The Appocalypse
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I already discussed the Screen Wars, which were over the most-prized asset; real estate on the trader’s desktop. With more experience, I could see that the Screen Wars were merely one front in an even broader struggle for control over the future of information. I call it the Appocalypse.
Yes, I was disappointed with my programming environment, but also with computers, software and the culture of technology in general. I was good at building applications but terrible at using them. My advisor might have been right. Maybe I was too old for this stuff before I even started.
For example, I was (and still am) really bad at using kiosks. Sometimes I just stare at the screen for ages, trying to figure out what to do. After I use the same kiosk several times, I will eventually figure out how it works. Then, one day, they will change it and I begin the process all over again.
The problem seemed to be getting worse. I was pretty comfortable using Microsoft Office products for example, or the Linux command line. That’s because they were powerful software packages that you could invest in learning and then get more and more leverage from being good at them. I like that.
But the world of software seemed to be moving away from grandiose designs like Office and Linux. It was moving towards these siloed “apps,” each of which would handle only a handful of semi-arbitrary data points or commands. Each app would present a completely unique interface. Sometimes they were good and sometimes they were bad, but one thing was constant; it was near impossible to do anything combining data from multiple apps. If you needed something from App A and something from App B, you then had to create App C by tapping into the underlying datasources of both. App C would not be easier to build than A or B. It would be harder, and it was likely that you would wind up needing to change or even rewrite A or B in the process. Apps had no way of composing or combining.
As a developer, it was like witnessing the collapse of a few great civilizations into hundreds of tiny, warring tribes.
Of course, I still wasn’t having any new ideas. There was already a significant movement afoot to address exactly this problem. It was called Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). But if SOA was our best hope of stopping the Appocalypse, we had good reason to worry. People kept putting out apps that you couldn’t integrate with, and that included me. You couldn’t avoid spreading the disease.
At least part of the problem with SOA was that the entire cost of making something “service oriented” fell on the developers of the apps. The reward to compensate you for the cost was not necessarily easy to realize. The value of data was always unlocked by displaying that data to important people. If you were successful in making your data available to other DEVELOPERS, then it was likely that they would be the ones to display it to the important people.
In the Appocalypse, you couldn’t just open your doors to anyone who happened by. It wasn’t safe.
As a computer user I was suffering from this malaise everywhere I went, but in my professional life I was churning out exactly the type of app that was laying waste to my dreams of a better computing experience. I could see that the traders were suffering from the Appocalypse too. But at the same time they were demanding more apps. This had given me the mistaken impression that I could save us all with my Utopian Techno-visions.
But if this were a zombie movie, I would be the guy who died because he just couldn’t accept that the old world was a thing of the past. This struggle was bigger than me, bigger than my team, and way bigger than “the firm.” I decided to leave my dreams of a better world at home, and to commit to becoming as valuable as I possibly could under the austere realities of the Appocalypse at work.
