Any early adopter has experienced the pain of a purchase followed by a price drop. It’s no fun. But enough with the hysteria that seems to be de rigeur these days whenever there’s a price drop (e.g. N.Y. woman sues Apple, Jobs over iPhone price cut).
I’m an Apple fan, but it’s extremely annoying that every single Apple item I own (and I have several) significantly drops in price as soon as someone else comes along and shows us that prices don’t really have to be that high.
Sure, they gave a rebate to all those iPhone buyers who got the rug pulled out from under them, but what about my computer, my iPod and the songs I’ve been paying $1.29 for?
Apple could learn a thing or two about customer loyalty. Everything they make works great. But customers will eventually become wary of a company that pulls the financial wool over everyone eyes, price-gouging until someone points out that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes. By that point, the money’s already in their pocket. Then they’re left scrambling in an effort to justify why they’ve been charging so much more. I hope the monopoly ends soon. Apple is most dishonest to their own customers.
Annoying? Sure. But this is the way technology and capitalism work. If you paid $1.29 for a song or $599 for an iPhone, you felt you were getting your money’s worth (otherwise you shouldn’t have bought it). The song or the phone didn’t change, so suck it up.
A new car loses a significant amount of its value when you drive it off the lot. If you don’t like that, buy a used car. Similarly, if getting the best technology value is crucial to you, buy used gear (or just hang on to what you’ve already got).
But if you want the latest and/or greatest, accept the fact that what you’re buying will cost less in the future. It’s the way the game works.
Your best bet: Step 1) Only buy things that are worth the cost to you at that time. Step 2) Get on with your life.
Over the past few months we’ve been getting requests from professors around the country inviting us to speak to their business, design, or engineering students about Getting Real.
So we’ve been thinking about putting together a 37signals Getting Real College Tour. We’d pick a dozen or so schools and put together a speaking tour over a couple months.
If you are a professor and you think you can pull together 100+ design, business, or engineering students to attend a one or two hour talk (including Q&A) on your campus, please drop us an email at svn@37signals.com.
Important Note: Since we posted this we’ve been hearing from a lot of students. It’s great to hear that you’re interested, but in order to make this work we’ll need to be contacted by professors or department heads who would be able to sanction/sponsor the event. If you’re a student please let your professor/department know you would be interested in having us speak at your school. Please ask them to get in touch with us directly. Thanks!
From a financial perspective, how did you make the move from client development to 100% product development (i.e. private funding, VC, Angel, internal profits?). We’re in a pivotal time of shift in this direction but being internally funded means that client work sometimes (or most times) still takes precedence.
37signals made the move from clients to products one day at a time. Basecamp was developed alongside client work and was treated as essentially a third client. It had to compete for resources on equal footing with other clients, which meant that every hour we spent on it had to really count.
With constrained resources, you realize the value of the marginal hour very quickly. You can’t just goof around with science projects, open-ended explorations, and play time with new whiz-bang technology. Instead, you have to deliver real value, real soon. Otherwise the project is simply going to languish as it loses out to the “real work” of paying clients.
For us, that meant we had to build something for ourselves, something we needed, and something that was valuable enough that we’d assign resources to it over getting billable hours done. It meant racing to running software, deciding that a lot of stuff just doesn’t matter, and building half, not half-assed.
The initial start of extreme resource starvation lead to many of our thoughts on software development. It also lead me to believe that the best work is done when there’s not enough time, not enough money to do it “right”.
Doing it right is a pie in the sky. It’s a misnomer for second-system syndrome and it’s never going to happen anyway. So stop aiming for perfect, start aiming for good enough.
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!
“Amazon’s finally done what was clearly the right solution in 1999. Music in the format that people actually want it in, with a Web-based experience that’s simple and works with any device. I bought tracks from Amazon (Kevin Drew and No Age), downloaded them, sync’d them to my new iPod Nano, and had them playing in my home audio system (Control 4) in less than five minutes. PRAISE JESUS. It only took 8 years. 8 years. How much opportunity have we lost in those 8 years?...We certainly didn’t gain mass user adoption or trust, two prerequisites to success on the Internet.”
“Take at look at Google, for instance, who gets about 200 million queries a day. Let’s assume each query is displayed for about 10 seconds; that means Google is running for about 550,000 hours every day on some desktop. Assuming that users run Google in full screen mode, the shift to a black background will save a total of 15 (74-59) watts. Now take into account that about 25 percent of the monitors in the world are CRTs, and at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, that’s about $75,000/year, a goodly amount of energy and dollars for changing a few color codes.” [tx AK] (Update: Google responds)
“Despite it’s warts, Rails is still the fastest, easiest way to get things working and out to customers, which is absolutely critical. I’m now back to quickly adding new features into our app. And by tomorrow, we’ll just have a web host that specializes in Rails. Depending upon user acceptance and incoming revenues, it might make sense down the road to invest time, money, and mental angst in rewriting in something like Django for better performance, but not right now.”
“When I came home this last time, I had an email from Zappos asking about the shoes, since they hadn’t received them. I was just back and not ready to deal with that, so I replied that my mom had died but that I’d send the shoes as soon as I could. They emailed back that they had arranged with UPS to pick up the shoes, so I wouldn’t have to take the time to do it myself. I was so touched. That’s going against corporate policy. Yesterday, when I came home from town, a florist delivery man was just leaving. It was a beautiful arrangement in a basket with white lilies and roses and carnations. Big and lush and fragrant. I opened the card, and it was from Zappos. I burst into tears. I’m a sucker for kindness, and if that isn’t one of the nicest things I’ve ever had happen to me, I don’t know what is.”
Along those lines, check out SmileOnMyMac’s brief but informative email newsletters. They reek of someone at the company asking, “How can we help our customers kick more ass?” Here’s one that was recently sent out to TextExpander customers (text is copied below)...
What makes a good abbreviation to trigger expansion of your snippets? Here are some basic guidelines:
1. Make it short.
2. Make it easy to remember.
3. Make sure it’s not likely to be typed by accident.
4. Make it unique.
One easy strategy is to repeat the first letter of the abbreviation. “sig” would be a bad abbreviation for your customized email signature: everytime you tried to type words like “sign” or “signal”, you would not get past the third letter before automatically triggering your email signature. But “ssig” would work perfectly, because no word starts with those letters.
By default, you’ll find the snippets with the abbreviations “ddate” and “ttime” already set up by TextExpander. You might want to create your own snippets like:
- ttel
- llogo
- llink
With the right abbreviations, you’ll be on your way to saving hours of unnecessary typing with TextExpander!
Natura pet food comments on safety
Chris Schlarb writes:
My family has two beautiful Siamese cats and with all of the issues surrounding wet or canned cat food I decided to take a look into the brand we purchase, Innova & Evo.
Well, I went to their website and what did I find?
Anyhow, I was really impressed. This sort of small gesture will go a long way to ensuring that I continue to use their products. Not only did the video inform me that their products are safe (and why!), it let me know they have respect for me and are operating transparently in a time of industry-wide crisis.
Mark Cuban wants candidates to do less
Bill Litfin writes:
A 37Signals-esque blog entry from Mark Cuban. It’s about politics… but some quotes struck me as, well, 37Signals-esque… it’s a whole diatribe on picking the candidate that does the least—and why.
“When I vote in any local or state election, I vote for the candidate who I think will do the least. Not the least of anything specific, just the least amount of everything.”
“What I would love to see is a candidate who says he/she is going to start removing laws and programs. Give me a candidate who’s primary platform is to spend 4 years removing federal programs and laws. If it was a law or program worth anything the states or local municipalities will find much more creative ways to make them work.”
“So if you want my vote in 2008, don’t tell me what you are going to add, tell me what you are going to remove. Tell me how you are going to simplify the government. That’s how you get my vote.”
New Backpack feature: Add Anywhere!
Add anywhere makes it easy to add the content you want right where you want it…The secret is the “Add here” control that you’ll find when you move your mouse above or below or between two pieces of content on a page. You’ll reveal the “Add here” control when your mouse is “in the gutter” to the left of the existing content…The best way to see it in action is to watch this video (Quicktime required).
New: Sort files by size in Basecamp
Another new Basecamp change we just rolled out: You can sort by file size within the “Files” tab (it’s one of the sorting options in the right sidebar).
