One of the hardest things has been managing the scope of the project. Last summer it got too big, and I lost my handle on it. I spent most of the fall avoiding it because I felt like I had gotten burnt, and was too scared to keep trying.

But in 2010 I picked it up again, and around January 30, I decided that I was close enough to something launchable that I could set a launch date. I chose March 1st, about the time when people often start sprouting seeds indoors for the spring planting. I created 5 milestones, the last of which I thought I could get to by February 26th.

As is to be expected, things took a little longer than expected. Goals were shuffled around. Milestones were hit days and weeks after they were supposed to be done. An entire additional milestone was added.

However, today I reached the “beta quality” milestone. I’m 12 days late, but that’s actually not so bad. I’m proud of myself for being flexible, but keeping the pressure on, and not letting the schedule slip more than it had to.

So, without further ado, I’m very proud to invite y’all, my little internet posse, to give it a shot. It’s pretty basic, and it’s rough around the edges. But it should at least sorta work. At the very least it’s something worth criticizing.

Please try it out, and give me feedback, either through this blog or via email, or through the feedback system on the site. I’m particularly interested in comments about the planting dates it recommends and bugs with the site. But whatever anyone has to say, I’ll listen.

And wow, what a difference it makes. Trading anonymity for accountability has led to radically improved conversations.

I’d point to a specific example but it’s more what’s missing now. A lot less antagonism and a lot more thoughtfulness and general politeness. Great to see.

I wonder if they’ll also find a lot less women.  In my experience men are much more likely to be gung-ho about posting their real identities online.  Maybe women tend to have more needs for anonymity (domestic abusers following them, increased lifestyle scrutiny at work, etc) or maybe they’re just more careful.  I don’t know.  But I know some women will balk at the requirement.

In the case of 37signals, since their market is small businesses, perhaps there won’t be a problem.  Women might be comfortable signing up, in a professional capacity.  But designers should be careful about requiring full names.  You could alienate an important audience.

Now, I hate software patents as much as the next person. I think the free, unencumbered exchange of ideas would be a better setup. But the truth is, the whiners are just being lazy. There is always a better way.

A good example is Apple’s iPod wheel:

When Apple came out with the first iPod, it was like holy crap, this is the best way to scroll through long lists of songs EVER! And I remember thinking that the other people designing mp3 players were totally screwed. No configuration of buttons was ever going to be as luxurious and fun as the click wheel.

I was right about the buttons, but I was wrong to think the click wheel was the be-all, end-all:

Leave it to Apple to one-up themselves, but the iPhone certainly made the click wheel seem cumbersome.

Apple’s competitors had 1,904 days between the release of the iPod an the announcement of the iPhone to leapfrog Apple by simply putting a touch screen on their mp3 players. But none of them did.

They failed to think outside the buttons.

I was recently reminded of this phenomenon when I ready about Method’s new laundry detergent containers on the 37signals blog.

I remember when those new detergent bottle tops were invented… the ones that drain back into the bottle when you screw them back on. It was a revelation. No more gunky bottle tops.  Presumably someone patented that idea. And for years, apparently, competitors threw their hands in their air, thinking what could be better than that and paid the patent owner to license the design.

But Method… I have to hand it to them. They leapfrogged:

I mean, genius, right?  They designed a better bottle cap by making a bottle without a cap!  It has a pump!  Designgasm!

Maybe there are cases where someone actually finds the utter and total apex of design perfection.  But somehow I doubt it.  There’s always a better way.

What is that, some kind of oragami?  The one on Android looks like some kind of Pokemon powerup.  Seriously, does anyone know what these icons do?

And what about this one?  Some sort of banana with Wi-fi capabilities?  A sex toy?  I have no idea what these are.

These are the other two the Palm has on their homescreen.  I think the one on the left is a little square of notebook paper that got ripped out?  With some vertically-written chinese text on it?  Something to do with privacy controls in China?

The other one… the number 19 written on a stack of sheets of paper…  Maybe something about OCD?  Or, like, a lucky numbers app?

Seriously, the only company I know who really gets it right is Volkswagon.  Here’s the key fob for the new Jetta:

I mean, OBVIOUS, right?  I just take one look at that and I immediately think horseless carriage, A.K.A. my car.  Palm needs to update their icons to match what people actually know about, like, pronto.

~~~

In all seriousness, though, there are 12 year olds today, who have iPhones and have no idea what this icon means:

They just push it because it’s labelled “Phone”. If you asked what the icon was of, they’d give you a blank stare, because they’ve literally never seen one of these:

… or anything even vaguely like it. All they know is holding little “candybars” up to their ear. In fact, there’s a good chance if you showed them that picture, they would have no idea what it was.

So, what are the icons of tomorrow going to look like? The android “Messages” icon is at least relatively forward looking. The speech bubble metaphor might have some legs, as long as people still read comics:

But honestly, as our tools become more and more “virtual”, it might be getting harder and harder to find visual metaphors that make sense. We’ll have to rely on these historical artifacts, or little birds and other, actual nonsense:

You can skip any/all of the questions, but I would really appreciate the feedback. You can consider it payment for any enjoyment you get out of my posts! It should only take a minute.

Thanks friends!

Anyone have any others?

He’s right that openness will be a big boon to Android, but I’m not convinced this will go down the same way the whole IBM/Macintosh thing went down in the 80s.  Maybe it will, maybe it won’t.  It’s a different time.

I do think, however, that iPhone OS will only be relevant as long as Steve Jobs is.  Apple looks a lot to me like Microsoft did right around the time of Internet Explorer’s rise to prominence.

In 1995 Microsoft was a huge, lumbering, misguided beast.  But Bill Gates, I think, was a genius.  And he was able to ride that ungainly beast into the future, and vanquish his enemies.  His 1995 memo, The Internet Tidal Wave, was incredibly smart.

He was able to see that tidal wave clearly, not because of Microsoft’s power but despite it.  It was his genius as a technologist that gave him that vision.

By comparison, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s current head, is an idiot.  Microsoft is at another crossroads, 15 years later, and Ballmer is correctly trying to turn the tanker.  But his vision lacks clarity.  Where Gates was laser-focused on exactly why and how the web was going to obsolute the desktop, Ballmer is preoccupied with marketing bullshit.  ”The cloud learns and helps you learn, decide and take action” is just the same marketing hype they’ve been feeding us about Bing.  ”The cloud creates opportunities and responsibilities. The cloud wants smarter devices.”  Gee, opportunities!  Smarter!  Sounds great, where do I sign up?

This is not to say that Microsoft won’t continue to be successful.  They’re obviously doing Fine For Now.  Ballmer is a very capable manager.  He’s great at milking cows.  And Microsoft is a very milkful cow.

But without Gates, they will lag further and further behind other players in new arenas.  Web applications, social, mobile, and the next ten years of changes will continue to erode Microsoft’s relevance.

Apple, I think, is where Microsoft was in 1995.  The iPod, iTunes, the iPhone… possibly the iPad… these are prescient advances.  Arguably they are even better bets than Windows 95 and Internet Explorer were. I truly believe Jobs is one of the most visionary technologists we’ve seen in a long time.

But without him, Apple is just a great device company with an unusually good design department.  Apple without Jobs is Microsoft run by Steve Ballmer.  It’s a resource to be milked.  They will continue to put out great mobile devices.  People will line up to buy iPhones.  But the day Jobs retires is the day Apple stops making iPhone-scale departures from its core business and succeeding at them.

Eric S. Raymond, in that essay I mentioned, points out something interesting in passing:

And isn’t it entertaining, boys and girls, how thoroughly Unix won? Both OS X and Android are Unix underneath.

The real reason that Open Source is winning, and will continue to win these platform wars, is that it is not a company.  More specifically, it is not a company dependent on a single visionary leader.  It is an ecosystem of visionary people, all struggling against each other and struggling together.

It is incredibly impressive that people like Gates and Jobs are brilliant enough to go up against an entire ecosystem and win battles.  But in business, as in nature, the ecosystem always wins.

“With this shift came a new political viewpoint: not conservative, necessarily, but oppositional to the prevailing media Establishment led, in Thomson and Baker’s view, by the liberalism of the Times and the Washington Post” ~ A Look Inside the Life of News Corp. Mogul and Raging Septuagenarian Rupert Murdoch

I love the distinction between conservative and oppositional to liberalism, which of course exists on the left as well.  I wish we could all move towards more principled, and less oppositional, stances.

“Something wonderful happened when the Internet broke through a similar logjam in the early 90s. But that’s now a distant memory. A new generation has come of age. The students I work with at NYU were small children when the Web grew out of the ruins of the PC business. They don’t have any memory of what it was like before.”

Some people are too young to remember, or just weren’t into tech at the time, but the 90s were a relatively sad time in the tech world.  Big companies–predominantly Microsoft–had amassed huge amounts of power. Desktop computing had matured as a technology, and these big players were entrenched as gatekeepers in that space.  If you couldn’t build it with Microsoft’s tools, you couldn’t build it.  Many of the industry’s best and brightest stopped pushing boundaries, and we were stuck with the boring, conservative technological updates the big corporations fed to us.

I used to think the stuff Paul Thurrott writes about on WinSuperSite was the epitome of exciting up-and-coming tech.  That’s how bad it was.

Lucky for us the web came along, on the back of the Open Source movement, and changed all that.  It was a new platform where Microsoft didn’t hold the keys, where smart, enterprising folks could build truly revolutionary products without the blessing of the megacorps.  Because of this new opportunity, we have Google and Facebook and Twitter, and this bevy of crazy, new, disruptive technologies that allow totally new ways of using computers.

If we had left things to Microsoft, there is no way you would be carrying an unlimited information resource around in your pocket, connected to your friends and loved ones thousands of miles away, in constant coordination with your social network, passing news and photos and videos around like candy.  No chance.

This glorious, scrappy innovation continues today, within these companies and without.  But frightening new powers are amassing in the halls of Facebook and Google.

But the hearts of men are easily corrupted,
And the ring of power has a will of its own.
It betrayed Isildur to his death
And some things that should not have been forgotten,
were lost.

…

Rumor grew of a shadow in the East,
whispers of a nameless fear.
And the Ring of power perceived:
its time had now come.

The internet gave us developers and our users a great power: freedom from needing to write and run software for Microsoft’s platform.  But just as we gained this power, we gave one up.  We took the responsibility of running our own software and storing our own data and handed it over to companies like Google and Facebook.

I don’t get to decide which applications can run on my internet profile, Facebook does.  I don’t get to decide whether I upgrade my email application, Google does.  I don’t get to decide which applications can see the email addresses of my friends, Facebook does.  I don’t get to decide which applications get access to my news feed, Twitter does.  For now, these companies are generally pretty liberal with allowing us to push this data around.  But in the end, Facebook Giveth, and Facebook Can Taketh Away.  These are freedoms I had and have lost.

Are these few minor limitations the price that we have to pay for the incredible conveniences Google and Facebook have brought us, or are they harbingers of future freedoms these companies will continue to leech away from us?

Time will tell.

The one thing that gives me faith is that the internet has promises that have nothing to do with these companies.  The difficulty and cost associated with creating our own web services is plummeting.  In ten years, you will be able to create your own social network, totally independent of Facebook, in a weekend.  And you’ll be able to host it for you and your friends for pennies a day.

This is the fundamental empowering fact of information technology.  Large companies can control the landscape of today, but the landscape of tomorrow is always open season, and it is advancing like a freight train.  This is what keeps Steve Ballmer and Mark Zuckerberg awake at night.  If Facebook becomes tomorrow’s Microsoft, then we will just build tomorrow’s Facebook.  Like the tech giants of yore, they too can fade into obscurity.

I just hope that this time when we start seeing abuses, it will take only months to route around them.  Not years or decades like it took for us to maneuver around Microsoft.  I don’t want my little heart to have to handle the disappointment of seeing my field falling into another depression like that one.

$8.44 bill → $10 → $2 tip
$20.99 bill → $25 → $5 tip

Remember your times tables.

Step 2: Add on for extras

• If it’s slow (night shift), add extra.
• If most of the customers don’t tip, or don’t tip well (coffee shop, burrito shop), add extra.
• If the bill is small (less than $20), add extra. Does the waiter at the $40 restaurant really deserve 300% more than the waiter at the $10 restaurant?
• Tip at least $1 for every hour you spend there.  If you buy a $10 meal, and sit there with your friends taking up a table for 5 hours, tip $5.
• Every now and then, just throw in an extra $5 for someone.

All of this will cost you maybe a few dollars per week, but it will make the people around you happy, and will bring you good Karma.