On Simplicity offered this advice for enjoying life more by having less:
Start seeing empty spaces as packed with freedom. Celebrate every empty shelf, bare wall, and exposed square foot of flooring as the ultimate victory. If freedom equals happiness (or at least a big component of it), then not having something just brings you closer to your personal nirvana.
The same can be said for software development. Sometimes, not adding a feature, is exactly what your product roadmap needs.
Matt discusses how to take a great photo: Take 36 pictures and throw away all but 1.
When you edit ruthlessly like that, you come out with great results. People think you’re better than you are. It’s not that you became a brilliant photographer, it’s just that you started exercising taste and restraint.
It’s the same reason I advocate trying software instead of deciding to try. Matt continues:
What you leave out is often what turns good into great. What you leave out is the difference between something that is either 1) never seen or used or 2) simple, clear, and actually digestable. It’s true for photography. It’s true for features in software. And it’s true for plenty more too.
Or perhaps more succinctly:
“The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.” -Linus Pauling
Daring Fireball on Microsoft’s latest rebranding campaign with Jerry Seinfeld – and their abrupt withdrawal after only two ads – says There’s Nothing There:
As entertainment, the spots are good. Both are well-shot, well-cut, well-acted works of cinema. And they’re a radical departure for Microsoft insofar as they completely dropped the meaningless corporate doublespeak that’s been the hallmark of their advertising for the last decade.
But they “worked” only insofar as they said nothing and dropped the pretense of saying something. The spots said nothing and reveled in the nothingness.
Just well-made nothing. A couple of million bucks just burned up in well-produced style.
After David saw the ads, he concluded ”I liked Microsoft better when they were assholes”
It’s hard to imagine that the once mighty 800-pound gorilla in the room has been reduced to a mere monkey. A monkey with a $230B market cap, but a monkey no less.
And Waffle decides the ads should have been run in the 80′s:
More than anything, though, the new ad seems to have that terrific vibe of “computers — ain’t they quite the thing?”. I’m suspecting this would have worked much better one or two decades ago. We already know.
Maybe this is just all a marketing miss-step, but I for one believe the problem is much deeper: Microsoft has lost their way. What made them successful is not what will keep them successful and they need a change. Unfortunately, however, they haven’t figured this out yet.
BusinessWeek’s Designing the Future of Business:
Imagine a crazy wonderland where most of what you learned in business school is either upside down or backward. A land where customers control the company, jobs are avenues of self-expression, the barriers to competition are out of your control, strangers design your products, fewer features are better, advertising drives customers away, demographics are beside the point, whatever you sell you take back, and best practices are obsolete at birth. Meaning talks, money walks, and stability is fantasy. Talent trumps obedience, imagination beats knowledge, and empathy trounces logic.
If you’ve been paying close attention, you don’t have to imagine this scenario. You see it forming all around you. The only question is whether you can change your business, your brand, and your thinking fast enough to take full advantage of it.
and on one specific component of such a company, agility:
A company can’t will itself to be agile. [...] You have to encourage an enterprisewide appetite for radical ideas. You have to keep the company in a constant state of inventiveness.
A good read. Go check it out!
To follow up on my previous post about estiquotes, and 37signals post on late projects: No one can predict the future, and project estimates are an educated guess at best.
In my own personal life, I find I can only vaguely predict what is happening this week. Next week’s events? I might just as easily name the date that Christ is to return. Work is no different – what I think I can accomplish for the day at 8am is wildly different than what was accomplished when I close up shop for the day.
Project planning is the same way. It is reasonably easy to predetermine a sequence of events, but identifying dates for when they will happen is largely meaningless.
You might say I just don’t have talent, or I am not thinking the project through well enough, but tell me this: when you know you have to cancel a meeting, do you know it months ahead of time? weeks? I find meetings are most often cancelled an hour before they start, and often the lead time is less than 5 minutes.
If we can’t habitually predict today’s events with accuracy, how can we possibly predict events weeks or months later?
Jason says it best
We release things when they are ready to be released, not based [on] a we-can-predict-the-future schedule.
Priorities shift, products change, new ideas bubble up, we discover new techniques and concepts, mistakes are made, external circumstances reveal themselves.
All those things make schedules a waste of time. They don’t account for surprises, new opportunities, gut feel, and human error. Schedules are too theoretical for our tastes.
The only time we start thinking about dates are when we’re really close to release. Then we can say “let’s try to get this out next Monday” or “Let’s do what we can over the next couple week and then go live with it.”
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