The Three Ninety Percents: Open Source, Enterprise, and Great Software

The Graphing Calculator Story has a great quote in it.

It is a cliche in our business that the first 90 percent of the work is easy, the second 90 percent wears you down, and the last 90 percent — the attention to detail — makes a good product.

As a pretty good approximation, this explains the user experience of Open Source, Enterprise, and Apple software.

Open Source software often stops after the first 90 percent, the fun part, and does not go beyond that.

Enterprise software is characterized by someone (no longer with the company) having done the first 90 percent years ago. The curse of enterprise software is that the programmers only ever do the second 90 percent, the unfun stuff. Enterprise management is not interested in creating new software (the fun 90 percent) or spending the time and money to make a polished product (the last 90 percent).

There are a few companies, Apple being in the vanguard, which do all three 90 percents.

One word: Discoverable

The following is my take on The Black Box Disease, an excellent blog post. It is a revised edit of my post on Hacker News.

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The "transparent" vs. "opaque" abstraction distinction is excellent, but I submit it is an instance of a more important philosophy. The philosophy can be summarized in one word...

Discoverable.

Opaque abstractions are not discoverable: you cannot look inside to discover what makes the abstraction work. If the abstraction works, life is good. If When it breaks, you are forced to limp along with a broken mental model of the abstraction. With opaque abstractions, every time it breaks, you get "buyer's remorse."

Transparent abstractions are discoverable: if you need to (or want to), you can open the box and look inside. As long as your mental model matches the actual functioning of the abstraction, you don't need to open the box. More importantly, when your mental model vs. the abstraction breaks down, you can open the box and either fix your mental model (likely) or fix or enhance the box.

Now to expand "discoverable", think of Apple's products (I think Apple is the best company at implementing discoverable products). Why do they not provide a 2 inch thick printed manual with their products? Because they have a comprehensive Help file[1]? No, it is because their products are discoverable.

You don't have to know how to use every feature of the iPhone in order to get started, you just turn it on and make a phone call. All the useful features a new user needs are obvious and intuitive. Need to browse the web? OK, there is an icon that looks like it will browse the web. Hey, look, it worked. Need to do ______? Poke around, ask a friend, ask Google and you discover new and better ways of doing _____.

More importantly, the advanced features lie quietly in wait. They do not distract the new user, but they are discoverable as the new user becomes more sophisticated.

Not needing a manual is just a side benefit of being discoverable. The bonus for the user and Apple is that the user's delight in the product does not end after the turn it on for the first time. There is no "buyers remorse." Instead, they are discovering new features for months, sometimes years, which results in a long term stream of surprise and delight in the product.

[1] Windows and most Windows software attempts to make their products discoverable by...

1. showing all possible options at once, making their product incomprehensible, and
2. providing an incomprehensible help file that, if printed, would be 2" thick.