On occasion, we get asked why we chose to create Home Inventory as a desktop app instead of a web-based product. So in my attempt to get back into blogging I decided this would be a safe, short post that I could whip out quickly.
Here is where old habits die hard. I spent most of my career in IT working for enterprise software companies. My roles were mostly technical spanning the organizations: Pre/Post Sales, Training and Implementation, Quality Assurance, and Product Management. We sold to fortune 500 companies worldwide. At each company, we were constantly re-evaluating technology and finding new ways to spin why our products were the best in the marketplace.
Unfortunately, this is exactly how I approached this one simple blog post and instead of sharing why we picked the desktop over a web-based product I ended up creating a post on the technical differences between the two and why desktop apps are better (of course, that’s what we picked, right?) – Boring!!! And let’s face it, there are those that prefer web-based products and those that prefer desktop products and now those that prefer mobile products, regardless of the pros and cons. It comes down to personal preference.
When Kevin and I left the corporate world, we wanted to bring some fun back to our work environment, take some risks, and at the end of the day, create some awesome quality products and bring them to market to share with the world. We wanted to do this by being able to react to technology changes immediately and without having to follow someone else’s rules and decisions, or be politically correct and white-washed business like all the time. Just take a look at our Looky video for an example, and yes those are homemade sock puppets!
So though technology did play a role in our decision, it was minimal. We chose the desktop because it was what was interesting to us and it matched our personal and business goals. Kevin wanted to learn more about developing for the Mac and thought he could do much cooler things in a desktop app verses a web-based app; things like direct integration with peripheral devices and the desktop among others, cool things that we could all benefit from as users. I wanted to work on a desktop app because I spent the last 20 years on complex, enterprise wide software products that ran on almost every platform available (except OS X!) including the web and quite frankly I was done. Also wanting to bootstrap our company ourselves, I did not want the complexity and cost of a hosted product. I was ready to concentrate on one platform, the Mac, and jump into the consumer world, which I absolutely love.
And yes, I trashed the original post, all except the matrix! Old habits are hard to kill, but I am trying……