David Pogue: How can companies churn out such bad design?

“But you don’t have to have an M.B.A. to understand that refusing to compromise on design, for any reason, can lead to fantastic commercial success. Look at Apple, Google, Sonos, R.I.M. (makers of the BlackBerry), or (in its glory days) Palm. So what goes through the minds of executives who don’t sweat the small stuff? Don’t they realize that critics and bloggers will find and publicize the limitations? Don’t they realize that customers nowadays can compare notes, can warn each other away?”

You need to sell things which can not be copied

“When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied. Well, what can’t be copied? There are a number of qualities that can’t be copied. Consider “trust.” Trust cannot be copied. You can’t purchase it. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be downloaded. Or faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long). If everything else is equal, you’ll always prefer to deal with someone you can trust. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy saturated world.” [via MH]

Trent Reznor: Why won't people pay $5?

“And then Reznor ended the hoopla last week when he reported on his blog that 154,449 people had downloaded Niggy Tardust and 28,322 of them paid the $5 as of January 2. In the blog, Reznor suggested that he was ‘disheartened’ by the results.”

In search of the distraction-free computer desktop

“WriteRoom has me composing more quickly, and it’s brought back the elemental thrill of assembling thoughts by tossing words onto the screen. As outrageous and premature as it sounds, programs like WriteRoom could have the kind of impact for this generation that The Elements of Style had for another, by distilling down the writing process and laying bare its constituent parts.”

How kids respond to the XO laptop

“If Negroponte wants to convert kids to the global information economy, he might consider the chief virtue of the XO laptop: its lights and sounds. Even Western kids, whose toys flash and squeal, are drawn with primitive wonderment to the peculiar phenomena of this computer — the distinctive hums and blinks that seem like evidence of its soul.”

Invest in an athlete

“The 25 year-old pitcher is offering 4% of all his future major league earnings for $50,000. If you don’t have that kind of money, you can buy a share of that 4% for $20…Don’t be surprised if in five or ten years you can bet on any professional athlete’s career the way you can bet on Newsom’s.”

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs on Microsoft/Yahoo deal

“The Borg-Yahoo merger won’t work. Here’s why. It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster.”

Outside.in switches to Rails

“By switching to Rails we were able to shrink our maintained codebase to just 20% of its former size while expanding the overall feature-set of the system. There have been some learning curve-related hiccups over the past few months as we acclimated to a new system, but on the whole we now have a leaner, better codebase, more control over our system, and are developing in a language and framework that are joys to code in. We’re very happy with the switch so far.”

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

How Expekt uses Basecamp to manage one of the leading European online gaming sites
“Late this summer I heard about Basecamp and 37signals. 2 months later our whole marketing department collaborates in Basecamp. Lost mails, confusion, and who’s doing what/when are no longer a problem.”

Library professionals use Backpack for presentations (and more)
MCLC Library Tech Talk, a technology interest group for the library professionals in Maricopa County, AZ, recently published a review/description of Backpack: “I use Backpack in particular to collaborate with colleagues on projects or presentations, and often use it to outline any presentation I might give.”

RunMyProcess lets you integrate your Basecamp information with other applications without any programming
“The global idea is to offer integration of Basecamp with another application without any programming: Just design the flow of information and select from our library of connectors the one needed.”

Price it low

“If you’re not worried that you’re pricing it too cheap, you’re not pricing it cheap enough. That’s the best advice I can give you about Pricing in a single sentence. Never ask, ‘How much might someone be willing to pay for this?’ Ask instead, ‘At what price could I sell a huge number of these?’ Read the biographies of Henry Ford and Sam Walton and you’ll learn that this was the one question asked by both men throughout their lives.”

NPR interview with author of 'Gotcha Capitalism'

“Bob Sullivan’s latest book is about the hidden fees found in many phone, cable, credit card and other bills. All told, he says, corporations are nickel-and-diming their customers to death — or at least to the tune of $1,000 or more a year.”

Gapingvoid offers advice to tech businessmen

“To all you corporate MBAs out there, here’s a little tip. When you planning on how to embrace the brave new world of Web 2.0, the first question you ask yourself should not be ‘What tools do I use?’ Blogs, RSS, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook- it doesn’t matter. The first question you should REALLY ask yourself is: ‘How do I want to change the way I talk to people?’”

Steven Pressfield’s “The War of Art”

“There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t and the secret is this: it’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.”

Lessons learned from Dreamhost’s billing debacle

“The moral of this story is that ‘flexibility’ is rarely desired in programming! The less a program will accept/the less a program will do/the less options and preferences it has, the more usable it is/the more understandable it is/the more stable it is. Tough Love When designing a program, you’ve got to make some tough decisions .. and when you really can’t decide if this is something your users will need someday, err on the side of leaving it out.”

1960s Braun products hold the secrets to Apple's future

“Some people will probably call these examples a ‘rip-off’ but, in a world where industrial design and art is constantly being recycled into new work, I just see Apple’s products as a great evolution to classic concepts. Now, as I look at Rams’ work I can’t help but to wonder: which of these old Braun designs will Apple revive next?”

Steve Jobs on the Kindle

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Profile of Tumblr’s David Karp

“Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, Mr. Karp continued, have a tendency to cash out early. ‘I want to build something I’d be happy to be employed by 10 years out,’ he said. ‘The idea of Tumblr employing 40 people in two years is such an incredible idea.’”

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

New Basecamp Feature: Image-grid view
Today we announce a new Basecamp feature called the image-grid view. The image-grid view allows you to browse images (GIF, JPG, or PNG) uploaded to a project in a visual grid (3 across). The images are thumbnailed to 200×200 so they are big enough to browse but not too big that you can’t see many of them at once.

Using Backpack for recruiting project management
“When it comes to keeping all information together for a job search, Backpack is the best thing I’ve found…I generally set up one Backpack page per client I work with and include notes about that client’s process, interviewing preferences, and stuff that I need to do next in my own recruiting processes. If my client has provided me with a written description as a Microsoft Word document, I upload it here. If I have pictures of the work site, I upload them. In short, that page becomes a clearing house of information relevant to my search and helps me to be efficient in tracking my communications and efforts.”

List of great tools for web application development includes Basecamp
20 tools for web application development is a helpful reference list for anyone developing a web app. The list includes Basecamp: “We use Basecamp to communicate and collaborate on all of our projects. It allows us to set up a schedule with milestones and keep our messages and to-dos all in one spot.”

How Backpack is helping one design/writing freelancer
“Using the List feature I was able to get a simple to-do going. I thought that was all I’d ever use it for. As things went on and I needed to be more organized, I was able to add another page with Monthly goals separated by weeks and by those that will take place over the entire month. Then I decided to make a calorie counter page. I don’t know what I’ll make next. The examples page has so many diverse pages, people planning a wedding, organizing guitar tab, selling stuff, choosing fonts. There are plenty of ways to use it, that’s what makes it so intimidating to start and so addictive once you do.”

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Some of the recent activity at our internal 37signals Campfire chat room:

New Xerox logo

Ryan S.
Ryan S.	cries
Jason F.	RS: Ugh.
Jason F.	I don’t mind the new type
Jason F.	But the ball. omg.
Ryan S.	the new type looks like it could be anything. a video game company, a brand of sneaker, a prescription med
Ryan S.	the old one was authoritative and distinctive
Ryan S.	also had a nice “precise” quality to it that fits with their line of products
Jason F.	RS: Yeah. I don’t like the lowercase trend..
Matt L.	yeah, looks like totally generic software logo thing at the end too.
Ryan S.
Sam S.	i like the 1907 kodak logo
Sam S.
Ryan S.	that logo is wild.
Jeremy K.	Sam – that’s awesome
Sam S.	reminds me of
Sam S.
Jeremy K.	like wax seals with the family initials
Sam S.	yeah totally

Neverending receipts

Sarah H.
Sarah H.	This is the receipt for the GIFT CARD i bought my dad.
Sarah H.	17 inches FOLDED IN HALF
Jeremy K.	Sarah – wow
Jeremy K.	I got a two-footer from Staples earlier this week and was blown away
Jeremy K.	But half of it was to print the terms of some impossible-to-redeem rebate
Sarah H.	yeah it’s totally ridiculous
Sarah H.	half of it is a survey I’m never going to take.
Jeremy K.	haha

We’ve invited Phineas X. Jones to be a guest artist here at Signal vs. Noise. You can get some background on Phineas and his “for-real work portfolio” at phineasxjones.com. Phineas also has more images and words at nocommercialpotential.net and at anexquisitecorpse.net (“a collaboration between a small number of artists, each with little to no idea as to what has gone before, creating a (hopefully) single, unified and otherwise unique work that could not be created any other way”). His initial post will explain more how this all came to be…

How Obama’s speechwriters (who are under 30 btw) work with the candidate

“What I do is to sit with him for half an hour. He talks and I type everything he says. I reshape it, I write. He writes, he reshapes it. That’s how we get a finished product. It’s a great way to write speeches. A lot of times, you write something, you hand it in, it gets hacked by advisers, it gets to the candidate and then it gets sent back to you. This is a much more intimate way to work.”

Customer experience case studies: Amazon, Apple, SAS, Whole Foods, and Zappos

“We now can point to case studies of major successes that explicitly and provably stem from a focus on good experience. (And they’re getting more frequent; these five case studies all popped up within the last few weeks.)”

The downside of home-office life

“For home-office workers who aren’t in regular touch with colleagues or clients, a frequent complaint — even among those who say they are distracted by other members of their households — is of isolation.”

49 simple and clean designs

“Let’s put it straight – simplicity is more complex than you probably think it is. To design a web-site in user-friendly tones, presenting all information and removing unnecessary details isn’t easy. In fact, many designers don’t manage to find the right mix between details and their presentation on the screen, which usually results in an information overkill and/or decreased usability. However, some designers do manage to find the right balance and create usable, elegant and clean web-sites with simple layouts. We’ve selected some of them.”

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

What GR-FX, experts at Microsoft Access and Office, likes about Basecamp
Garry Robinson and his associates at GR-FX are experts at Microsoft Access and Office development and XML file processing. They’re also Basecamp fans. Garry, who’s written a book on Access and a number of big articles for MSDN, sent us an email detailing how his team uses Basecamp.

Use Highrise cases to track internal staff
“We use our CRM software quite successfully to track our staff as well as our customers. Highrise by 37signals, has an option to create ‘cases.’ We use these ‘cases’ to keep notes on sick days, days off and any personal or performance issues that may arise. Access to these files is restricted to management who can then comment in the message threads if there are any ongoing issues.”

Basecamp one of the “best online publishing tools of 2007”
The Mequoda Daily provides free, valuable tips for publishers that want to build better websites. The site recently published its list of Best Online Publishing Tools of 2007 and Basecamp made the list.

Search Backpack from the desktop with LaunchBar
“LaunchBar is a cool utility that provides instant access to your applications, documents, and more. You can also configure it to search all of your Backpack pages. This makes it easy to find anything you’ve got in your Backpack account right from your desktop. If you’re already setup with LaunchBar, here’s how to search Backpack…”

Beanstalk: Basecamp-friendly version control for team leads
“Beanstalk is a hosted Subversion system, making it easy for anyone to setup, browse, track, and manage Subversion repositories. Beanstalk has built-in integration with your favorite tools such as Basecamp.”

Highrise is the #1 must-have tech tools for the wired mediator in 2008
“Every ADR practice needs an effective client relationship management (CRM) tool to track clients and projects from first contact to end of contract. The trouble is that most CRM software is overkill for a small business and the long lists of features are dizzying and overwhelming. Enter 37signals’ Highrise, a web-based client communications and tracking service. There are few bells and whistles and it does what it does very well.”

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