Wonderfully conceptualized, beautifully executed public service ad from Sussex Safer Roads. One of the best ads I’ve ever seen.
Jason Fried interviewed on The Pipeline
Dan Benjamin interviews Jason Fried. Topics include big vs. small, fear of success, turning points, solving universal problems, if investment and success has affected the company and how it’s evolved over 10 years, the “37signals culture” and mindset (like spending only one day a week in the office), and finding design inspiration in nature.
The audio interview is 36 minutes. A text transcript is also available.
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
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Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher (1788 – 1860)
Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher (1788 – 1860)
The cost of being everything to everyone
As long as we’re doubling up, Marco Ament is chiming in at the comment thread of yesterday’s “shoot themselves in the foot” post with some more great thoughts.
Success, as measured by installed base or revenue, doesn’t strongly corrolate to quality. A lot of mediocre products are extremely successful, and a lot of extremely successful products are mediocre.
I can’t argue that Microsoft Word or Firefox haven’t been successful, and I won’t argue that they don’t deserve their success. They both try to be everything to everyone, and they’ve largely achieved that, hence their success.
But, like most independent or small developers, I have neither the resources nor the desire to be everything to everyone, and I don’t like the experience of using most products that were designed in that way. Being everything to everyone incurs huge costs in complexity, reliability, and efficiency that I can’t afford, that I can’t tolerate in products I use, and that can’t result in a product I can be proud of.
Later on he explains why he feels comments are a net loss for the vast majority of comment-enabled blogs.
The thing [our clients] bring to the table is this extensive knowledge of their domain. The thing that we [software designers] bring to the table is the clarity that we think with. I don’t think our primary thing we bring to the table is our technical competence, although we need that. We need to be good enough to know how to do the implementation. But the thing that we bring that’s really critical to the process is we think sharply. We are able to abstract and we are able to define things crisply.
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Another one from Eric Evans, but good stuff is good stuff. This time from Putting the model to work.
Another one from Eric Evans, but good stuff is good stuff. This time from Putting the model to work.
If you can’t understand it, you can’t change it.
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Eric Evans on code and the reasons for thoughtful modeling. From his talk What I’ve learned about DDD since the book.
Eric Evans on code and the reasons for thoughtful modeling. From his talk What I’ve learned about DDD since the book.
Instapaper developer: "I try to minimize ways for my customers to shoot themselves in the foot"
“Side effects of developing for yourself” is an interesting piece by Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper (a simple tool to save web pages for reading later).
In it, Marco talks about how features only get developed if he wants to use them. That means a big NO to the following: unread-count icon badge, tags, full-screen reading (where you tap to temporarily show the toolbars), comments, and Graphical Mode (“It’s one of those features that people say they want until they actually use it and realize that it’s not worthwhile at all.”)
Does this mean he’s not listening to customers? No, he’s just not letting them steer the product.
I try to minimize ways for my customers to shoot themselves in the foot…If I let users steer product decisions, the result would be a massive codebase producing a bloated, cluttered product full of features that hardly anyone used at the expense of everyday usability and polish on the features that matter. Like Microsoft Word. Or Firefox.
Great to hear about Marco’s strong point of view. And I can vouch personally for the results: Instapaper is the iPhone app I use the most.
On a related note, “Feature checklist dysfunction” is another post by Marco where he rails against checklist comparisons. Here he evaluates the iPhone to see whether it’s a good product:
“Sounds like a terrible product. I bet it will fail.”
Refreshing to see a design firm publish what their services cost and what you get with the engagement. –Design Vineyard’s site
Unexpectedly
For all the experts in the world, there’s a lot of unexpectedly going on. Quite a bit of more/less than expected too.
John Williams joins 37signals
We’re excited to welcome John Williams to the operations team at 37signals this week. John will be joining Joshua and me to make sure our servers and infrastructure are as reliable as possible. John impressed us with a job application similar to the one that Craig submitted and went the extra mile by driving 5 hours to Chicago to meet with us face to face for a couple of hours.
John has past experience doing Rails development and as a systems engineer at Contegix. He’s also a pretty good cyclist, and was part of the National Collegiate Cycling Association Track Championship Team in 2003 and 2006 while at Marian College.
He’s a great addition and we’re thrilled to have him join the team. Welcome, John!