This got me to thinking about what makes software popular. In my experience the best written software from user interface design and from the point of view of software quality is not necessarily the most popular. The program that I work on now, "Chief Architect", is much more popular than the program I worked on before "HiQ".
The quality of the code I'm working on now started out significantly worse than what I had thought was average quality code in the industry today. Even now I don't believe the code quality is significantly better than average even with all the work our team has done to improve it. It has improved dramatically over the years as has been attested to by our customers and our software metrics.
The interesting thing is this poor quality code produced a consumer product that has several times been the #1 product in it's category. So clearly code quality isn't what makes a program popular.
The user interface design in this example is also interesting in that it had and still has numerous cases where the design is inconsistent, cumbersome and visually unappealing.
What is it that makes one product more appealing than the other? In the case of "America's Got Talent" there are a lot more people who like country and western music than those that like opera. The same idea applies to "Chief Architect" and "HiQ". "Chief Architect" appeals to anyone who wants to design a house while "HiQ" appeals mainly to engineers who are trying to solve some hairy computational problem.
This ties in with my previous blog post "Know Your Market". If your goal is to make the most profit then the idea of working on things that are really useful should be extended to include the idea of working on things that appeal to a wide audience.
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