Ryan King links to this great essay.

Anyway, I babbled at Nat along these lines for a while, predicting that, while I was sure that anyone he talked to in a corporation would tell him, "free groupware, yes, awesome!", there was really no reason to even bother releasing something like that as open source, because there was going to be absolutely no buy-in from the "itch-scratching" crowd. With a product like that, there was going to be no teenager in his basement hacking on it just because it was cool, or because it doing so made his life easier. Maybe IBM would throw some bucks at a developer or two to help out with it, because it might be cheaper to pay someone to write software than to just buy it off the shelf. But with a groupware product, nobody would ever work on it unless they were getting paid to, because it's just fundamentally not interesting to individuals.

And there you have it in a nutshell. No **organization** ever wrote or used a program. **Individuals** write and use programs. If you want people to love your software, it has to appeal to individuals.

As a corollary, if your program sucks for individuals, it will suck for the organization. This goes along with the complex adaptive systems and emergent behavior issues I rant about from time to time.

Good idea for a project at the end of the article, too: server-less calendar sharing. Cool.

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