Spectrum of Knowledge? No...Landscape of Knowledge

Phil writes about the Spectrum of Knowledge...

I've put together something similar for Knowledge of both users and developers.

I think HTML is the easiest for developers to use (think back to the 90's every man and his dog was writing HTML) and that the web is the most comfortable for 99% of users out there, they know and understand the web and how to use it, Windows Applications are much less comfortable to most.

Not sure it's 100% accurate but as a Web Developer it's certainly how I see it.

What do you think?

No, I don't agree. I can see how it's fairly easy to line up these technologies and assess their relative knowledge by users and developers, but I think it's entirely depending on where you are living in this "spectrum".

Me, I'm not really a web developer primarily, so I can't say that my knowledge increases in the same direction - probably exactly the opposite. And the users I have experience with (currently business users of a PowerBuilder enterprise-wide app) have far more knowledge of WinForms-type apps than they do of browsers and websites.

So if I were to draw this, I would probably draw a landscape of overlapping circles, where the circle represents a certain technology, and the overlaps are where the two technologies overlap (obviously). Then the users and developers would have to be people that would be placed somewhere on this horizon or landscape, and their relative knowledge would be a colour-gradient circle surrounding them - the further away from their position, the less they know of it. (I think there's large pieces of the developer landscape missing from Phil's drawing I think - database (SQL), integration (Biztalk), collaboration (Groove?), more infrastructure-type areas of developer technology)

Some people have been able to position themselves over time in lots of different places in the landscape of technologies, and perhaps their circles of knowledge are not as large wherever they have stepped, or the colour quickly fades. On the other hand, devs or users that spend a lot of time in a particular area can extend their circle of knowledge and saturate their colours because the depth and completeness of their knowledge increases.

That's how I would draw it, if I had Office 2007 drawing tools.

1 Comment

  • Mike,

    Great post, thanks for your perspective on this.

    You might notice I specifically didn't include any programming technologies, more layout and effects technologies, and this is the angle I was coming from when I wrote the post.

    The ecosystem as a whole is huge as you point out, there are areas of enterprise services provided by Database servers, Gateways and application logic tiers.

    If you knock together a paint diagram I'm happy to Officify it (I think that's the right term? ;-) )

    Cheers,

    Phil.

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