Joel Spolsky said:

[...] As users gain more experience, their needs become slightly more complex. They start to understand the simple product completely, and then they have the cognitive ability to understand more fancy bells ‘n’ whistles. For users who have been doing project management for a long time with any software product, they will have a long list of things that they know — from experience! — that they need.

That is why there’s a market for simple and there’s a market for full-featured. Both are discrete markets, usually.

If this would be the whole truth, my mother wouldn’t use the same MacOS than I do. There might be a market for discrete solutions, but only as long as somebody comes up with something better. See: Apple. Peter Armstrong mentions the same thing here.

Obviously every software designer strives for “power made easy” — it seems easy at first, but there is power under the hood when you need it.

Exactly. I think the ultimate goal for software design is to increase the number of features and simplify the interface at the same time. That is where the say-no-by-default-approach fails. Keeping it simple is only half of the battle.

Jason Fried said:

For reference, here’s our original post on this very topic in June of 2006 when Basecamp was 2.5 years old.

http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/growing_in_vs_
growing_out…

Today Basecamp is 7 years old. Signups are stronger than ever.

Whenever we survey customers asking them what they love most about Basecamp, the top response by a mile is: it’s simple, easy, and their co-workers and clients actually use it. It’s not multiple choice either – the words “simple” “easy” “intuitive” show up more than any others in the open ended textarea.

We’ve made Basecamp a lot better over the years. Some people still ask for more. Others say it’s too complicated and they wish it was even simpler.

Software development is a challenge. Everyone wants something different. So you do what you can to thread the needle and make as many of the right customers as happy as possible. Not everyone is the right customer.

It sucks to lose a customer because we did something wrong, but it’s OK to lose a customer if we just aren’t the right fit anymore. People move on from all sorts of things. Clothes, houses, cars, jobs, relationships… Why not software? As circumstances change, one product may not fit someone forever. That’s OK as long as it fits plenty of other people at the same time.

Some customers stick with you forever. Others come and go. Many who go come back after trying other tools that promise them more but that no one actually used. In the end, the tool that actually gets used is the one that’s the right fit for someone. It’s really really hard to get people to actually use things.

We’ve found that the simplest stuff is what actually gets used. It’s why email is still the world’s most popular project management tool.

Thank you for your answer. I am glad to hear that Basecamp is still growing (actually I wasn’t sure). As I said, I owe you a lot, and I mean it seriously. But judging from the comments (and traffic) I receive, I’ve hit a sweet spot, and I thought it is important that you know.

Grammar nazi (in the comments) and languagehacker:

All your I’s in the middle of a sentence are lowercase!

Am I the only person who couldn’t get anything out of this post because of its bad grammar?

Apologies. But I insist, my English is better than his.

I am not angry, this is just the end of a love story, and i want to say goodbye.

We once met in Copenhagen at the reboot7 conference back in 2005, and meeting you – among many others – changed my life.

From then on, you have been sort of an idol to me, a real hero. You were so admirable. You got a lot of things right that others didn’t. I was in love. I praised you. I mentioned you in countless presentations, hundreds of screenshots and many talks. You have been a source of inspiration for me, and i want to thank you.

I was proud to know you. But not anymore.

Things move on. Neither you are beautiful anymore, nor you are the coolest girl at the party. Yes, i am a bit disappointed. In case you’re interested in, here is why i leave.

These are slides from the first day we’ve met.

I was very impressed when you said: “Say no by default”. As you can see, i even kept your slides to remember. I know very well the problem of too much features leading to crappy software. Your beauty came from inside, from your virginity. Saying “no” seemed pretty obvious the right thing. Like a boss.

But as it turns out, in the long run, after 6 years, i must say that the result is disappointing. You proved yourself wrong, i think.

You improved in these years, but you didn’t take the next step. Your innovations i am aware of: “due dates for milestones” and recently, the new calendar. For me, you seem to have said “no” too often.

You didn’t integrate the Writeboard into Basecamp.

You still don’t have a real newsfeed.

You don’t allow me to switch off unnecessary tabs to prevent confusion of my poor co-workers.

You didn’t develop task and ticket management workflows like Jira has. There is no tracking of work times.

I could go on.

Others are more beautiful now. For me, Podio is the new Basecamp. I love the idea of building self-defined information items, although it’s true that her (inter)face is still ugly and cannot match with yours. But i don’t care, because she will improve. Even now at this early stage, she is more useful for me than you. Of course this happens all the time, different people love different software, and maybe i have changed.

But what really disappoints me, is that you don’t understand.

Life is change. Everything is on the move. It flows. You cannot step in the same river twice. If you want to keep a relationship alive, you have to change. You have to take risks, the risk of breaking up. And if you take risks, you might fail. But remember – the courage you showed in the first place was one of the reasons i fell in love with you.

But there was a chance to renew our love. It began so promising.

A lot of your other lovers have been waiting long for you to launch a good app. Finally, you came up with Basecamp Mobile. You might have had good reasons not to build a native app and try something different. A lot of people i know, mostly developers, cheered. While i am a big fan of the open web too, i am really grateful for that you tried to prove what is possible.

The result was – well – i call it painful. You have built so many great things in the web browser, how come you don’t see it? Even on the best phones and networks, your overall appearance is annoying – compared to a well done native app. You are way too slow and far not responsive enough. In fact you are so bad, that if someone asks me about what i think about HTML5 apps, i am answering now: check out Basecamp Mobile. How can we expect to do better if they can’t do it?

It was a nice try, you could have easily learned from it.

But instead, you are starting to talk weird. 10 Apps is all people need? Only because someone does not use more than 10 apps, a diversity of thousands of apps is irrelevant? I might use only 10 apps too, but certainly they are not the same 10 than somebody other’s. You are way wrong, and it is well justified to say you are in an insider bubble.

You could have aimed to be baked into the OSes with your applications, just like twitter is now baked into iOS. I was desperately hoping you would succeed. Your UIs would be as snappy and funny as Angry Birds’s, and people would say, why should i use the desktop when i can also do this in the phone?

(I am not saying that everyone should build a native app because i know it is awfully expensive to do. But then you could have said: sorry, i cannot afford to support apps. But do not try to make me believe this is the better strategy.)

With this, you finally lost me. Certainly, you don’t care. But i feel sorry to say: it’s over.

Bye.

One More Thing

In May 2007, i upgraded my free Basecamp account to the “Personal Plan”, which was $12/month. I payed for 42 months. That’s $504 in total. I managed some, not all, my projects with it. I always was a bit pissed with the storage limits, but i admit that cleaning up a bit solved that issue.

A week ago, i considered reactivating my account for a certain project. And guess what, i was shocked. Now i should pay at least $49 $24? That is more than close to what i pay for my Adobe CS, which is approximately $35 when you write it off over 3 years. I consider Basecamp as ridiculously overpriced. No chance that i will sign up again under these conditions.

[update: i didn't recognize the tiny line at the bottom, offering the $24 "basic" plan, thanks for that correction.]

[update: There is a discussion thread in the Hacker News related to this post, I responded to comments from Jason Fried an Joel Spolski here]

- done

While i’m one of those lucky ones who have an premium account in germany, i thought it was impossible to get the Spotify app for the iPhone, but luckily there is a simple workaround. Just create an UK iTunes account and download it there:

• enter the iTunes Store
• log out
• scroll down to the footer, click “change country” (zu deutsch: “Land ändern”)
• select United Kingdom
• search for the Spotify app
• click the purchase button
• click “create new account”, accept disclaimer
• select the payment option “none” – this works because the spotify app is free
• fill out the form with any valid UK address, use a different email address to your original account
• check email, validate email
• enter the iTunes store again. now you’re in the UK Store
• search for the spotify app again
• purchase
• install
• done

Thanks to hypebot, i found  this remarkable post from Umair Haque on Harvard Business Blogs. He calculates MJ’s royalty income to $12M per year, which is a lot of money, but astoundingly low considering MJs outstanding fame:

If the world’s biggest pop star only made $12 million a year from his recordings, why would anyone make serious music? Where did the rest of the money go? Why, straight into record labels’ pockets.

Did they make better music with it? Nope — they made Britney and Lady GaGa. And that’s how they killed themselves: by underinvesting in quality, to rake in the take.

It’s not the web that is responsible for the current desaster of music economy, it is the greed of those who conducted all this. The music industry deserves to disappear.

I’m not skilled to judge the quality of music. What does quality in art mean anyway? The sex pistols, did they make “good” music in the sense of a musician? Surely not. Have the been “good” musicians? *cough*. Was punk rock innovative? nope, it was just rock’n'roll, not even a fast one. So why have the sex pistols – at least – been so successful and why did millions identify with their music and why can be said: this is true art? Of course is the answer: because punk rock was an authentic, urgent and strong expression of an attitude towards society and life.

Authenticity is something that everybody carries inside, it derives from life itself, it is not manageable and cannot be created artificially. Authenticity is the key to art. I am convinced that the greatest and most common mistake in the music business is to influence and polish artists in order to reach marketing goals and therefore undermine and bury their authenticity. This is the true reason for the current disaster of the music industry.

Regina Spektor says: Don’t mess with art!

There is the suggestion that an album should cost $5, my guess is that in mid term the prices will even drop to around $3. This seems to be the amount a consumer is willing to pay on a voluntary basis. (Remember the Radiohead In Rainbows numbers. Divide $2,736,000 by 1,200,000 downloads, then you get $2.28 in average.)

Why so low? It’s not only random customer behaviour. The value of an mp3 file itself, as is with any digital information, tends to zero. It’s an economic fact, because the marginal costs for the production of a digital copy are nearly zero.

Despite this a digital download has a value for the customer, because of two reasons:

First, the service that provides the download is a value. If you pay, you save yourself hunting in file sharing networks and ending up with mistagged mp3s in bad quality. The better the service, the higher the value. iTunes is more convenient than amazon’s mp3 store, so they might be able to realize a higher price.

Second, people will pay because it’s fair. But you are not paying for the file, your want to support the artist. People (mostly) want to be fair. In this view, you are paying for the consumer-artist relationship. This means that probably a direct sale from the band’s website has a higher value for the customer – if they know that the money goes directly to the artist – that could equal much more than $3.

…that the best selling album of 2008 - Tha Carter III from Lil’ Wayne -  sold 2.88 million copies and

for the very first time since tracking album sales started under the current model in 1991, the number-one album didn’t clear 3 million copies (mediapost.com)

… but still, Lil’ Wayne alone…

sold more CDs than did CD Baby in 2008 (coolfer)

…which is interesting if you know that CD Baby has 277,000 Albums in stock. Does that mean that the Long Tail is a dead end? I doubt. Look at this:

Songs from Regina Spektor, an album that is available only from CD Baby has 2,257,765 plays from 161,533 listeners on last.fm, which is roughly the same as the 2,466,466 plays from 116,056 listeners for Lil’ Waynes’ Tha Carter III.

How come? Do Lil’ Wayne listeners use less computers? Are Regina Spektors’ fans a bunch of file sharing criminals? Or maybe – are the “official” sales numbers just a massive fake?

I won’t say that i regret having paid, i like it, but i really wonder how much time people spend on developing stuff that – on a mid term perspective – will surely be eaten up by the big fish in the pond?

Spotify isn’t difficult to understand. Basically, it’s  a streaming iTunes with a 9,99 € flatrate. The application is well made, slim (just 2.4MB) and in terms of interface design an iTunes copycat, even shortcuts like spacebar for play/pause work the same. Spotify is fast and search works fine.  Sound quality is good, a lot better than streaming from last.fm, but not as good as an 192kB mp3 downloaded from iTunes. One downturn for me: spotify cannot stream to my apple airport speakers. Feature request! Anything else is fine, but what’s new?

Surely, Spotify is doing what Napster should have been done in the past. But that does not justify its right to live. At the certain moment when it will be possible to clear royalties for an on-demand streaming for the US market (Spotify only works in Europe), it is very easy for Apple to enter the business, and that will be the sudden end for Spotify.

What I love about “Elephants … Teeth Sinking Into Heart” is you know for a fact that there was not a single A&R or P.R. or marketing person that was in the process remotely, because there’s not a single up-tempo song on the whole album. They’re all completely self-indulgent, in the best possible sense of the word, indulging in the beauty of the sadness.

I’m so thrilled when I hear that. There might be slight danger that a label would be trying to say “Let’s make sure there’s a radio song.” It’s a really healthy thing in this younger generation of artists…

No A&R, no PR and marketing remotely makes good music. Just think about it.