exciting and innovative!!!! uh... no... try boring and useless

well...here we are. we are probably in what i would consider to be the most absofuckinglutely most god awful period ever in software development. jesus fucking christ. we are in the software equivalent of elvis in his vegas years...fat, bloated, barely functional, and shitting our pants. i don't know about you guys (or gals), but i am fucking sick of this shit. in addition, it's not just single pieces of software that i'm talking about. i'm talking about whole categories of applications that are so fucking completely useless and asinine, i wouldn't even know where the fuck to start.

let's see if i can at least dredge up the fucking energy to browbeat some of my favorite fucking culprits...

google
hmmmmmm..... am i missing something here people? maybe i just. don't. fucking. get. it. here i thought there could never ever be a company as arrogant as apple is. boy, was i fucking mistaken. everything from their "do no evil" motto to their google "blog"(which is nothing but some of the worst advertising ever) does nothing but reek of fucking arrogance. let's get a grip here folks...they have a pretty decent search engine, and... no, that's basically it as far as i'm concerned. there is nothing more diarrhea inducing then hearing yet another fucking bullshit google product announcement fawned over by a bunch of moronic imbeciles (eweek, wired, register, oreilly, etc...) and treated like a staggering revelation that will change the world as we know it. let's take a look at some of their more recent offerings...

gmail
wow... fucking web-based email!! yes!! yes!!... that's just what i fucking needed. another free web-based email account. as far as i know gmail has two claims to fame:

• the use of client side javascript
• the size of the mailbox

as far as the first would be concerned, i was not aware of the fact that client side javascript was something new... ah, but i hear you spew out the "ajax, ajax, ajax" bullshit. well, as far as i know adopting a technology that was invented by one of your biggest competitors is hardly anything new or innovative. especially when they have apps that do it better...

as to the size of the mailbox... that's a simple one. i just can't consider spending money to be something that should be thought of as new or innovative. as long as you can afford the storage and the infrastructure needed for it, you're pretty much good to go... again, i just don't see what the big fucking deal is.

actually the only really new idea that gmail has is scanning your email and vomiting forth ads and marketing that would be relevant. so if you're wondering why your gmail account has nothing but click-through ads for blow-up dolls, pocket pussies, and anime porn, it's not because gmail is reading your mind... it's just that by reading your email it's determined that you are a lonely tech-dork that has some spare time...

google maps/moon/whatever...
let me just say first... google maps is a fine piece of technology. as a matter of fact i get the feeling that most of the tech-morons out there refer to this application as cool. the combination of javascript, satellite imagery, overlays, etc is something that is fairly new and innovative. (even if all they did was take 1/2 terraserver, 1/2 mapquest,  mix, shake and pour) unfortunately when it is all said and done, and all the glitz and bullshit are removed, all it really does for me is provide me with driving directions. i have gotten driving directions over the web for some years now, and i can't say having yet another site with driving directions is too terribly exciting. this is basically the same piece of shit ford pinto web application, but with a new coat of paint. you can only get a hard-on from seeing your house via satellite imagery so many fucking times before you just go limp...

and so on...
despite the above two, google has many other services and applications. they also have a toolbar. however, i'm just so fucking incredibly amazed that the public is stupid enough to value these arrogant buffoons close to the tune of  a billion dollars. people... it's a fucking search site! nothing more or less... and you know what else is hilarious... when i hear from all these fucking instapundits that microsoft better watch out, because google is "out-innovating" them. oh, that's rich...ya gotta love it... let's see... a search engine, driving directions, newsgroup archives (which they bought) and a blogging service (which they bought as well) among other things. gee... i guess if i was microsoft i'd be crapping my pants in fear too...

social software
social software... social. software. this has got to be a fucking oxymoron, right? from my space to del.icio.us, i can't think of bigger fucking waste of bits & bytes. do you honestly think that i'm going to be impressed by your oh-so-ultra-hip listening habits? or your cool taste in movies?? and why the fuck would i want to be a part of this utterly fucking moronic community? (i have to say though, it would be fun to browbeat a bunch of emo kids, but i digress...) and let me tell you...i really couldn't give a shit about what you're bookmarking... the only things i can see that these sites serve is to force your completely fucking juvenile taste in books, music, and film onto the unsuspecting public in a desperate plea for attention while hoping these things serve as a beacon showing just how hip, cool, and utterly original you really are...

in addition, those fucking cliche bits of poetry that i find on some of these profiles...jesus christ. i dunno...maybe your pathetic attempt to be deep and profound will finally pay off and get you all the pussy you deserve. (i'm guessing probably not though...)

while i'm at it... let me tell you... i couldn't give a shit about your fucking photo albums. from the completely moronic phenomenon of moblogging to sites like flikr, i think the web has had just about as much disgustingly bad amatuer photography as it can take.

also, anybody who has used the word folksonomy and still take themselves seriously should be gagged, defecated upon, pistol-whipped and finally shot. you know who you are...

desktop search applications / browser toolbars
are you that fucking disorganized? jesus fucking christ... i've been using various computers and operating systems just as long as the next guy has and i've never needed this kind of shit. maybe i just don't have that many files worth giving a shit about. or, maybe i just know how to use simple things like folders, directories, file names that aren't idiotic...but that's me. why desktop search applications have gotten so much press in the last year is just so fucking completely beyond me. i can't tell you how many people i saw writing stuff about this shit... telling me it's going to change the way i use my computer! has software gotten so fucking abyssmal that desktop search utilities are deserving of such press? and speaking of moronic bullshit...

so let me get this straight... google, microsoft, and yahoo are supposed to have some pretty bright people working for them. so in order to make our web browsing experience better, they release... toolbars!?!? what the fuck is that? i can't think of a better way of saying, "well that browser you're using is kind of broken...but we got this nifty toolbar you can download to fix it!!!!" you know what you sorry-assed losers? i don't want a fucking toolbar... i want a fucking browser that works. all these so called features that you see in these toolbars should be part of the fucking browser in the first place. i don't care if it's internet explorer or firefox... spell-checking, searching, etc... you shouldn't need a fucking add-on for these.

what annoys me is that in the last year i've just seen way, way too much bullshit about both desktop search and browser toolbars. i have neither and i can't say i've suffered too much. such completely useless bullshit...

(and of course)
open source

(don't worry... microsoft is going to get their due too...)

let me tell you something... i've always thought it pretty fucking slightly ironic that the biggest fucking craybabies ever about innovation, passion, etc... base the majority of their creative endeavours on making inferior free versions of already existing software... these are the lunatics that have the nerve to criticize companies like microsoft?? holy duechemasters batman!!... these bastards don't have a leg to fucking stand on.

having the attitude that one should not get paid for their hardwork is not very innovative or exciting either. and no, as far as i'm concerned peer recognition and respect, pride at a job well done, being part of a pathetic self-rightous proselytizing community and being a celebrity in my own mind is not what i would call proper compensation. nor is it pretty fucking exciting for the people who do this kind of thing to provide for their kids, family, mistress, deadbeat uncle, etc... who have to hear constantly that the software they are creating should be replaced by software that costs nothing. maybe that's an innovative way of destroying morale in some cases but that's about it.

i'm so fucking tired of hearing all these fucking self-congratulatory press releases about one fucking moronic open source product after another. jesus... just what was i thinking. of course i could always use one of the following:

• yet another buggy IM client
• yet another buggy mp3 player
• yet another bloated linux distro
• yet another fucking incredible useless spreadsheet/powerpoint clone

you know what i find to be even more fucking hilarious... oh, this is so fucking rich... the fucking fastest growing development platform for linux is.... TA-DA... MONO!! man, i can barely type this shit i'm laughing so fucking hard. how great is this. this is just fucking too good to be true! in my book, this fucking takes the cake. i think now it's only a matter of fucking time before some young, ambitious open source developer decides to port cmd.exe and explorer.exe to linux as well... jesus. fucking. christ.

however, since these guys are so fucking lacking in innovation, maybe they can turn to...

microsoft
you know what is really exciting? over the course of two or so years hearing essential features being ripped out of what was going to be THE ONE YOU ALL HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR (and still are). on top of that many so called features and innovations are now going to be available for some of their older operating systems as well. but i guess when one of your main selling point is new and improved desktop search, what the fuck are you expecting??

as far as i'm concerned i'm still waiting to upgrade any microsoft software since office 2000. i mean what the fuck is so goddamned compelling about a fucking word processor that i need spend $400.00 to upgrade?? i just don't get it. i'll tell you what... office has just gotten sooo fucking ridiculous. how can anybody be fucking passionate about microsoft office? uh, yeah... word processors and spreadsheets get me real fucking excited... no matter how you fucking cut it, no matter what fucking euphemism you use to describe the soul-sucking, life-leeching thing we call work, there is nothing that is going to make these products more exciting. i can't think of a more useless upgrade than office.

i'm sorry. at this point not even the fucking deluge of developer tools do it for me. how many fucking times do you need to hear that visual studio 2005, sql server 2005, and fuckmaster 2005 are finally going to be the tools to boost you to the next fucking level. this shit has gotten so fucking anti-climatic already. enough...i've fucking had it! holy shit!!! i can now code those 1.5 million lines faster, stronger, and more productively due to nullable types!!! yes... yes...bring it the fuck on!!! lately i've also been hearing vague things about c# 3.0 regarding database integration... wait... just wait... you mean to fucking tell me that you have just fucking figured out that 80 or so fucking percent of applications built with your tools work with a fucking database?? what the fuck is that? when i hear shit like this, do you actually have to wonder why i might be just a little unexcited? unfortunately i can't think of something more boring to code than yet another web or desktop application that reads in data from a database (or even better yet... a web-service), let's a user completely fucking mangle it, fails your validation logic 4 fucking times, and then finally get shoved back into the database... and you're just starting to fucking realize that there might be an impedence mismatch between the data store and the application?? you guys have been doing this for how long??

sigh...
unfortunately this kind of shit is neither exciting nor interesting. i'd rather get a hand-job from a fucking cheese grater.

Comments

[Andy]

Nice to see you back!

[Pat Berry]

All that and nothing about Ruby on Rails...

[thomas woelfer]

oh. looks like you're still alive. good.

WM_CHEERS
thomas woelfer

[Anonymous Coward]

It's about fucking time you posted! G'Damnit!

[Scott C. Reynolds]

Phil...have you gone over the edge finally?

[causticPhil]

andy: thanks.... (by the way, your post on bullshitting definitely requires a more careful analysis)

scott: no, i can assure you, i have not gone over the edge yet. i am still quite sane. trust me... you'll know when i'm over the edge. however, i appreciate your concern...

[superk]

although i don't agree with the free software bit, the rest is pretty accurate, especially the part about social software. i ranted about it just last week, especially the bit about bad poetry. glad to see i'm not the only one =)

K

[optionsScalper]

Phil,

You wrote:

"the public is stupid enough to value these arrogant buffoons close to the tune of a billion dollars"

Trailing twelve month sales (total revenue) at Google (GOOG) are US$4.48 Billion. Market Capitalization of Google (shares outstanding times price) is US$83.11 Billion. Both of these numbers are as of tonight's market close. So you were off by a factor of about 83, but I think I'm just beginning to get your point (I'm a little slow).

BTW, where is your crappy CAPTCHA to protect you from blog spam?

---O

[causticPhil]

o: thank you for the correction. this of course though brings us from mildly depressing to fucking suicidal...

[Homer]

Phil, you always amuse me with your insightful commentary. As a corralary to your "love" of the moronic, My least favorite idiot is the senior exec who repeatedly demands un-achievable deadlines for projects. So you are always pushing things out a week before going live, or going live and then spending months cleaning up the mess. There's nothing like an entire MIS dept spinning their wheels 18 hrs a day for some project that never goes live...or goes live and creates more issues than before. So cheers for your candor and your humor...most of us are in a similar boat.

[causticPhil]

homer: thanks for the kind words. what you are talking about is actually going to be a subject of a later post that i've been thinking about...

[Bill]

Thank God you're back!

[Tobin Titus]

Perhaps you'd like my competition to Ajax named JAXASS (http://www.jaxass.net).

[Jeremy Brayton]

People will spend money on things they perceive to have value or added value. An upgrade from Office 2000 to Office 2003 for Word, Excel, and Powerpoint is 0% value. There's nothing useful that was changed in any of those products. The only product in the entire Office suite that deserves the upgrade sticker is Outlook. It's actually become a decent email client with administrative features that won't allow your employees to completely trash their computer while they proceed to get all sorts of email pr0n and other wonderful goodness. Is it worth $400? Hell no. $40? Maybe.

If I didn't have a job that required me to watch over employees like little children I could care less about Office. It's not really all that great and you can't really innovate anything about a Word processor. Them damn things have been around as long as man has written. It was first called stone and a chisel.

Is it just me, but do these points seem like symptoms of a larger problem?
That problem is that people are demanding more money for less and/or shitty work.

It'll only become greater though as borderline criminal behavior is now business policy in some companies. People will do what they can get away with and it's pretty evident that people are trying to work for nothing. I suspect if people could get paid to do nothing, they would. Wait a minute, I just described welfare yet these people wouldn't dare call it that. Retards.

[slugster]

primo!! from now on i am going to read all your posts at the office, so my snorts of laughter disrupt all my fellow drones.

kudos for keeping it real :)

[Al]

Phil,

Yeah, Google is gonna disappoint many people someday. I will NEVER get tired of looking at my house using the sat image though.

Peace,
Allan

[Hemant]

To add to the agony of using Google earth, I installed it and was looking for live images of my house. Unfortunately Google says that the images were taken sometime in last 3 years and are not as frequently updated as you may think. So even if you are not getting tired of looking at your house, do not expect to see your wife or kids waving at you.
BTW looks like my house is below the clouds when the photograph was taken and Google has not updated it yet :-(

[Timothy Babych]

Man, you got to kill yourself now. This world is full of morons and bullshit and this is unlikely to change. And arrogant jerks will never get used to it.

[chuck]

you're so full of shit.

[Red5]

I like the fucking fresh face you put on our industry. Keep up the fucking good work!

[MoreMan]

Give us more... its time!

[Michael]

I'll start by saying that i agree with you.

As to google, they're overvalued and overhyped, and you're dead on. I'm still waiting for the bubble to burst, but the people with money aren't the people with technical insight. Hell, even the people with technical insight are lemmings to the new machine. It's sad, but hopefully we can cash in on the stock spike before everyone wises up, or Google actually becomes a real business.

To your point on desktop search, I might point out that while I've never needed it for the seam reasons as you, every non-techie I know does. People seriously don't understand files and folders. I kid you not. Worse, they don't understand how to navigate through Windows, let alone the file system. They need toolbars as well, because the web browser is all they understand. On top of that, they can't figure out the address bar, so they always have to start from a search engine or a bookmark to get anywhere. This is reality, my friend.

On open source, I'm still in debate, so I won't commen at length, but writing software is damned hard, and I hate those that try to undermine my ability to make a living by spreading the free software ideal. Having said that, there is more than one definition of "free" in use in OSS, and not every one bad. It's a thick forest with a lot of issues on both sides.

To your point on Microsoft releasing expensive updates with few new features, it's quite simple. They're always going to have a current version of everything, and it's alwasy going to cost whatever they feel the complete package is worth. You're not expected to buy the latest and greatest, so don't. They'll market it anyway, because it's in their best interest to do so, but you DO have the option of ignoring it. Simply buy the versions that appeal to you, and skip the rest. But to expect the company to stagnate for years because the version you bought is good enough for you is ludicrous. If I buy Office 2000, and in two years they've added a few new features, why shouldn't the next guy who comes along be able to buy Office 2002? It doesn't mean that I have to, because I'm satisfied with what I paid for, but he should be able to buy whatever is current.

Do you get pissy at Toyota for releasing a new Camry every year (let's assume, just for a moment, that you're a Camry customer), and forcing you to upgrade for $25,000 or so? No, because you understand that they'll always have a "current" model, and you're happy with whichever you paid for. You'll likely skip a few years, and upgrade when you're ready. Toyota will even advertise that you should be in a shiney new Camry, but you'll ignore it, because you know they're talking only to those that are ready to buy new or upgrade, and not to you, someone who just bought one last year.

Microsoft is no different.

In any case, software development sucks today, I agree. My personal pet peeve is AJAX. Not because of the usual "it's old technology with a new name" argument. That's just arrogance. It's because we've just spent a decade refining the desktop, and now we're writing shitty applications in the browser that are less capable and less consistent across platforms than Windows 1.0.

THE BROWSER IS NOT AN APPLICATION PLATFORM!!!!

Yes, I understand the need for a capable, cross-platform environment for developing easily-distributed and managed applications. However, the browser is infantile, immature, and designed in a different time for a different purpose. Instead of trying to cram modern software into such a crippled tool, we should instead be devoting our efforts into new technology that will actually solve the problem. Java failed to live up to expectations, but it was a good cause. Microsoft's .NET framework, combined with SmartClient and ClickOnce, are great concepts, taking advantage of easy deployment and updates, and the full rich UI of Windows. Of course, it's not there yet, but it's a better area to spend R&D money than another round of AJAX crap.

[Matt]

I hope you never want to work again:

http://www.canton.elegal.ca/archives/2006/02/index.html#a000583

Just shut the fuck up, microsoft troll. I suspect you are microsoft employee (and assbandit, as well).

[FuckAJAX]

Anyone who says ClickOnce is a "great concept" is a Microsoft cocksucker.