We have always been
fascinated by the fact that software sometimes seem to arrive in
the marketplace in bunches. That
is, when a new category (or category variation) arrives, it rarely
arrives in the form of a single piece of software, but rather by
having three or more examples show up all at once.
There is a “scientific”
explanation for this interesting phenomenon.
All of the information that informs innovation or invention
is available to all of the innovators (or software developers) who
are working on projects at any moment in time.
If you’re working in a particular area, you have access
to the same hardware platforms, the same new chips, the same
operating systems and infrastructure, and the same information
about customer needs.
What differentiates
products is what their developers bring to the process in terms of
skills and prior experiences.
Sometimes you can guess who (or which team) worked on a
product just by looking at it.
Developers have their trademarks as surely as artists have
their style.
Just now we’re seeing a
flurry of activity around what we’d call “easy web site”
software. Most of it
is based on the idea that it should be possible for people who are
neither programmers nor web wizards to update the content on a
site without the need to learn new skills (like HTML) or settle
for a really boring site. I think we’re seeing more of them because we wrote
enthusiastically about Dan Bricklin’s addition of blogging to
his Trellix software to let SP’s offer easy web sites to their
customers/subscribers and that sent some of these folks to come
and tell us “We’ve got something, too.”
In any case, we’ve seen
four products in the last two weeks, which is, I think, our world
record. A few of them
aren’t announced yet – or are about to be – so we’re going
to let them take that course before we talk about them in public
(soon!). They are vastly different in terms of how they achieve their
results and exactly who they’re aimed at.
But all of them are interesting and any of them would
definitely qualify as making it easier to maintain a nice web site
with few skills. Just
how far you could go before you’d need more than this depends on
the product. For some
people, this would be all they’d ever need.
To get you started thinking
about this idea, have a look at these:
Nextology’s QuickEditor
will let you edit your site to your heart’s content (text and
graphics), within the templates built for it.
Adding an extra page is, however, a service you purchase
from the provider (or access through an upgraded version of the
product). Many of its
users are restaurants in the Chicago area who need to update their
menus and special events every day.
See it at www.nextology.com.
Another product you might
look at is clearly for consumer or small businesses.
It seems to be Italian (at least the email I got about it
was) and the cartoony art you may optionally purchase to embellish
it has the characteristic look-and-feel of Italian cartoons.
See it at http://www.easywebeditor.com/
