You would have to be living under a rock to not notice Apple’s ascendancy as of late.
And one of the clear elements of their ascendancy is that they have a clear vision for usability and peak customer experiences. Notice I didn’t say “peak corporate experiences” but that is a topic for another post I’ve got planned…
Most people seem to point to this focus on peak customer experiences as being driven and shaped by one person – Steve Jobs.
So here is the question.
Do you need a Benevolent Dictator to create great out of the box experiences that extend for the lifetime of the product’s use by an end user?
And is this true for both OpenSource and Closed Source projects.
The folks at the humanized blog had a great post up about this that motivated me in part to put up a post on our blog.
But in addition this is a question that has come up quite frequently in our interviews and is the highlight topic of an upcoming one soon to arrive on the blog.
So what are your thoughts?
I’ve got my own two cents on this which is that you do need one regardless of whether it’s an OpenSource project or Closed Source.
But I’m curious what other folks think as well…
October 13th, 2007 at 11:23 pm
I think that you need a Benevolent Dictator at some level of an organization to make anything Big happen. I’ve yet to see any breakthrough, be it from Microsoft, IBM, or Apple, that wasn’t ultimately pushed by a single person that just MADE IT HAPPEN.
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Dustin Puryear
Author, “Best Practices for Managing Linux and UNIX Servers”
http://www.puryear-it.com
October 14th, 2007 at 11:04 am
It doesn’t need to be a benevolent dictator, but it does need to be strong leadership based around a dearly defined goal.It’s about development models that engage with, and understand, the user.