The Art of Hiding Complex Engineering
I’ve known Eric Hayes and Tim Brown, co-founders of Attensa, since about 1990, when we all worked at Now Software. We bled the colors of the Apple rainbow together at Now where we developed and marketed applications solely for the Mac.
I started at Now as a very green product manager for Now’s compression utility; Eric was the architect of Now-Up-to-Date and Contact, our best-selling calendar and contact management software. And Tim was an engineer on Now Utilities - the original Mac system enhancement suite.
Those were the days.
Our products were award-winning, our engineers were rock stars in the Mac community, and we got to go to great parties at Mac World when you actually knew most of the people there.
Oh, I miss Boston in August! We were always there at Madonna Festival time, and what a place to see it…
Fast forward 15 years: the Apple logo (and some of my hair) is stylishly gray, and I’m working again with Eric and Tim at Attensa; helping them get the word out about their enterprise RSS platform and RSS readers.
Of course, the worlds of marketing and engineering software is much more complex than in the good old days. As are the applications, tools and platforms that we use.
But one of the things I’ve always appreciated about Eric and Tim (and others like them) is that they’ve been smart enough to hide the complexity of the worlds they negotiate from pretty much everybody else but themselves.
Thank goodness some things really don’t change.
