Less is Better
Very interesting interview of Ruby on Rails creator and 37Signals founder David Heinemeier Hansson:
For us, on both the business side and the software side, our approach is simplicity. Simple alone is a huge feature that’s often vastly overlooked. When people compare software products, they often compare checklists of features. In other words, the product that has the longest checklist appears to be the best.
Another piece:
It’s incredibly hard to help people realize that if we added their A, B and C, and everyone else’s D, E and F, they wouldn’t like the software anymore. It wouldn’t be simple any more. In some ways, we are in constant conflict and we just have to be willing to embrace that conflict. On one hand, you get to please users by doing something that’s simple and that doesn’t have a lot of features. On the other hand, we have to constantly push back against the very same people saying, “I want this, I want that, and I want the other thing.”
