No law of software has proven more true in my experience than Conway's Law, which states:
> organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
The reddit thread comes to the same conclusion, but doesn't frame it this way. This is how I react to good and bad software, and when I see a confused mess of an app coming from a large organization, I think "every VP or director in this bureaucracy had their fingers in the pie, and this app reflects internal backbiting rather than a single unified vision."
And when I see an app with heart, good bones, competent in the implementation, but which is ruined by some crucial flaw, I think there must be a persuasive figure in the organization who rode in after it was halfway done, and championed some bad product choice they really cared about, usually for selfish reasons.
And if a miracle occurs, and when a huge organization produces some successful, well-scoped product, it is inevitably discovered that someone was given a budget and more or less ignored by the chain of command, and was able to ship something good under their noses—and if it is successful, expect version 2.0 to be have been meddled with.
> And if a miracle occurs, and when a huge organization produces some successful, well-scoped product, it is inevitably discovered that someone was given a budget and more or less ignored by the chain of command, and was able to ship something good under their noses—and if it is successful, expect version 2.0 to be have been meddled with.
Well of course. If everyone in power at that organization DOESN'T meddle with it, they're risking huge promotions to the new guy. To be bypassed, in the best case, or outright lose to them.
In huge companies, sabotaging others is an essential part of the way managers climb the ranks.
because the independent appdeveloper and the company ceo have conflicting contradictory goals. the independent devs goals are aligned with the end user. The ceo goals are "aligned" with the users, in the same way a slaughtery owner is aligned with the bacon pigs. simple as that
Indie developers have a unified vision to hang on to. Big corps have multiple stakeholders with varying degrees of conflict between each other, that in turn becomes a variation of "design by committee" even if there's a design team they aren't able nor allowed to have a vision that goes against what so many different parts of Big Corp wants.
Conway's Law applies as well, Big Corps are always delivering their org structure, not a product.
I'll give a slightly differing view from those presented here.
For most big tech companies, apps don't really matter. Your decision on your bank, streaming services, ISP, hardware vendor, etc isn't primarily driven by app quality, it's driven by other factors. "has a beautiful and thoughtful app" is not high on the vast majority of current and potential customers decision criteria. Apps are a cost center and a marketing channel, and are at this point quite often left to languish until they're bad enough to be fully replaced. They are not continually improved, refined, etc. Apps are expensive to produce and require constant maintenance, as both OS and user expectations change.
For a tiny indy shop the app may well be the whole business, and so is invested in accordingly. For a giant company, why spend money on something that just doesn't matter?
> For most big tech companies, apps don't really matter. Your decision on your bank, streaming services, ISP, hardware vendor, etc isn't primarily driven by app quality, it's driven by other factors
For now. When Boomers are in power and drive the majority.
I personally know people of my generation who have picked banks based on which has the least bad web and app presence and Apple/Google Pay support. The actual differences in interest rates aren't that big compared to the day-to-day utility of an actually working mobile app.
For indie devs their single app is their product and their company. It's all they have. They're app-first, it's their entire business model.
For big tech companies (all companies), they have a range of products, and they have many products, and many ways of interacting with the company that might not even involve the app - eg. website. They don't need the app to be good. eg. Gmail is fine in the website. It was a site before it was an app. Google is still primarily a site more than an app. Same with Facebook, etc.
Small tech companies tend to be design or engineering led. Organizations grow and evolve, and as they become large they become marketing or finance led.
* Large organizations tend to be dysfunctional or at least grossly inefficient.
* When requirements are clear and followed through on, they aren't necessarily in the interests of the user, nor even of the business.
* On average, our discipline isn't very good at what we do. (Even arguably criminally bad, when you consider security vulnerabilities routinely created in something that really shouldn't have them.)
* You're exposed disproportionately to the better indie apps, but whatever a big tech company spews out gets exposure because it's from a big tech company.
> organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
The reddit thread comes to the same conclusion, but doesn't frame it this way. This is how I react to good and bad software, and when I see a confused mess of an app coming from a large organization, I think "every VP or director in this bureaucracy had their fingers in the pie, and this app reflects internal backbiting rather than a single unified vision."
And when I see an app with heart, good bones, competent in the implementation, but which is ruined by some crucial flaw, I think there must be a persuasive figure in the organization who rode in after it was halfway done, and championed some bad product choice they really cared about, usually for selfish reasons.
And if a miracle occurs, and when a huge organization produces some successful, well-scoped product, it is inevitably discovered that someone was given a budget and more or less ignored by the chain of command, and was able to ship something good under their noses—and if it is successful, expect version 2.0 to be have been meddled with.