Lack of a challenge

Looking at some of the technology projects out there, especially the software based projects. Make the site look pretty and make it effective and make it fast. I am not seeing a real challenge for technology masters in countries, like Australia, where research and innovation is treated as a disease.

There are people with the talent for making web sites look really good. I am not one of them. As a photographer I have produced images that are outstanding and that is not the same as producing a Web site that looks right so I will leave that to people with the gift. When you cast the right artist for the site, everything works naturally. Looking at local projects versus some countries overseas, the Americans invest in the right look while most Australian Web site owners treat it as an expense. There are some brilliant looking local sites and they are so rare, they are an anomaly. The rest use images downloaded from American image banks and we see American people, including American negroes, where we would expect to see Australians including some Aboriginals.

Some parts of make it effective you can read off a to-do list. I teach people to make stuff effective and more than half of it can be learned by rote. The other part is a combination of the research part of science, a Madame Curie approach, and a black art based on a weird combination of genes rarer than an honest politician. In both software and some other technologies, there is little attempt to make it effective. The investment laws in Australia do not reward people who make a product work before releasing it. The laws about wine production force wine producers to release immature red wines. The sources of investment in film are so narrow that Australians produce just one or two fashions in film each year. In software based projects, three to five year projects have to make a profit in the first year, compared to several countries overseas where a profit in the first three years is considered progress.

Make it fast is one of those areas where I excel. Strangely the local interpretation of make it fast is almost always a reference to the elapsed time between the start of a project and the point where a product is inflicted on the public. Rare is the project where the boss says it has to be fast for the end user.

I am not seeing the challenge in local technology projects. Perhaps Australians have been producing more with less for so long that Australian investors under estimate the investment ten fold. Perhaps it is the lack of tax breaks. The last time I looked at tax incentives in technology, the only real incentive was to throw out your existing working computer and replace it with new hardware from China, an incentive which benefits only hardware manufacturers in China.

Australia needs incentives that encourage innovation instead of trashing hardware.