The mark of a professional, I believe, in any field of expertise is the drive to improve their value, their worth as a whole to that field; The desire for self improvement. In some ways, it is what sets us as humans apart from the lower species. Over the course of the last few years, what has inevitably come to the fore for most designers and developers alike is the importance of customer experience, and in many cases, the emotional connection the customer forms with your product and or brand.
This connection is what fuels popular brands like Starbucks, Apple, JetBlue and others. They seem to have discovered this much earlier on than most companies and the benefits are tremendous.
As a designer and a developer, it is very easy in this field to lose sight of the most important part of the entire process. The Customer. Not the product, not the tools, but the customer. The customer's need, his connection with you and how much he feels you understand that are key in creating brand loyalty. Reviewing the recorded sessions from MIX07 that are on the web reveal a few sessions dedicated to rethinking the entire design experience, changing how we the producers of what customers use approach the process. My favorite of all those by far, and quite frankly, the best presentation I've seen in a while was the one given by Lewis Carbonne on "The Emotion of Customer Experience" available recorded. One of my favorite quotes from his presentation is this
Good, bad, or indifferent, every customer has an experience with your company and the products or services you provide. But few businesses really manage that customer experience... so they lose the chance to transform customers into lifetime customers.
I would classify that as well as several others as a must see for any designer, developer or producer as a way to provide context and direction for where and how they need to evolve in the current competitive market.
In what can only be referred to as a playground pissing contest, I've been coming across quite a few posts by Adobe developers reacting to the news of Microsoft's release of Silverlight (formerly WPF/e) and the inevitable conclusion by this observer is that Adobe and it's developers are worried and are acting out, like children in a playground who just noticed a new kid with a better ball than them. With good reason I might add.
To start with, in my brief testing and review of Silverlight and it's capabilities, it is nothing short of stunning. And the potential for this technology is tremendous, and cross browser to boot (except for linux that is). Silverlight is without question a competitor to Adobe's Flash offering, which has more or less owned the market for vector animations and rich dynamic applications for quite a while. It's features are quite similar, both have a light install footprint, but more than that, even in it's beta release form, the video performance of Silverlight exceeds that of Flash. And to sweeten the pot, the upcoming version 1.1 opens up development to all .NET developers as it includes a reasonably full subset of the framework.
With all this going on, it is understandable that adobe and it's developers would be a mite perturbed. But instead of taking a step back and examining where they need to innovate and go from here to bolster competition, many of them are taking the juvenile step of attacking the technology and Microsoft, seemingly on every little weakness or deficiency of the technology. Nitpicking at this and that like kids at a playground. And interestingly, so far, this has been mostly one sided. Alessandro Crugnola, a well known flash developer referred to it as "Fear of Silverlight".
I am a big admirer of Adobe, quite frankly, as far as software goes, if there were software groupies, I'd be one. But I have to say, in this most recent outburst of emotion towards Silverlight, they leave a lot to be desired.
