Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

We usually build things for ourselves. We then hope that someone else will use what we build. Sometimes we adapt to doing it right; sometimes not.

A recent story related how we want 80-somethings to register for and then receive the virus vaccine. “All you have to do” is go online and… Wait, is there a contradiction here? “80-somethings” and “go online” seem to not go together or something.

A 30-something built something for 30-somethings. Then someone told 80-somethings to use this 30-something gizmo. Hmmm. Sort of doesn’t make sense, huh? How can smart people do this?

Consider Facebook. It was built by college students for college students. Remember how you needed a dot-edu email address to get an account?

Those college-student builders received and heeded some good advice from somewhere. They revised the software so that other folks (not college students) would use it. Viola’! A trillion dollars or something in profits.

Back in 2008, I visited a company that was under contract to build gadgets for the 2010 census. Someone at the Census Bureau thought it a great idea for census takers—those who walked neighborhoods and knocked on doors—to have a little digital device in their hands on which to enter information that would be zapped up to a computer where wonderfulness would occur. Oh, by the way, those census takers were usually retired volunteers in their 70s who had poor eyesight and had just mastered the push-button telephone at home. A 30-something building a gizmo for a 70-something.

I guess we don’t learn fast or maybe some folks learn faster than others. And then there are those who do learn and rake in a trillion dollars.