. The only thing that cost money was the content which, we felt, was how it should be.
So in this situation it was good and cheap and fast. For what we wanted to do, anyway.
Sure, there’s still a huge market for bespoke web design and even with plugins and such platforms like Wordpress won’t always do exactly what you want them to do. I’m not suggesting the death of the website building industry by any stretch. But the fact is I can have a website up and running in minutes that is cheap, if not free, and very good indeed. Especially when compared to some of the bespoke rubbish the snake-oil salesmen sell for absurd sums. (And I’m not tarring everyone with the same brush. The same applies to the nascent social media industry, if not more so.)
“Good” is subjective so let’s assume free software like Wordpress is good and park that. It’s cheap because, well, it’s free software. So the thing that’s aparently been eradicated is fast. Since you can’t have something from nothing, where did fast go?
When you get something bespoke it generally means a handful of people have worked on it. If it takes 5 people a week to deliver then you’re looking at 200 hours of work which you’ll be billed for. But Open Source software is written by thousands of people over many years with no cost to the end user. Why this happens is a subject for another time but it boils down, I feel, to a culture of collaboration and sharing for mutual benefit.
So when you pay someone to develop a site run on Wordpress they’re not building it from scratch. They’re modifying something that has had hundreds of thousands of hours spent developing it. This speeds the process up no end.
I’ve scratched the surface here, mainly because I didn’t want to get into a long explanation of stuff like the Free Software movement, but also because I’m more interested in whether we can get to a place where you can get good and cheap and fast in the offline world. Can collaboration and sharing be applied to business in this way? Or is that just Socialism by another name?
Your thoughts would be appreciated.
A lot of thought is deserved here. But I’ll start with a story which I think is relevant in that it shows that value isn’t necessarily measured in simple terms like, good, fast and cheap.
Joe retires from a refinery after working there for forty years. He’s enjoying his retirement when the phone rings. His old boss sounds frantic. Something has gone wrong at the refinery and no-one knows how to fix it. Could he pop over and take a look?
So Joe goes over to the plant and takes a look at the mass of pipes and valves. He borrows a large wrench and whacks one of the pipes. The refinery comes back to life! His old boss is so pleased he suggests Joe send in a bill for the work done.
Joe thinks about this and finally writes out his invoice on a piece of paper. “To visit refinery and fix pipe work, 1 hour at £10/hour. To know which pipe to hit with wrench, £1,000. Total £1,010.”
This example of experience does may directly compare with innovation and creativity but the point can be made that most creative and experience based advances happen very quickly but rely on a huge store of information often gathered over a significant period of time. How is that huge period of time to be paid for?
The exciting thing about collaborative business is that the simple sharing of information obviates much of the time spent by each individual in accumulating information and experience. Presumably this is how Open Source works?
(An interesting comment on the web this morning about Apple’s Jonathan Ives who says they don’t use focus groups as the result is watered down and satisfies no-one)
As one of the more successful regional snake-oil salesmen who sells a lot of custom-builds, or more accurately modifications of previous builds, I give this issue quite a lot of thought.
The beauty of WordPress (or Moveable Type before it, or Manila before that) is that it makes web publishing easy by removing the tree-structures that typified websites before and replacing them with a sequential publishing model. For those of us that get it, this is liberating, it also leads to RSS, podcasting and ultimately Twitter. The problem is that there are still plenty of clients out there who require structures that don’t follow this model. If you spend five minutes trying to model, for example, a venue’s what’s on guide using WordPress this becomes apparent.
We went through a phase of trying to convince certain clients that they should use WordPress, but you might be surprised what kind of premium many clients put on having the exact information architecture that they want. Most of us either indulge in day-to-day workarounds to get WordPress to do what we want, or are happy to accept the sequential publishing model. But many of the clients who we did successfully convince to use WordPress, were not happy to do either, so they effectively put it in the ‘cheap and bad’ category. And ultimately the web design and build industry is very much client-driven.
“We used Wordpress, which is free, and an off the shelf design, which was also free, and had
it up and running in an afternoon. … So in this situation it was good and cheap and fast. For what we wanted to do, anyway. ”
OK, so setting up the software took a little bit of time and it did just what you wanted, so in that sense it was good and cheap and fast.
But the website wasn’t good, because it didn’t have any content.
“The only thing that cost money was the content which, we felt, was how it should be.”
And that cost something and it certainly wasn’t fast. It took a fair amount of time, and a number of false starts.
You’re arguing, I think, that people tend to get caught up over the software, when they should be concentrating on the website content. I would agree but I think in setting out your argument you, too, have got caught up in the software.
i like this post. it’s made me think, and over the past few days at work we’ve been going through rather intense company development which has in turn meant a lot of thinking. and i like thinking.
BUT. equally, what my first question is: “..whether we can get to a place where you can get good and cheap and fast in the offline world.” – assuming this point refers to everything and not just business models, i want to ask – why? i’m quite aware of things like the slow food movement becoming more popular of late, and that the 20th and 21st century lifestyles have been criticised for becoming faster and faster and pace of life overtaking enjoyment/experience/savouring of anything…
interestingly my wiki search on slow food lead me to slow design, and also the slow movement which both sounds interesting if challenging.
WHY should things be faster? – and this isn’t a dig at you, but more a general musing.. i know i always appreciate things i’ve had to wait for more than things which are immediate!
and on that same note – valuable things like relationships/trust etc always take time to develop and mature. hmmmmmm. you’ve got me thinking lots. :)