You’re reading Signal v. Noise, a publication about the web by Basecamp since 1999. Happy !
“Norwegian designer Daniel Rybakken has installed LED panels replicating daylight on a dark staircase in Stockholm. Called Daylight Entrance, the walls of the staircase are lined with solid surface material. Recesses were milled out from behind the material to accommodate panels of LED lights.” See more photos here.
It’s important that nobody gets mad at you for screwing up. We know screwups are an essential part of making something good. That’s why our goal is to screw up as fast as possible.
Beautiful shot of Frank Lloyd Wright with his apprentices at Taliesen. Photo by Ken Hedrich, 1933.
Saying no the right way — taking things away from people while keeping them on your side — seems like it’s becoming an increasingly crucial skill. Came across three bits in the last few days that echoed this idea…
1) Marco says, “Making a product better often requires removing features.”
Dealing with the negative feedback is tough. Every feature removal, even if minor, is greeted with an initial barrage of emails from people whose lives I have just completely ruined by this change to my free website or my $5 iPhone application…It’s especially tough with web and iPhone apps, for which there’s no good way, or no way at all, for the offended customers to just keep using the old version.
But the result, once the fire has died down, is a much better product for the majority of customers.
If I could never remove features, I’d never add any.
2) A day after reading that, I heard Thomas Friedman discuss how the next generation of political leaders will need to focus on taking things away from voters.
We’re entering an era where being in politics is gonna be, more than anything else, about taking things away from people.
You think it’s tough removing a feature from an iPhone app? Try being a politician that takes away a group’s pet entitlement program.
3) And here’s environmentalist Yvon Chouinard in the trailer for 180south (synopsis):
The hardest thing in the world is to simplify your life. It’s so easy to make it complex. The solution for a lot of the world’s problems may be to turn around and take a forward step. You can’t just keep trying to make a flawed system work.
When REWORK was released we launched a “REWORK in the Wild” promotion. We asked people to upload a photo of their physical (or digital) copy of REWORK. We said we’d pick our favorite and send that person an iPad.
Check out all the submissions at Flickr.
We were originally going to pick one winner, but we decided to pick three instead. Some people got really creative.
From Adamsentz
From Victor “Scott”
From holmjohnii
We’ll be in touch with the winners over the next few days.
Thanks to everyone who submitted a photo. And thanks to everyone who’s read REWORK. We hope you’ve enjoyed it.
Microsoft has filed suit against Salesforce for infringing the following patent:
Lest you think these are just the headlines and that the abstracts are better. Check out the one for System and method for providing and displaying a web page having an embedded menu:
A method for providing a web page having an embedded menu to a web browser and for displaying the web page to a user of the web browser are provided. A request for a web page is received from a web browser In response to the request, a web page and an applet associated with the web page are packaged for transmission to the web browser. The web page and the applet are then transmitted to and downloaded by the web browser. When the web page is displayed and the applet is executed by the web browser, the applet creates and manages an embedded menu in the displayed web page under control of the applet . This embedded menu provides a user of the web browser with a plurality of links through one action in the displayed web page.
Software patents are a despicable tax on innovation. Companies that use them in aggression are pathetic.
Big companies where both sides have huge patent inventories might have fun with this sort of sue and counter-sue, but when the titans reach outside of their country club gardens to pick on someone a speck of their size, it’s truly disgusting.
These patents are so generic that Microsofts suit against Salesforce is purely selective enforcement against a competitor. What would we do if we were sued in a similar fashion? Probably the same thing a shop keeper on a street run by mobsters would do: Pay up or lose a limb. Extortion at its best.
But hey, maybe five years from now a cut-off-the-air-supply email can emerge, then the justice department can spend another half a decade pursuing a slap on the wrist, and in 15 years we’ll have some “justice”.
Fucking patent trolls. Fucking Microsoft. What a sad day.
About a month ago we shared a video of our new office space under construction. There’s been a lot of progress since (new video soon).
I thought it would be a good time to share some more details about the new office. We’re aiming to move in the first week of July.
First, why are we getting a new office space? For the past seven or eight years we’ve been sharing an office with Coudal Partners. It’s their office, we just rent a strip of desks and share the the common areas (conference room, kitchen, etc.). It’s been great in every way. Everyone at Coudal have been remarkably good hosts. We’ve made good friends, worked on some great projects together, and started a company together (The Deck). We hope all that will continue.
But it’s time for us to move into our own space. We’ve got 9 people in Chicago now, and only 5 desks at the office. We’re getting in Coudal’s way (they haven’t said this, but we definitely feel like we are). And we need privacy — currently we have to leave the office and talk in the hallway whenever we have a private call to make. It’s just time.
Also, this is a luxury item for us. When we launched 37signals in 1999 we shared an office space for about two years. Then we got on our own temporary raw space for a few years. That space was right up against the train and we used doors for desks. Since then we’ve been sharing the current office with Coudal for the past 7 years. So in many ways this is a luxury purchase for us. We don’t need this space — we could continue to work the way we work today. It’s definitely getting cramped, and people don’t have the privacy they need, but we could have continued to get by with what we had. But we decided that eleven years into our business we could afford to experiment with a dedicated space built out just the way we wanted. We believe it will pay off.
When we started thinking about what we wanted out of our own space, we realized we didn’t just want a place to work. We wanted a place to share our ideas and learn from others. We used to give workshops a few times a year, but we stopped because it was a hassle to book venues and deal with all that crap. We wanted to get back into the flow of doing semi-regular workshops and master classes. And we wanted to invite others to come in and teach us. We wanted our own venue.
We also wanted to make sure the work environment followed our general principles: Open in general, quiet when we need it, and easy group collaboration without interrupting other people. We also wanted to set up dedicated spaces for private phone calls, recording audio/video/screencasts, and room for expansion – specifically for our customer service/support team.
So those were the big picture ideas. We selected Brininstool + Lynch as our architect and worked with Grubb & Ellis to help us find a space. We looked at a variety of spaces – everything from house-like spaces to raw floors in empty loft buildings. In the end we took an empty floor so we could build out the space exactly as we wanted. We got a lovely corner space with tons of natural light.
The wall of windows on the bottom faces north. We have 12 desks lined up against those windows. Along that window wall there is a built-in full-length credenza for extra desk space and storage for each desk.
Continued…Transcript posted for latest episode (#14) which discusses criticism of REWORK.
