Pat Riley on "the disease of more"

“In his book ‘Showtime,’ Pat Riley unveiled ‘the disease of more’ and argued that ‘success is often the first step toward disaster.’ According to Riley, after the 1980 Lakers won, everyone shifted into a more selfish mode. They had sublimated their respective games to win as a group; now they wanted to reap the rewards as individuals, even if those rewards meant having to spend way too much time at Jack Nicholson’s house. Everyone wanted more money, playing time and recognition. Eventually they lost perspective and stopped doing the little things that make teams win and keep winning, eventually imploding in the first round of the postseason. So much for defending the title.”

15 unfortunately placed ads

Context changes everything. (Kinda NSFW?)

Why the iPhone Will Beat the Blackberry (and why power users can mislead)

“Get over it: power users are a minority, and while they point the way to the future, they tend to be disappointed when the rest of the market catches up with an inferior product that has a lower barrier to new users.”

Military wants tech partners to “get real”

Advice to civilian innovators seeking military sales: “Do it quick, and make it cheap because conditions change.” [tx EC]

Can Adobe really shift to web apps?

“It is very plausible that Adobe can have (less powerful) online versions of its most popular software aimed at the consumer market within 10 years, but I think it will be a long time before professional users are comfortable using completely online applications for critical graphic, video, animation, and programming work. Matching the speed and complexity of Adobe’s offline applications online is more than 10 years away, in my opinion.”

Alan Cooper on design engineering

“Software builders struggle to integrate design into their process for two basic causes: 1) programmers have never learned to follow a design, and 2) their day-to-day responsibilities forbid them from doing so. I also believe that these reasons can be understood and vanquished.”

UnitedVisualArtists does lights/visuals at Chemical Brothers show

“We augmented the Chemicals’ touring set with a constellation of powerful lights around the square, and created a set of generative, realtime graphics for the show finale.”

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

nContxt lets you access your Highrise contacts from your mobile phone
“nContxt is a mobile interface for 37signals‘ Highrise contact manager. It works on iPhones. It works on Windows Mobile phones, non-smartphones. It works on any phone with a web browsers. It’s free for the first week, and then $5/month.”

AARP site recommends Ta-Da List
“So I decided to find a Web site that offered an easier way to manage my to-do list. The one I like best is Ta-da Lists™. This site is easy to read, the list is simple to use, and there’s nothing to download.”

How to use Backpack for GTD
“As someone who has tried a slew of GTD software, I’ll never abandon Backpack. It’s the definitive solution.”

Highrise and Backpack are “essential tools for the online bootstrapper”
“If you need to keep track of who you talk to, what you said, and what to do next, Highrise is the product for you. I personally use this tool daily for all of my clients, and any business contacts I meet along the way.”

How to end a Backpack calendar event with a number
Any number at the beginning or end of a calendar entry will be parsed as a time. So, in this case [“Midterm 1”], Backpack thinks the 1 indicates 1 o’clock. There’s a workaround though. Use “Midterm 1.” — with a period.

Subscribe to the Product Blog RSS feed.

Check out the icon Apple uses to represent a PC in Mac OS X:

We’re looking to add another person to the team. Interested? See our job ad for more details.

We have an idea we’d like to try with a few folks who think they could be good at pitching Highrise.

I’m not sure if we’d call the idea a reseller program, affiliate program, or a partner program, but we do think it will be a great opportunity for you to make money selling a product that often sells itself.

If you’re a reseller or a salesperson or someone who thinks they can get Highrise in front of the right people, drop us an email at svn [at] 37signals.com and include “37signals Affiliate” in the subject.

We’re going to be selective and only pick about 10 companies/people to work with on this program so serious inquiries only please. Thank you.

Vikas Sabnani writes:

Since launching [our website] in private beta 8 days back, we have seen more than 100 [accounts] created but less than 5 have actually done anything after creating an account.

Since you offer a free basic version as well, I suspect you see the “Blank Page” problem as well. My question is – what is the best way to encourage / prod your customers to try the product out?

This reminds me of the old “hosting a party” metaphor for web apps. Just because you’ve invited someone over to your house/app, doesn’t mean your hosting duties are over. You still need to welcome your guests, show them around, offer some introductions, and make sure they get into the flow.

That’s why the blank slate, the first screen people see, is so key. If it’s unwelcoming, people may not stick around.

It’s easy to overlook the blank slate too. When you’re building an app, it’s natural to get hung up developing the best experience for power users. But for most people, getting started is the biggest obstacle. So step back every once in a while. Put yourself in the shoes of newbies and figure out the best way to welcome them into the fold.

37signals blank slates
We’ve begun using welcome tabs as a variation on the blank slate. These let people keep intro information nearby for quick reference or get rid of it when they’re ready. This tab also serves as a crude site map of admin features, help links, preferences, and more.

Backpack

Our newest product, Highrise, has a bunch of different blank slate states, one for almost ever major feature and some special “almost-blank slates” for screen with just a little bit of data. Some blank slates go away instantly while others go away after you’ve done something three times.

Highrise

Continued…

The Onion comes through, as usual. Don’t miss the scrolling ticker at the bottom of the video too.

Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters

Microsoft just bought 1.6% of cool glow for 240 million dollars from the current darling of social networks, Facebook. That priced the latter at $15,000,000,000 or five hundred times expected earnings for 2007!

Now I actually really like Facebook. It’s clean, the guys running it are smart, and tons of people I know are really into it. They got a great audience, growing fast, and all that jazz. But an evaluation of five hundred times earnings?! If that doesn’t taste like bubble gum, I don’t know what does.

Facebook is certainly to be commended for getting as high an evaluation as they can. Bravo to them. They look like masterminds here. But what does Microsoft look like?

A 500x evaluation doesn’t exactly position them as financially shrewd. No, it feels like they’re trying to make a statement that they too can hang with the cool kids regardless of the cost. Regardless of even an obscene cost.

I think Microsoft would be wise to remember that trying to buy cool has a tendency of making you look even more like a dork. I guess they have to try something — anything — to improve their image to investors, entrepreneurs, future employees, and the media.

Maybe that’s also what’s behind the previous hoopla about Microsoft looking at companies heavily involved with open source software. CNet even pitched that we’d make the perfect candidate for that run.

In any case, you’d think that there’d be more critical coverage of this transaction in light of eBay’s write-down of the Skype purchase. In comparison, eBay’s buy looked like a steal. They got a cool media darling with current revenues of $400 million/year for just $2.6 billion a few years ago.

But that’s exactly the opposite of the story being played in some quarters. Reuters frames it as Microsoft beats Google. No they didn’t. Google beat Microsoft with a goading stick and got them to buy-in at bubble gum numbers. It’s Google and Facebook laughing all the way to the bank, not Microsoft.

Khoi, who’s consistently one of the best writers on the web, recently took a swipe at enterprise software. Who can blame him? We agree.

If you work at a big company and you’ve ever had to do something that should be simple, like file an expense report, make changes to your salary withholdings — or, heck, if you’ve ever tried to apply for a job at a big company — then you’ve probably encountered these confounding user experiences. And you probably cursed out loud.

Then he opines:

I have to wonder: what is it about the world of enterprise software that routinely produces such inelegant user experiences?

My take: The Buyers Aren’t the Users

The people who buy enterprise software aren’t the people who use enterprise software. That’s where the disconnect begins. And it pulls and pulls and pulls until the user experience is split from the buying experience so severely that the software vendors are building for the buyers, not the users. The experience takes a back seat to the feature list, future promises, and buzz words.

This is one of the reasons we think enterprise is a dirty word. It’s also why it’s an absolute pleasure to design products for what we call the Fortune 5,000,000.

The Fortune 5,000,000 are the the small businesses, the side-businessess, the freelancers. The people who buy our products are the people who use our products. If they don’t get value on both the financial side and the productivity side they don’t stick around.

We have to make the money happy and the people happy. In our market they’re the same person. In the enterprise market they are often different people in different departments in different buildings who sit at different lunch tables.

In the world of small business software the product — not the salesperson — does the talking. There’s no camouflaging value when the buyer is the user.

Rory asks:

Is there any hope for designers in the online entrepreneur world? As in, people who can for concepts sketches and design layouts, but who can’t program themselves? Or would you say that the ability to program is an absolute must?

I’m a designer who can’t program worth a shit. But I’ve always loved designing interfaces and I’ve always loved building a business. With passion, curiosity, and ambition, there is always hope.

Getting started

I got started by designing text-only interfaces for BBS’s way back before the web. Then I moved to graphical BBS’s when NovaLink Pro was introduced. Then I moved to making music, book, and video organizers in FileMaker Pro. FileMaker Pro allowed a designer to make a product with barely any understanding of programming. Just pop in some fields, set up a few buttons, add a few conditions, and wrap it in a nice UI.

Audiofile in FileMaker

My first foray into product-based entrepreneurship was a shareware product I built in FileMaker Pro called Audiofile. Audiofile was $20 and I uploaded it to AOL. This was the early 90s. A few weeks later my parents gave me an envelope with my name on it that came in the mail from Germany. I didn’t know anyone in Germany. I didn’t know what to do with it. But when I opened it there was a crisp US $20 bill wrapped in a printout of my Audiofile order form. That was my first customer and the moment I realized I can do this.

So over the next few years I released a few other products. BookBin for organizing your books, Videofile for organizing your videos and DVDs. The $20 bills came flooding in. It was really exciting. It bought a lot of beer (and other stuff, ahem) in college.

I met a lot of folks and made some great lasting business contacts through my FileMaker Pro products. Richard Bird, now a great friend and colleague, was one of my first customers. Richard even hired me to design an experimental (and vaporware) project management tool called Sightrope. This was probably around 1999.

Every once in a while I hear from Basecamp customers who connected the dots all the way back to Audiofile. They were Audiofile customers back in the day.

Singlefile on the Web

Eventually I wanted to move these products to the web. I had tired of using FileMaker Pro and tired of building software people had to download. I wanted to build web-based software. I decided the first product I’d take to the web was BookBin, the book organizer. I decided to rename it Singlefile (wayback machine archive).

So I started learning PHP. I never took any programming classes or went to school for any of this. I just got a book on PHP, followed the examples, and wrote some code. It was shitty code, but it mostly worked. But I was stumped. I couldn’t figure out pagination.

Enter David

So I wrote a post on SvN asking for some help. I got a lot of responses, but the best one was from this guy named David Heinemeier Hansson. He was friendly, helpful, and patient. We traded some emails and then I decided to hire him to help me with Singlefile. This was when David was a PHP programmer, a few years before he even discovered Ruby. Remember that?

David and I got along well, our working styles meshed, we both enjoyed swearing, and our general outlook on simple software was the same. So we did a few client projects together. And then we started on Basecamp. The rest is history.

You can do it

Yes, there is plenty of hope for a designer who wants to build a product business. Having business sense will help. Being able to spot and attract other talented people will help. Having a knack for spotting the right opportunities will help. But being curious enough to just figure things out on your own will help the most. If you can’t program today it’s because you haven’t tried to learn yet. Just a little effort may pay serious dividends down the road.

Who knows where things will lead. My story started with designing text-based interfaces for BBS systems.

So, yes, you can definitely build something great if you’re “only a designer.”

Got a question for us?

We’re looking for interesting questions to answer here at Signal vs. Noise. Got one? Then send it to us at svn@37signals.com (make sure the subject line reads “Ask 37signals”). We’ll cherry pick the most interesting ones and answer them here. Fire away!