The End of the Hard-Coded GUI

One of the strangest rituals of modern white-collar life is learning how a software vendor’s product manager organises their thoughts.You buy a piece of enterprise software, and for the next 5 years you and 50,000 other people have to remember that to check a customer’s billing status you click Accounts, then Subscriptions, then the little gear icon in the top right, then Advanced Settings, and finally scroll two-thirds of the way down the page. None of this matches how you think about your business. You put up with it because someone in San Francisco spent 6 weeks interviewing a dozen customers in 2021, dragged some boxes around in Figma, and froze that layout in React.Silicon Valley spent a decade calling this “opinionated software”, as though forcing every customer on earth to use the same 3-column screen were a bold artistic statement. Really it was just unit economics. When designing, coding, and maintaining a single polished screen took months of engineering time, a software…

Commenting on Bubbles has been removed. Why? If you want to talk about this post, write to the author, use the comments on their blog if it has them, or reply with a "RE:" post on your own blog. Suggestions? feedback@bubbles.town