Every once in a while I have to remind myself of the mantra of the 37signals team, as expressed so well in their book Getting Real.
They focus on simplicity and on getting started (as with Nike’s “Just Do It”). And, they focus on limiting the choices to those that people really want and need. For example,
“Conventional wisdom says that to beat your competitors you need to one-up them. If they have four features, you need five (or 15, or 25). If they’re spending x, you need to spend xx. If they have 20, you need 30.”
“This sort of one-upping Cold War mentality is a dead-end. It’s an expensive, defensive, and paranoid way of building products. Defensive, paranoid companies can’t think ahead, they can only think behind. They don’t lead, they follow.”
[what is needed is] …
“Less features
Less options/preferences
Less people and corporate structure
Less meetings and abstractions
Less promises”
We’ve talked about this before, how less is more, how we don’t like having too many choices. We may tell ourselves we like a lot of choices, but research has shown conclusively that we really do better with fewer choices.
If the Big 3 automobile manufacturers in the US are going to survive, they need to focus on simplicity and on offering a reasonable set of choices. They would do well to read the book from the 37signals team. You might want to read it, too. If you don’t want to shell out $19 for it, you can read it online. It’s intended for developers of web applications, but its principles have broad applicability.