Don Norman, an author, professor, and partner at the Nielsen Norman Group, read the Wired article about us and wrote a piece asking, “Why is 37signals so arrogant?”

Hansson said: “I’m not designing… for other people.” I think that simple phrase speaks volumes. Thank goodness most companies recognize that this attitude is deadly.

If 37signals wants to follow this attitude, I think that is fine. I’m pleased that they are enjoying themselves and that their simple applications do indeed meet many people’s simple needs. But I would prefer someone who designed software for other people. If you want a hobby, fine, indulge yourself.

First off, let me say I respect Norman. His book The Design of Everyday Things is a classic. I’ve always admired him and think he’s spot on most of the time.

That said, I think he’s looking at this the wrong way. In fact, most of what he says about us in his piece misses the point.

Jason Calacanis wants you to save money for your startup, so he has come up with 17 tips on how. The intention is good. Working lean is great and means you probably won’t need outside money. And there’s some good stuff, like don’t buy Microsoft Office and skip the phone system. But there’s also some depressing bullshit like:

Fire people who are not workaholics…. come on folks, this is startup life, it’s not a game. go work at the post office or stabucks if you want balance in your life. For realz

Here’s another take on that: Fire the people who are workaholics! Here’s five reasons why:

1. Workaholics may well say that they enjoy those 14 hour days week after week, but despite their claims, working like that all month, all the time is not going to be sustainable. When the burnout crash comes, and it will, it’ll hit all the harder and according to Murphy at the least convenient time.
2. People who are workaholics are likely to attempt to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at the problem. If you’re dealing with people working with anything creatively that’s a deadbeat way to get great work done.
3. People who always work late makes the people who don’t feel inadequate for merely working reasonable hours. That’ll lead to guilt, misery, and poor morale. Worse, it’ll lead to ass-in-seat mentality where people will “stay late” out of obligation, but not really be productive.
4. If all you do is work, your value judgements are unlikely to be sound. Making good calls on “is it worth it?” is absolutely critical to great work. Missing out on life in general to put more hours in at the office screams “misguided values”.
5. Working with interesting people is more interesting than just working. If all you got going for your life is work, work, work, the good team-gelling lunches are going to be some pretty boring straight shop talk. Yawn. I’d much rather hear more about your whittling project, your last trek, how your garden is doing, or when you’ll get your flight certificate.

If your start-up can only succeed by being a sweatshop, your idea is simply not good enough. Go back to the drawing board and come up with something better that can be implemented by whole people, not cogs.

Update: Calacanis reeled it in and reconsidered, sorta. Requiring passion is certainly something we hopefully can all rally about.

Bigger isn't always better for business

“Americans think big. This has helped make them the most powerful nation on Earth, but bigger is not always better, either for our bodies or, I suggest, for our organizations. If I were to visit a symphony orchestra and ask them about their growth plans for the future, how would they respond? They would talk about their plans to extend their repertoire and to bring their work to new audiences, not about increasing the number of violinists…Why does almost every business that I know seek to grow in size, year after year, in fact, as if there were no limit? Why can’t they be content with doing more with less?”

Tech support “greatest hits” CD leaks

“When they say, ‘Your call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes,’ that’s only partly true. They also record your calls so they can pass around recordings of the funniest ones. They actually gave me one of those “Best Of” disks at the end of my day in the call center. Herewith: a few actual calls from that disk or that I heard about from the agents themselves.”

Site shows you the $0.99 “Movie of the Week” on iTunes

“Every Tuesday iTunes offers a special rental price of 99 cents on a movie selection. This special price is available through the following Monday. We’ll keep you updated on what that movie is every week.”

droidMAKER: The inside story of George Lucas

“The inside story of George Lucas, his intensely private company, and their work to revolutionize filmmaking. In the process, they made computer history. Discover the birth of Pixar, digital video editing, videogame avatars, THX sound, and a host of other icons of the media age. Lucas played a central role in the universe of entertainment technologies we see everyday.”

Elaine St. James on the importance of imagination

“Einstein said, ‘Imagination is more important than information.’ I experienced this first hand after I canceled my magazine and newspaper subscriptions. I’ve never been much of a TV watcher, but I just kind of unplugged from everything. I found out that I could take the time at the end of the day to just sit and daydream, opening myself up to really thinking rather than constantly reacting. We all fall into that habit. We react to the things that are going on around us and feel there is a certain response or a certain expectation that we have to live up to—usually somebody else’s expectation. If we let go of that, we can really get the feel of how important imagination is in our life. It’s not that information is not important, but imagination is what we do with that information. We have to learn to take the time to tap into our own intuitive knowing.”

The secular Sabbath is a digital day of rest

“Thus began my ‘secular Sabbath’ — a term I found floating around on blogs — a day a week where I would be free of screens, bells and beeps. An old-fashioned day not only of rest but of relief.”

Behind the scenes of the old school HBO intro

What we saw today was the spark. The explosion will continue for twenty years. We will all feel the warmth.

What we saw today was the beginning of two-decades of mobile domination by Apple. What Microsoft and Windows was to the desktop, Apple and Touch will be to mobile.

And while mobile platforms have been around for a while, they never really gained passionate traction. Palm sorta had it for a while. Windows Mobile has been getting better. RIM is the current choice for business email on the go.

But just like there were a lot of players in the portable music space, there were no clear leaders. Until Apple came to town.

The same thing is happening today in the mobile space. Palm, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Symbian. They’ve been players, but no one has broken out big. No one has managed to grab both the business and consumer markets like Windows did on the desktop. Until Apple came to town. At least that’s my prediction.

Apple has the superior product, the big momentum, the cool, the lust, the business hooks, the consumer hooks, the customer experience, the interface, the design (interface and industrial), the smooth development environment, the vision.

And, maybe the secret key to it all, they have the commercial platform that makes it possible for a developer to actually sell, distribute, and update their software with the flip of a switch. And don’t forget the customer experience revolution — buying and it-just-works installation of iPhone software will be as one-click easy as buying music from the iTunes store. It’s all wrapped into one beautiful package. A package that only Apple can deliver.

This is brand new big shit. It all started today.

Looking for an iPhone Developer? Post an ad in the new iPhone Developer category on the Job Board.

If you’re at SxSW this weekend and next week, you can see both Jason and Sam present.

Jason’s 10 Things We’ve Learned at 37signals presentation is at 3:30 pm on Saturday, March 8th in Room A.

Sam’s Secrets of JavaScript Libraries panel is at 2:00 pm on Tuesday, March 11th in Room 9.

We hope to see you there.

Oh, and… After my talk stick around to see Jim Coudal’s A General Theory of Creative Relativity starting at 5 in the same room. It’ll be the perfect way to finish the day.

When we launched the multi-user version of Backpack we added the Newsroom. The Newsroom has a message board (for Basic plans and higher) as well as a latest activity block that shows a list of new pages, changes, calendar additions, etc.

But soon we realized the Newsroom was missing something. It didn’t show you upcoming events from the handy Backpack calendar. Good news: As of today it does.

If you have any events on the Backpack Calendar that are coming up in the next 7 days we’ll show up to 15 of them them in a strip on the right side of the Newsroom. If there are no events in the next 7 days the strip won’t appear.

(Zoom to full size) The name of the calendar is displayed above the event, in the same color as that calendar. (You can color code each calendar so, for example, Sam’s events in the Calendar and his name in the Newsroom Calendar Strip always show up in purple.) And if there’s anything coming up today the date is yellow (otherwise it’s a muted grey).

So how did we get here?

We’re really happy with the way it works and the way it looks. But it took a pile of iterations to get here.

First we started with just text for the dates…

One of the easiest ways to shoot down good ideas, interesting policies, or worthwhile experiments is by injecting the assumption that whatever you’re doing needs to last forever and ever. Which means that the concept has to scale from 5 people to 5,000 or from 100,000 users to 100 million. That’s a terrible way to get from those 5 people to 5,000 or reach those 100 million users.

To reach the top, you have to be willing to use all the tricks that makes sense at the earlier stages. That’s your advantage over the guys who are already sitting up there. So you’re not Google and don’t do a billion dollars in profit every quarter. But I bet you that you’re way more capable of quick, sweeping changes. When you have 100 million users on your email platform, you can’t do the same quick iterations that constantly push upgrades out. When you just have your first few hundred or thousand, you can.

So stop worrying too much about whether giving everyone in your company a credit card at 10 people is going to work when you’re a hundred times bigger. If it doesn’t, you change, come up with something that does work for that size.

The same with your infrastructure. We started on a single server for everything when Basecamp was first launched. There was no point in growing a huge farm of machines if the thing was going to flop anyway. Today we have many more machines and redundancies and surveillance and more because we’re at a different level.

The best way to get to the point of needing more is by optimizing for today. Use the strengths of your current situation instead of being so eager to adopt the hassles of tomorrow.

My penchant for Christopher Alexander is on the rise again after spending the weekend at an inspiringly-comfortable bed and breakfast in Green County. Here’s an excerpt from A Pattern Language that cuts to the heart of what Getting Real is about.

202. BUILT-IN SEATS

Problem
Built-in seats are great. Everybody loves them. They make a building feel comfortable and luxurious. But most often they do not actually work. They are placed wrong, or too narrow, or the back does not slope, or the view is wrong, or the seat is too hard. This pattern tells you what to do to make a built-in seat that really works.

Solution
Before you build the seat, get hold of an old arm chair or a sofa, and put it into the position where you intend to build a seat. Move it until you really like it. Leave it there for a few days. See if you enjoy sitting in it. Move it if you don’t. When you have got it into a position which you like, and where you often find yourself sitting, you know it is a good position. Now build a seat that is just as wide, and just as well padded – and your built-in seat will work.

This morning I was reading through some of the comments on an article at Hacker News, and stumbled across this one:

The key is to hire rockstars—they produce more value in four days than a mediocre employee does given weeks. If you gave the typical person free food and time off. They’d stuff themselves until they got diabetes and spend the rest of their time watching reruns of ‘Room Raiders’ on MTV.

I am perfectly willing to acknowledge that not all of us excel at the same things, but I’m coming to believe more and more firmly that this whole “typical person” entity is a myth. I’ve never met a typical person. There are only people who are passionate about what they do, and people who aren’t. When the latter become the former, they become “atypical”, because suddenly they are self-motivated, insightful, excited, optimistic, and happy.

The “It’s about time” clock
Dan McFarland writes:

I just saw this on about:blank and thought of you guys: The “It’s about time” clock

It’s a clock that just tells you “about” what time it is… “nearly 12”, “quarter past 3”, etc. Most people don’t realize they really don’t need any more detail than that.

The Paige Compositor
Khoi Vinh writes:

If you’ve never written about this before, this short case history of 19th century typesetting is a story tailor-made for the SvN audience.

The Paige Compositor.