Dave in LA

I watched a video last night that showed up in my Google Reader that I can’t stop thinking about. It’s from a conference called the Business Innovation Factory (BIF). It’s an interview by Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal with Jason Fried, the CEO and founder of 37signals, a web based software company (and also the developers/inventors of Ruby on Rails). Watch it here.

The interview focused mainly on building products and software that are usable by everyday people. The way technology should work for you, not against you. It’s a goal that not many companies seem to understand but the ones that do succeed. You would think that this would push the market towards these ideas being used everywhere, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

This is something that I’ve heard from David Pogue before as well here. Both talks touch on some of the same points, mainly that the model for software is broken. The eternal push to add new features will almost undoubtedly ruin a piece of software. Pogue puts it like this:

If you improve software enough you will eventually ruin it.

The interview at BIF went more in depth into the ideas that David Pogue presents in his video. Specifically how 37signals designs simple tools to get things done, then gets out of the way. They don’t keep adding features and bloating their software. They stick to simplicity and productivity.

Fried also presents his companies solution to the broken software model, a subscription based model. This allows his company to constantly innovate (since all of their software is web based) while not having to answer to any single entity that may influence his companies work (since the most expensive subscription is $150/month). The fact that the company doesn’t have large businesses paying thousands and thousands of dollars for their software allows them to be the gatekeepers of ideas and be able to say “no” to ideas they think won’t work.

I found this video at a timely moment in the life of a piece of software I helped work on. Our development team is already getting suggestions from people as to features we should add for the next release and I hope that we’re diligent enough to say “no” when we need to and keep our software usable and simple. Fried touches on this with what could be summed up as:

Decision by committee is destined for mediocrity. Leaders make great decisions, not groups.

In listening to the BIF interview I feel as though I’ve been part of a team that has accomplished a great thing. We’ve made a usable piece of software that sometime in the future might be released as an actual product. I only hope that our core group keeps the ideas mentioned above in mind when deciding on the features needed for future releases and that we don’t fall into the trap of improving to the point of ruining.