ALAN COOPER, KNOWN as the "Father of Visual Basic" and the author of The Inmates are Running the Asylum, is one of the keynote speakers at the InfoWorld CTO Forum this week in San Francisco. His firm, Cooper Interaction Design, innovates and improves software and interactive products. In an interview with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard, Cooper talks about what ails the industry today and what it should do -- including abandoning browser technology -- to reinvigorate itself.

   ADVERTISEMENT
  

Free IT resource

TechNet: More ways to know it, share it, and keep it running.

Sponsored by Microsoft

Free IT resource

Attend the SOA Executive Forum: Breaking SOA Bottlenecks SOAExecForum.com/may2007

Sponsored by InfoWorld

RELATED LINKS
»  IT trainer offers master's degree for hackers
»  MSNBC buys participatory news site Newsvine
»  Merchants: eBay ad programs drive buyers away
»  Web services RSS feed 

IDG ENTERPRISE NETWORK
• Web Services Caution Abounds  (CIO)

TOP NEWS 


IT SOLUTION SEARCH
InfoWorld: Right now the industry as a whole seems to be stuck in a morass. How did this come about?


Cooper: The industry has been swept with strong currents. There was a strong uplifting wind and there was a strong [downward] wind. And as the old saying goes, 'In a high wind even turkeys fly.' There were a lot of bogus ideas out there about the way you build your business, and the implosion of the dot-com world has shown those things -- such as you have to go to market immediately, that time to market is a great advantage, that you need market share, and that you don't need profits -- to be hollow claims. They were an example of the truth by repeated assertion. Since the implosion, I've realized that a lot of the things that I believed in deeply and have believed in for many years actually were true, and it was a temporary anomaly that made these things seem like maybe I should doubt them.

InfoWorld: Where are we now?

Cooper: People are waiting for the next technology to bail them out. Each successive technology, while it brings a set of solutions, also brings a set of problems. So the net gain is nothing. In order to deliver real solutions, you still have to do hard work. A lot of people are saying computers are hard to use, but it will all be really easy when we get voice recognition. And that just isn't true. People said computers are hard to use, and when we get graphical user interfaces, they'll be easy to use. And that's not true. What we did is we just added new layers to functionality and complexity, and computers are just as hard to use as they ever were. In fact, they're arguably more so.

InfoWorld: So has there been any real innovation brought about by the Internet?

Cooper: The Internet is not new technology. The Internet is built on technology that's largely been around for about 50 years. The bulk of it has been around for about 30 years. It's packet-switched networks based on telephone networks, integrated computer chips, and personal computers that have been around for 25 years. Everything you could do on the World Wide Web today, you could do on CompuServe 15 years ago. What made the difference was not technology, but interfaces between software. TCP/IP and HTTP are software-to-software interfaces, and they allow the different disciplines to communicate with each other. This was not a technology innovation at all. Most of the advances that we use today aren't technological advances -- they're product innovations, which is a dramatically different thing. Product innovations generally don't come out of the lab, or from academia, or from business. They usually come from people who are concerned about the needs of users.

InfoWorld: What exactly are you doing today?

Cooper: We model the user, and we can tell you what features and facilities and behavior this product is going to need in order to be desired by your users. That last step tends to be eschewed by most of the people in the industry. So we get products that are tremendously powerful and that have viable business models, but that please nobody. There are a thousand firms out there that call themselves usability firms. What they'll do is let you build your Web site and then meter it and tell you what works and what doesn't. Well that works, but boy, isn't that expensive and time-consuming to build, only to discover that you've built it wrong? People need to put in some time and effort on the front end so that you can have a much better chance of knowing what's going to be right and what's going to satisfy your users when you come out of the starting gate. Instead of blundering around with time-consuming development, your development proceeds much more smoothly with fewer dead ends. If you go down a dead end during actual coding, that's enormously expensive. It leaves behind scar tissue inside your program that you may never recover from. Once you build something, it kind of takes on a life of its own. And so it becomes a real problem.

InfoWorld: Why does the software industry always seem to want to try to extend existing code into new application areas, rather than write something new?

Cooper: One of my assertions is that code is not an asset. A lot of companies say their job is to maximize the revenue from our code base. That reflects a kind of an Old World, industrial-age thinking. What's interesting is the open-source movement is kind of our first proof that code in fact is not an asset. What is your company's asset is the experience and knowledge that the people who have built your code have gathered during the construction of that code. But the code itself doesn't have a lot of value. In fact, the code kind of anchors you down. In the traditional manufacturing business 30 years ago, if you had a warehouse full of spare parts and completed products, that was an asset that you put on your books. Today if you've got a warehouse full of manufactured goods, that's a huge liability. In the world of software, it's your relationships with your customers and vendors and the knowledge of your people that are valuable. This is part of the movement from a product-centered world to a service-centered world that we're going to. I think the open-source movement is sort of like a moon mission. They went to the moon to see if we could go to the moon, not to set up a burger stand there. People who will come after will set up burger stands there. Linux may or may not be commercially viable. But I think that the people who follow in their footsteps will find that software is service. The software itself is not of value.

InfoWorld: Are the concepts behind component reuse viable?

Cooper: Moving toward software components is a laudable thing. The problem is that the "componentization" is not based on giving users what they want; it's based on giving programmers what they want. What users want and what programmers want differ dramatically. What makes software easy for humans is not at all easy for programmers. Right now you have toolmakers out there who are creating extremely powerful sophisticated tools that serve programmers but not users.

InfoWorld: So how will users ultimately benefit?

Cooper: It's inevitable that there will rise up in programming a separate but equal profession known as interaction design. These people will act as the bridge between business viability and technical capability. They will act like architects. Architects serve as the bridge between the long list of requirements and the actual blueprints. That's the role that the interaction designers need to play. As long as programmers are creating cool things that they like to make their job easy, we will be stuck in the exact same situation we've been in all along, where the stuff gets ever more capable but has the exact same level of frustration that it does today.

InfoWorld: With the advent of Web services, some people are now starting to talk about end-user programming. Is this ever going to be viable?

Cooper: Programmers have been talking about end-user programming for as long as I've been in the computer industry. And it's never happened. I don't know what makes people think that it's going to happen with the next wave of new software tools. People haven't changed. The only people who like to program are programmers. They will continue to evolve their tools and will continue to program and will do so more creatively and more powerfully and more interestingly. But the people who don't program aren't going to start programming.

InfoWorld: What's your best piece of advice for Microsoft and other software companies these days?

Cooper: My advice to Microsoft is to abandon the browser. The browser is a red herring; it's a dead end. The idea of having batched processing inside a very stupid program that's controlled remotely is a software architecture that was invented about 25 years ago by IBM, and was abandoned about 20 years ago because it's a bad architecture. We've gone tremendously retrograde by bringing in Web browsers. Now we have an infinite variety of computers all around the world and an infinite variety of remote sites all around the world. That's the power. And the power would be greater and the capabilities would be three orders of magnitude greater if we could get rid of this old, stupid, stinking technology of browsers. We have stepped backward in terms of user interface, capability, and the breadth of our thinking about what we could do as a civilization. The browser is a very weak and stupid program because it was written as essentially a master's thesis inside a university and as an experiment. Internet Explorer is nothing more than a master's thesis program.

InfoWorld: So what prevents us from walking away from the browser?

Cooper: There is no single technical obstacle -- none, not one. It could all be built today. The obstacle is in the most difficult place in the universe: It's between the ears of people in business and people in industry. And that's because what they tend to do is take the same conservative path, which is what they're going to do tomorrow and is what they did yesterday. Nobody wants to be risky and go out there. Wall Street doesn't reward people for risk-taking behavior; it rewards people for consistently making their numbers every quarter.

InfoWorld: Given your breath of experience, what's the No. 1 problem facing the industry today?

Cooper: The top technology issue is that the process by which we determine what products we're going to build is very lopsided. It's very expensive to build software and launch software. And yet what we do as an industry is very little thinking in advance, very little planning, and very little studying of who our users are. The biggest challenge facing the technology world today is understanding that devoting time before [beginning] construction pays enormous dividends downstream.