Let’s say that the current state of the art in Internet tech (app and browser tools) is focused on pushing out a few domains: mobile, cloud, social, entertainment.
None of them matter to my business.
Here’s my typical process:
- make submissions locally, pdf them and email them
- build analyses locally and email them
- Get questions about what I’ve done by email or phone
- write another email back
- write a contract locally
- email it
- receive confirmation that everything is ok
- by email
- go drinking
Mobile is useless because we’re at our desks (with no reason to leave them) and it’s easier to read things on a computer screen.
Not much value from the cloud, either. Our processes aren’t critical enough for us to care about building redundancy and our data sets are small enough that we don’t need any more muscle than a desktop has. Something go down? We’ll wait. Computation time is not a constraint. So you can throw Moore’s law up there as something that, on its own, doesn’t matter either.
What does? Development time. Time it takes to understand data. Time it takes to communicate our understanding.
One thing I have noticed recently is that websites and apps are often better designed than they used to be. I think quite a lot of the additional processing in mobile phones has gone to making them more intuitive to use. So let me add a fifth leg to the web: design.
Design is the next evoluation in the big business-to-business market, I think.
Not Unreasonable 