While I feel like I ramble a bit, the thought process isn’t so complicated. People have to make a tradeoff between money and convenience, and that’s the quintessential question of product development. When you read advice for product development, one of the key points is always that your product should be a painkiller, not a vitamin: In other words, your product needs to solve an actual problem the target audience has, not just make things marginally better. If it isn’t, you’ve basically created a luxury item. There’s nothing wrong with that, mind you, but it completely changes your target audience and approach.

More critically, I think that when it comes to the issue of software development, creating “luxury items” doesn’t work. I mean, sure, you could consider something like Adobe Photoshop a luxury item because you can get The Gimp for free, but Photoshop is the industry standard software that professionals rely on to do their work. It solves the pain these people have of photo and image editing more effectively than anything else.

In web applications, the situation is even more stark. There are a select few applications that actually cost money to use (and don’t have a free version), and with a few exceptions these are targeted at businesses. If your target is the casual user–the one who might carry two cell phones because it works out to be cheaper–your product just may not be worth paying for.

One of my more unusual assignments at work: serve as the model for an experiment with hand drawings. This was the result after some Photoshop processing.

Now I must go search the office; I’ve been informed that gullible is written on the ceiling, but I absolutely can’t seem to find where…

The Olympic Torch relay kicked off in Almaty on its way to lots of countries before it arrives back in Beijing to kick off the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. The relay slogan is "Light the passion. Share the dream."

"Congratulations on the holiday, our dear ladies!"

I was going to post photos today, but some technical issues unfortunately prevented me from doing it… so, some time on Tuesday, perhaps. It’ll give me the chance to take some more photos, while I’m at it.

Meanwhile, today we celebrated March 8, International Women’s Day, at work. I actually wrote a column about it for the ‘Nique this week (that I’ll post later), but the above photo is the poster the Magic department made for all the ladies in our office. We also all pitched in to purchase cake, flowers (well, amusing balloon animal-style flowers) and gifts for the entire female staff.

It might seem fairly insignificant, but the entire approach, with all the guys in the office holding a meeting to determine plans, and assigning responsibilities, etc., not to mention everyone contributing a not insignificant amount of money, was just something totally alien to what I would have expected in the U.S. Perhaps part of it comes from working at a much smaller, younger and more closely-knit company, but I can’t help but feel that part of it is based on cultural differences between the U.S. and Kazakhstan.

That’s pretty much been the story, in fact: there hasn’t been anything huge that has just totally caught me off guard about this country; for the most part it has been in line with my expectations. But it’s the little things that jump out at me out of the blue that are adding up to an interesting cultural experience.

So far, I feel that I’m learning a lot, even though I have experienced relatively little here to date. Let’s hope it keeps up.