A while ago I wrote a blog entry about a pre-emptive single task operating system that I think the world needs. It seems I'm not the only one and George RR Martin (Game of Thrones) also thinks there's a need for this. His seems to stem from security as well as a productivity perspective but I think I grok what he means. The feature bloat in products such as MS Office these days detracts from their usability. They may be able to boil the ocean but it's not really necessary and just gets in the way of the creative process. However, DOS surely has a limited life and it must be hard to find the h/w components to run this on now. I may fire up a VM with DOS sometime to remind myself of the good-old-days... need-for-a-preemptive-os++
Much has changed in the past few years, hell, much has changed in the past few weeks, but that’s another story... and I’ve found a little time on my hands in which to tidy things up. The world of non-functionals has never been so important and yet remains irritatingly ignored by so many - in particular by product owners who seem to think NFRs are nothing more than a tech concern. So if your fancy new product collapses when you get get too many users, is that ok? It’s fair that the engineering team should be asking “how many users are we going to get?”, or “how many failures can we tolerate?” but the only person who can really answer those questions is the product owner. The dumb answer to these sort of question is “lots!”, or “none!” because at that point you’ve given carte-blanche to the engineering team to over engineer... and that most likely means it’ll take a hell of a lot longer to deliver and/or cost a hell of a lot more to run. The dumb answer is also “only a couple” and “
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