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Just enough is good enough
This shouldn't be taken to mean to do sloppy work or throw something against
the wall and hope it sticks. It is a fine line. You've got to know or even sense
when to “Just Ship It”, and when to be sure things need to be really well
engineered. Many new technologies that have been introduced on the Internet
including streaming audio, Java, and even the protocols of the Internet itself were
arguably inferior to alternate approaches that could have been developed or
even that already existed. However, they all “did the job”. Just enough turned out
to be good enough to get the idea out there and enable people to start to benefit
from it. Early adopters are happy to get a hold on new things and are very willing
to spend hours providing their feedback on bugs and suggested improvements.
This same Net Attitude can be applied to projects of all kinds in any size
organization. You can actually use the model and culture of how the Internet was
developed to develop any idea – using the Internet itself as the platform for
feedback, review, collaboration, and communication. There have been many
examples of this approach on the Internet over the past five years. When the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications released the first alpha version
of Marc Andreessen's new web browser (called "Mosaic”) in February 1993, it
was a bit crude. Likewise on May 23, 1995, when John Gage, director of the
Science Office for Sun Microsystems, and Marc Andreessen, then cofounder and
executive vice president at Netscape announced that Java technology was real,
it was hardly ready for prime time. Ditto for many other technologies. In all cases
the early adopters greeted the technologies with open arms, provided feedback
and reviews to the developers, and actually collaborated with the developers to
iteratively improve things until they were usable by larger numbers of people.
Avoid the one-size-fits-all approach
While explosive developments in all aspects of the Internet were happening out
in the public domain there were an equally important set of things happening
inside of organizations of all kinds around the world. Internal networks using
TCP/IP, the protocols of the Internet, were constructed and firewalls were
erected to protect against unwanted intrusion from the Internet. The internal
networks became known as intranets. Web technology is relatively low cost and
relatively easy to implement and this enabled the intranets to mushroom. They
were initially used to publish information such as reference manuals and
employee directories. As the web application tools have become more
sophisticated the intranet applications have too. CIOs of organizations have
embraced the use of web applications and many have also begun to apply the
disciplines of more traditional information technology application development
including requirements planning, system architecture, design specifications,
development, testing, systems integration, etc. This is good on the one hand but
potentially can impede rapid progress if taken too far.
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