Hello, my name is JP.

Technological Grandstanding

I saw this comic re-posted recently on LinkedIn where the author argued this being the reason Apple and Google are worth "trillions" while the collective "your" applications are worth nothing.

It was an oddly arrogant post. For whatever reason my brain immediately started thinking of Apple and Google products that have missed the mark or annoy me, personally.

Have you seen the redesign of Gmail? It's legitimately awful now, IMO. It's a huge reason I moved to Hey.com for my primary email. Remember Google Wave? Sure, technically it was ahead of its time but HOLY crap was the UX horrible.

And Apple? They get so many things right we tend to forget what they do wrong. The butterfly keyboard?? The magic mouse? Remember the first generation pencil charger for the iPad? Yuk. And on the software side you're going to tell me Preview is a bastion of great engineering and UX? Have you tried searching for something in System Preferences only to have the autocomplete obfuscate relevant options completely? And up until very recently you could argue that Safari was by far the worst browser.

My point is that Apple and Google have done a lot right, clearly. They're both are singularly responsible for pushing UI/UX and the modern web forward but they're not perfect. Just like everyone else.

The point of the comic, in my opinion, was to point out that UX matters. In 2024 I have to say I feel most sites I have experienced online reflect a movement towards better UX. Writing software is hard. Writing really good software very hard and I believe there is a lack of grace at times around that fact.

Frankly, it's a miracle any of this works at all.