It's said that the point of studying history is so that we can learn from the mistakes of the past so that we can avoid making them again - and the tragedy is that we never seem to do so. We merely acknowledge, with distressing nonchalance, that we made the same mistake a second time (or a third, or a fourth, etc.) after we've already taken action.
Case in point: I was listening to a colleague vent about how his employer was presently attempting to recreate its entire Web presence on the iPad. To his way of thinking, it was "shiny new thing" syndrome - the executives were distracted by the tablet device and shifted significant budget to pursue it ... by cutting the budget to the smartphone development initiatives, which only a few years prior was funded by cutting budget to their Web site initiatives.
Each time, the abrupt change in focus left work half-completed in the previous channel, and work in the new channel-of-obsession was done in a hectic and sloppy manner. The repetition had him discouraged, and unable to commit himself wholeheartedly to his new projects because it seemed inevitable that, a year or two in the future, there would be a new platform (the iWatch or somesuch) for which his present work would be abandoned.
This took me back to 1994, a time when the Internet was relatively new to business, and their immediate reaction was to stop doing print and re-create all of their existing print documents online. As a result, many Web sites were a jumble of disorganized information, shoveled from archives of print documents that were written at different times, for different purposes, and for different audiences - and clients completely ignored the nature and potential of the new medium.
Perhaps I shouldn't complain too much, as it was the start of a fairly decent career when one savvy executive recognized the problem and reached outside the IT industry to get someone with a communications background to help make sense of it all - but one of the most frustrating aspects of my work from that day to this has been fighting against the shovelware mentality and the gormless enthusiasm for shiny new things.
No-one seems to have recognized that the mistake that is made when there's a heated rush to adopt a new channel and shovel over the content and functionality of older ones without regard to the nature, capabilities, and usage patterns of the channel. Or worse, they do recognize it, but issue the order to "just get something out there" and fix it later. But later, some other distraction comes along and the work that was done in a sloppy, heated rush is left that way indefinitely. Or worse still, the sloppy work that was done in other channels sets a precedent - it becomes a standard way of doing things that should be imitated in new channels for the sake of providing a consistent customer experience. Consistently awful, but consistent nonetheless.
I'm feeling far too pessimistic at the moment to propose a solution to the problem. Perhaps anyone with a long enough memory can use the example of the past to suggest we avoid, rather than repeat, the shovelware mistake in future. Or given the shorter span of time between platforms these days, perhaps it doesn't take so long of a memory to provide an example.
The point being that when the Internet came along in 1993 (or more accurately, that's when it went commercial and opened itself to the general public), there was not much in the way of a precedent. I think it was around the fifth century when books came to replace scrolls and tablets, and the originals probably were little more than collections of parchment and papyrus scrolls, cut apart and bound together without regard to whether the collection made much sense.
It took centuries to get books right, and decades to get the Web sorted out (if, indeed, it could be deemed "sorted" even today), and new media are bubbling up at such a frantic pace that it remains likely that decision-makers will latch on to them compulsively for a short amount of time, adopting them with reckless lust and abandoning them prematurely.
Historically speaking, it's a great time to be working in this industry if you enjoy fiddling around with shiny new things ... not so much if you care about doing things well.
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