- Music industry “gets it” eight years too late
- “Amazon’s finally done what was clearly the right solution in 1999. Music in the format that people actually want it in, with a Web-based experience that’s simple and works with any device. I bought tracks from Amazon (Kevin Drew and No Age), downloaded them, sync’d them to my new iPod Nano, and had them playing in my home audio system (Control 4) in less than five minutes. PRAISE JESUS. It only took 8 years. 8 years. How much opportunity have we lost in those 8 years?...We certainly didn’t gain mass user adoption or trust, two prerequisites to success on the Internet.”
- Black Google would save 750 megawatt-hours a year
- “Take at look at Google, for instance, who gets about 200 million queries a day. Let’s assume each query is displayed for about 10 seconds; that means Google is running for about 550,000 hours every day on some desktop. Assuming that users run Google in full screen mode, the shift to a black background will save a total of 15 (74-59) watts. Now take into account that about 25 percent of the monitors in the world are CRTs, and at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, that’s about $75,000/year, a goodly amount of energy and dollars for changing a few color codes.” [tx AK] (Update: Google responds)
- Two weeks with Django (and then back to Rails)
- “Despite it’s warts, Rails is still the fastest, easiest way to get things working and out to customers, which is absolutely critical. I’m now back to quickly adding new features into our app. And by tomorrow, we’ll just have a web host that specializes in Rails. Depending upon user acceptance and incoming revenues, it might make sense down the road to invest time, money, and mental angst in rewriting in something like Django for better performance, but not right now.”
- Zappos brings customer to tears
- “When I came home this last time, I had an email from Zappos asking about the shoes, since they hadn’t received them. I was just back and not ready to deal with that, so I replied that my mom had died but that I’d send the shoes as soon as I could. They emailed back that they had arranged with UPS to pick up the shoes, so I wouldn’t have to take the time to do it myself. I was so touched. That’s going against corporate policy. Yesterday, when I came home from town, a florist delivery man was just leaving. It was a beautiful arrangement in a basket with white lilies and roses and carnations. Big and lush and fragrant. I opened the card, and it was from Zappos. I burst into tears. I’m a sucker for kindness, and if that isn’t one of the nicest things I’ve ever had happen to me, I don’t know what is.”
- Gladwell on the workplace
- “The concept of the workplace has become more flexible and I think that’s only going to accelerate. When I walk around Manhattan in the middle of a weekday I see untold numbers of people sitting in coffee shops with their laptops. I mean, they’re working; but they’re not working in a way that would have been recognizable to anyone 10 years ago. I suspect that kind of thing will only increase.” [via JK]
- Video of pretty realtime logfile visualization
- “View real-time data and statistics from any logfile on any server with SSH, in an intuitive and entertaining way.”
- Combining arrogance and humility
- “Arrogance without humility is a recipe for high-concept irrelevance; humility without arrogance guarantees unending mediocrity. Figuring out how to be arrogant and humble at once, figuring out when to watch users and when to ignore them for this particular problem, for these users, today, is the problem of the designer.”
- Top 100 user-centered blogs (SvN is #1)
- “Web designers often concern themselves with optimizing sites for spiders from Google, Yahoo, and other search engines, but pay little attention to creating sites that real people can use. This problem has sparked a movement towards user-centered web design, a topic that covers accessibility, web standards, and interfacing. Check out these blogs for the latest and greatest in this people-centric field of design.”
Eric
on 15 Oct 07Zappos Rocks! Why would you buy from anyone else?
Jesper
on 15 Oct 07Google commented on Black Google and liked the idea but noted that it’s not clear-cut that it’d save energy.
Nathan Clark
on 15 Oct 07Yeah, the blackle site’s been discredited based on it’s apparent reliance on CRT’s for it’s claims for energy savings. Given the searches you make on that site likely profit the owners, it all seems a bit sketchy and perhaps not worthy of linking…
David Andersen
on 15 Oct 07Let’s see, 750 megawatts is .00075 terawatts and at least one source claims annual world energy use at 15 terawatts, so this is a savings of 5 thousandths of a percent. All that for what is mostly a bad design idea.
Marijn
on 15 Oct 07Oh great let’s bring out the flames for frameworks. I have no clue on why you put in such a weird post on django, is there a lot of user switching or is there actually some big competition between these two frameworks we’ve all been missing out on?
I thought we could all go peacefully side by side. I miss any sort factual information so the discussion will probably break loose on things like “i got my django site working in 2 days” and “needing a night for understanding regex is ” etc etc..
A side by side comparison would definitely be interesting but this is just a rant.
FredS
on 15 Oct 07I literally (and I’m using the word correctly) just ordered a pair of shoes off Zappos. In fact, the tab’s still open. They rock.
Matt B.
on 15 Oct 07Speaking of a company that “gets it” when it comes to digital audio in the car… take Audi for example. All of these cars coming out today by other companies brag of a place to plugin your iPod. So, what powers it? Your iPod charged/battery or the car? You need an adapter chord, right? They say it’s meant for an iPod; what about other non Apple based MP3 players? Where do you mount or set the MP3 player while songs play?
WELL, Audi took it a step further. The gps navigation screen folds down like something you’d see in a James Bond car and there you have two SD slots. Load a couple 2GB cards with music, pop em’ in and the MP3 player is already built into the dash. No messing around with plugging in your MP3 player. I love it!
Marc Love
on 15 Oct 07Re: Black Google would save 750 megawatt-hours a year
Paperless newspapers would save countless trees every year. Single-person vehicles would save crazy amounts of fuel a year. Businesses operating without lighting would save a tremendous amount of energy too.
Just because you can do it, doesn’t mean it should happen, will happen, or is business-friendly.
Mrad
on 15 Oct 07Holy crap – that Zappos story is awesome!
Jeff Croft
on 15 Oct 07As a hardcore Django user and advocate, I would say virtually every compliant registered in the Django v. Rails piece above is totally accurate. The only one I don’t really agree with is the one on static files, or “media”, in Django parlance. And I would question whether it’ accurate to say that most people will want to write their own forms versus using the built-in admin interface (almost all of the Django apps I know of use the admin interface). But, in general, I can’t argue with the piece.
The basic complaint here is that Django (and especially it’s documentation) doesn’t always allow for beginners to dive in quickly and easily. I think this is a fair complaint. I don’t know how this compares to Rails, as I’ve never used it - but I do think the Django community could do a better job of defining safe, sane, “default” ways to do things and presenting them in the documentation, rather than always outlining all 10 different ways and leaving it up to the user. And, I think more general tutorials and “getting started” types of info are definitely lacking. I tried for a while to provide some of this myself, via blog posts - while the community loved it, some of the lead developers of Django didn’t.
So yeah - no matter what 37signals motivation may have been in posting it here, I think it’d be hard for Django users to argue with. Of course, I would imagine Rails has a similar group of problems. No framework is perfect - but you’re far better off with either of these two than you are without them!
Anonymous Coward
on 15 Oct 07Zappos has great customer service and shipping and return policies, so they should be praised on a blog about user experience. On the other hand, navigating their site is a nightmare.
Dan Boland
on 15 Oct 07Any business student who isn’t flunking could tell you that had any of the record labels done their SWOT analysis 8+ years ago, I wouldn’t be posting this right now.
(PS – Amazon’s MP3 service freakin’ rocks. Legal and no DRM? I’m so there.)
Justin Reese
on 16 Oct 07@Jeff Croft:
Excellent response. I don’t know anything about Django, but from your post it sounds like Django and Rails may appeal to two different schools of thought. I have a coworker who has eschewed my Rails pimping because he is very smart and doesn’t like to be told what tool to use; he prefers the “bucket of screwdrivers” approach. Me, I’m lazy, so “intelligent defaults” and “convention over configuration” and all that stuff make my life easier. (I’m not so lazy that I accept inefficient defaults blindly, but damned if I’m going to do the same thing twice.)
From your description, I would probably get frustrated with Django, while my coworker would probably love it. I’d rather watch squirrels from my back porch than decide which of 10 possible development paths to take. But then again my laziness can’t be overstated.
Oh, and WJS 2007 was great. Props for BF’s involvement.
Dave Rau
on 16 Oct 07Zappos is unmatched for friendly, fast customer service. I’ve only ordered two things from them and the second package sent was someone else’s order. To fix the problem they sent me my shoes overnight (had them the next day) arranged a UPS pickup for the other person’s shoes I had and gave me a decent credit ($30 I think.) But that’s not the really cool thing; the service reps were fast, articulate, smart and very nice.
The Zappos policies are great, but their people are completely fantastic.
Jeff Croft
on 16 Oct 07@Justin: The frustrating thing is that there’s not reason Django wouldn’t have those sane, intelligent defaults. In fact, I would say it does have them - they’re just conventions that those who have been involved with Django for a while know about, but aren’t well-documented for beginners. So while there may be 10 ways to do something, I think most people would agree there’s one “best” or “simplest” way - someone just needs to take the time to document it (this is where you say, “it’s open source, why don’t you do it. :).
This discussion is closed.