Like everyone, I’ve been reading a lot about the troubles at the Big Three automakers. A lot of recovery ideas have been thrown around. Higher fuel standards, new designs, fewer model lines, new management, consolidation, bankruptcy, etc.

While some of these proposed solutions could have a positive impact, I want to talk a bit about something I haven’t heard discussed much: The dealership buying experience.

In the web world there’s a lot of talk about the customer experience. Discussions about usability and profitability and success always seem to swing around and point at the overarching customer experience: How’s it feel to browse, research, and buy something on a site? How’s the experience?

Dealerships

I like cars. Over the past few years I’ve probably been to 15 dealerships. I’ve checked out and tested out a lot of cars: German, Japanese, British, Swedish, and American. I’ve had a lot of customer experiences to think about.

Without exception, I’d put the American car dealerships at the bottom of the customer experience pile. The dealerships have been dirtier, the desks have been messier, the decor has been older. The dealerships themselves feel like used cars. I’ve also found the sales tactics pushier and the salespeople’s interest and knowledge about the cars lacking.

Unrelated but relevant: Have you been into an Audi dealer lately? Beautiful. Modern, airy, clean, welcoming, warm, lots of natural light, light wood floors, lots of room to move around. Go into an Audi dealership sometime then walk over to the local Cadillac dealer.

Join Jason and David as they recap what’s been happening at 37signals. They will take questions from viewers and answer them live.

Thursday, December 4
11 am Central (17:00 GMT)
@ live.37signals.com

Tune in at your local time:
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New York, 12:00
London, 17:00
New Delhi, 21:30
Tokyo, Friday, 01:00
Sydney, Friday, 02:00

Update: See what time 11am CST is in your timezone with Permatime.

This has been a hard one to keep to ourselves, but the time is finally right: We’ve signed a deal with a publisher to publish our next book.

The process

Even though we had tremendous success self-publishing Getting Real, we decided that this time we wanted to write a best seller. We want to sell hundreds of thousands or millions of copies. We couldn’t do this on our own, so we decided to work with a traditional publisher.

To help us find the right publisher, and to help us navigate the process, we enlisted an agent. We hired Lisa DiMona on Seth Godin’s kind recommendation. Lisa had the connections that made the meetings that made the deal happen.

With Lisa’s guidance, we wrote a proposal which she distributed to about eight different publishers. Proposals were sent to big New York publishers, small indie publishers, and a couple in between.

We received positive feedback from almost all of them, and received a preemptive offer. We were planning to go to auction with the book in a few weeks, but one of the publishers wanted to make us an offer so we didn’t go to auction. After careful consideration we thought it would be best to go to auction instead of take the preemptive deal. In the end I believe this was the right decision.

Off to New York

A few weeks later David and I were in NYC for the Web 2.0 conference. We set up meetings with six publishers while we were there to meet with the publishers who showed the most interest.

One highlight of Amazon’s EC2 is having a wide range of generally available services to help reduce moving parts.

We store part of our cluster configuration in S3. The server instances pull this configuration and bootstrap from there using a simple set of rake tasks and a server provisioning tool, Sprinkle. You could use SimpleDB for a similar purpose. One could serve as a backup of the other, given their similar APIs. Either way means fewer moving parts.

Another vital EC2 feature is passing arbitrary data to an instance. Many bundled images now automatically execute a blob of text you pass to the instance on boot as a shell script, like those supplied by Alestic. We use this to sync configuration scripts and packages from S3.

While reading Tim Dysinger’s article on using EC2 as a simple DNS, I thought this was a great way to remove the need for an internal DNS server on EC2 for smaller setups. We use a similar technique: specifying a single EC2 Security Group for a host as its identifier. Each server generates its hosts file every minute. Simple, effective and one fewer moving part.

Security groups are useful for describing roles and other identifying information about each host. We use this information to generate Nagios monitoring configuration files. For example, a security group named “role: app” will automatically enable HTTP checks and Passenger memory checks.

All this means less dependence on a centralized configuration server or pushing large sets of commands over SSH manually. While these techniques are effective, they require more moving parts and their own care and maintenance.

As your application’s complexity increases, you’ll thank yourself for the opportunity to reduce the complexity underneath it.

To truly be inspired for great work, you need to know that you’re making a difference. That you’re putting a meaningful dent in the universe. That you’re part of something that’s making a difference and that your role in that something is significant.

This doesn’t have to be grand at all. You don’t have to be looking for the cure for cancer. It could be done by a waitress at a neighborhood cafe that’s the gathering point of local artists. The key is that your efforts would be missed, your customers would have a sense of loss, if you stopped doing what you’re doing.

If you’re void that sense of purpose, the pleasure in your work will eventually wane and ultimately feel hollow. I’ve lived that sensation more than once. Working with tools and techniques and even people that I enjoyed, but where the end did not justify the journey.

You can only hide in shadows of the circumstantial for so long before your passion begins to fade. You can only excuse your lack of impact on the world with “but it’s great money” or “at least we’re doing agile” or even “this way I get to use Rails” until the playlist of stories repeat and it just all sounds the same.

Remember that your time is limited. By the time you discover that you’ve been coasting on empty calories, the pale face staring you back in the mirror might be hard to recognize.

I remember waking up to such a face on day long ago and thinking “the world would have been no different if I had not been here the past six months”. That’s a terrible feeling of regret.

But the good story is that it’s never too late to do something about it. I’d give up a cozy working atmosphere and using tools I enjoyed if it meant having to do work that just didn’t matter. You should too.

There’s a fine line between being indifferent with the state of things and using Reddit to express your every displeasure with all facets of life. In between is the discontentment you can use to light a fire under your productivity.

The key is to focus on the discontent with things that you can actually change. Get riled up about your programming environment and submit a patch. Become annoyed with how the text flows on your company homepage and rewrite it. Feel guilty about the UI of a common action in your application and redesign it.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
— Reinhold Niebuhr

When you find people who embrace this idea, you’ll usually find people with exactly the pointed drive that gives them the power to Get Things Done. Hire them.