Posted by: mlapora on Mar 12, 2008 - 06:26 AM  | Topic: General Announcement 

A long time ago I came to the conclusion that the test of a first-rate application was the ability of the consumer to use 95% of the application without ever resorting to any documentation. Everything should be patently obvious and available at the right place and the right time. A few years in, I also came to understand that great applications were often used in ways that were completely unanticipated by the development teams that designed the application and created the features. Breaking the rules and moving beyond the documentation was a surprising common usage pattern. Sure, new uses for application features were partly due to the sheer combinatorial possibilities of mixing features to enable new effects. And then, of course, on occasion there were those pathfinder customers that hit some artificial ceiling and simply broke the rules of the product and struck out for new territory, turning features and product design on edge.

I’ve watched various product teams struggle with the humiliating observation that consumers may have a better idea of what they want from an application than all of the infinite wisdom of a development team and countless man years of effort. It’s easy to feel downtrodden when you suddenly discover you’re on the hook for supporting new features that are outside of the original product vision and scope because consumers have somehow magically evolved the use cases on their own and they understand the market better than you, the creator. Simultaneously, it’s also the very best of times when you discover that your users are teaching and leading you. Champagne is appropriate when consumers blow beyond the application boundaries and we all discover that by design or by accident we had the good sense to enable enough flexibility to engender creativity beyond our own feeble horizons.

Web services start with a very different premise than the monolithic application designs of yesterday. They start with humility: The development team doesn’t know and can’t know the spectrum of applications that might be constructed, deconstructed and hybridized. It’s a leap of faith. Well designed web services will not inhibit the creativity of the development community as it realizes completely novel applications constructed from the most basic set of ingredients. Web services are the atomic building blocks that enable rapid experimentation so that we can all do a better job of enabling users to extend the experience and fulfill the promise of tomorrow. The spirit of Rhapsody Web Services is to enable you to play with the creative edge and to move music beyond the original boundaries of Rhapsody.

Ben Rotholtz
General Manager, Rhapsody Web Services & Syndication