tatx

Indeed! Amazon does top-notch customer service at scale like nobody else. Everyone else just assumes that it is impossible to scale up something like this and they let the a previously great experience slip as they grow into a faceless organization. Good business is all about getting these hard things to scale.

They mention that the “the client base moved to enterprise” and I think that, if Gigster is ever reasonably successful, it will end up as a shop making niche products for enterprises who find it difficult to fit such development activities into their budgets and schedules. They will then be directly competing with consultants who today do not provide an 'end-to-end' solution, so to say, to the development problems plaguing these enterprise companies.

But it is mighty difficult to do this kind of niche work because developers will then have to spend an inordinate amount of time acquiring relevant domain knowledge to implement these niche solutions. Hard earned knowledge that will be useless after the project is complete. And the effort of acquiring this domain knowledge will often be under-appreciated and underpaid, cause it is very very difficult to estimate this effort no matter how good an AI have you.

Look at it from the other side. If a designer were to suggest some of the more fundamental changes to how your product should work, would you genuinely listen to their opinions and suggestions, or are these critical decisions being taken by someone higher up in management?

Designers are often pushed into the rear end of the process in every sort of consumer product development (including software development). It is no wonder therefore that we end up with not only ugly but often unusable products. Big opportunities all around for a company that brings good design and better designers to the forefront of product development.

But it is just too damn hard for most people to let go of their ego where design is concerned. The whole design thing looks so intuitive and apparent right from the start that we can't believe we can't do it all ourselves, and, not only that, do it better that everybody else.

That Apple was ever good at design was probably the relative side effect of other software and hardware developers being abysmally bad at it (probably due to monopolistic inefficiencies). And now that the competition is heating up and challenging Apple on the design front, the flaws that earlier would have been swept under the carpet by ardent fans, including me, are becoming difficult to disregard.

Browsing Facebook, or for that matter any other similar network (including HN :)), is like anti-meditation. They rattle your mind with so much information in such quick succession that it becomes almost impossible to think through or about any one particular thing. Like alcohol, it is simultaneously addictive – the mind craves information – and depressing – numbs the mind preventing it from engaging in deep rational thought.

I think we can have the best of both worlds – enjoy our whiskey and discuss philosophy too :) I think there is a future for a social network that can slow things down a little, maybe also summarize, organize and filter an apparently disparate group of things, allowing the user enough time to digest and process the information before moving ahead in leisure.

Great metaphor, but I think smartness is something even lesser than a torch. Creativity, it seems, is the torch that helps you find the right wedge. Smartness is probably what tells you to look for a wedge in the first place.

Cleartax has done an amazing job, really. I filed my last two returns using Cleartax and everything went without a hitch. Even when the system fails to parse the Form-16 correctly it is easy enough to just manually enter the data, save it, come back to it later and complete filing the returns. I have had a harder time filing tax returns with TurboTax, though that was a while back. Cleartax kept sending me repeated email reminders to complete the filing process even after it was already complete, so there's a bug somewhere :) but otherwise kudos to Archit and the rest of the team.

Hell, I am ready to join their efforts, if only they would have a grumpy old guy like me on the team :)