That's when it hit me that the market for that kind of product could be immense. (If I had half the opportunism to which 23 of my chromosomes entitle me, I'd have been all over that market since, oh, the late 1980s or so.) And, in this case, being acquired by Salesforce.com is a massive coup--the business equivalent of the mountebank from the traveling medicine show being elevated to a peerage. Cynically, I can't help but tip my hat to the folks who have more or less tapped a limitless supply of energy third only to human stupidity and the impulse to one-up the neighbours. Well played, nameless company acquired by Salesforce.com.
But the epiphany ran deeper than even that. There's a lot--and I mean a LOT--of suckage out there in software. Sometimes the suckage is purely naive and unintentional. But too often there is too much money on the line and too many high-level meetings have been held for the possibility of accident. Frankly, Verbal Kint had it all wrong: The biggest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that software would enrich our lives. Cases in point:
- iTunes -Seriously, until it stops making me Google how to unscramble album covers on my music and podcasts, would the Apple fanbois and fangirlz kindly shut up about the transcendent superiority of design? kthxbi
- Facebook - 'nuff said, amirite?
- PowerPoint - Kinda makes you nostalgic for the days when software was something that The Suits expected their (far more practical) assistants to know.
- Comment sections - Fifteen-plus years of the likes of Slashdot and LiveJournal, and the software can't automatically hell-ban any user who refuses to learn the difference between "there," "their" and "they're"? (Ditto "you're" and "your".) Or won't stop using logical fallacies like slippery slope and ad hominem arguments? Or wouldn't recognise real fascism if it shoved a swastika up their nose? The internet hive-mind would be a lot smarter otherwise. (Better yet, if the dating sites would do this kind of screening, we could breed the ungrammatical & illogical out of existence. Get on that, Match.com!)
- Adobe Flash plugin-in - Oh, your browser just crashed? Again? I don't think we need to look any further for the smoking gun.
- Mindless games - Idle hands are the Devil's own instruments, so the saying goes. But the makers of Farmville, Angry Birds, etc. are clearly his brokers. And when a loud & loutish percentage of gamers can't respond to criticism without astroturfing, doxxing, and physically threatening their critics, it doesn't reflect well on the community as a whole.
