I am often asked by customers why they can’t update ‘so and so’ on their website – sometimes this might be a editing a contact form or processing script, other times something graphical that seldom changes.
When I explain that its probably easier for us to make those changes when they occur, clients react with surprise, suspicion are disgruntled or all three.
These days, I explain it to them in what I call the Oil Change Conundrum:
Ask any decent mechanic what the single most important bit of maintenance you can do on a car is and he’ll tell you to: change the oil regularly. It’s also standardised on all cars. They all have an oil filter and a similar system.
Given all that – why isn’t it easier to change? Why isn’t there a button somewhere that ejects the existing oil filter, pumps out the oil and you simply fill it up? Such a system could be applied to all vehicles, making it cheaper to manufacture and allowing anyone to perform the procedure.
The reason is simple: no matter how cheap it would be to add a system like this to a car, it will still be more expensive than having a mechanic do it, every 6 months, for the life of the car.
