We need more LEAP

March 16, 2008

Vinnie Mirchandani writes about LEAP (Lightly Engineered Application Products). His take comes from the world of enterprise software, and the trend towards lighter applications with less scope. Many life science apps try to do too much. I’ve always felt that it’s better to have an app that does one thing well than one that does 10 things somewhat well. It’s not always easy, especially in the commercial world, where customers can be very demanding and, especially in the case of scientists, have their own differing opinions on how a particular feature could be implemented. While I don’t agree with them all the time, especially given some of the challenges I have run into as a product manager, everyone developing web apps should read Getting Real, a book that encapsulates the 37signals philosophy.

One thing that troubles me about the life sciences is the apparent need to make apps too complex, to make them do too much. It’s a fault of both the consumers and the developers. The latter have not stuck to their guns for so long that in a small market, it becomes difficult to say no. Consumers on the other hand do not always take the time to try and figure out what will make them most effective (again to some extent developers should make an attempt to educate), so end up getting feature-filled products that could perhaps be more effective as separate entities.

Of course, if we could agree on common data formats and data portability/interoperability issues, things would be so much simpler

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Posted by Deepak Singh | Filed Under Life Science, Software & Internet 

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    Absolutely agree that developers should educate consumers. Part of the problem is that consumers are used to behemoth application suites (think MS Office), which try to do everything and as a result, do no one thing well. At the other extreme is the UNIX/Linux philosophy: many small tools/libraries, each of which are very good at one task, which you chain together (the original pipeline) to achieve larger tasks. The problem is that consumers don't care about computing philosophy - they want stuff that resembles what they know.

    I've developed a few web apps for biologists and I often hear "it's great - but could it do this too?" And this...oh, and maybe this. It's good to learn how to say "it could, but it's not going to and here's why" :)

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