Why is 37signals so arrogant?
jnd.org
jnd.org
Besides that, 37signals continues to grow and be successful, and apparently something like 92% of their users are really happy with them. So, arrogant or not, they must be providing something those users want, which by Norman's own standards is "essential for business success".
As much as I like Don Norman and dislike the tone and style of writing at 37s, this seems more like a reaction to being criticized than a well-thought article. It looks like he was reaching for any reason to be able to foretell their doomed future, even if that meant taking statements out of context and ignoring salient facts.
This discussion is a good example - here we are talking about them, and probably referring a few users to them in the process.
They know they aren't for everyone, they're just betting that there are enough people out there that like them to be very successful. So far, it seems they're right.
But honestly, I think he is blogging just to see himself type. Both 37signals and the author aim to "make something people want", but they approach that problem with different philosophies. The author acknowledges that the 37signals philosophy is successful at making simple things for people with simple needs, a valid market niche.
The 37signals attitude is not "a symbol of eventual failure" as long as they can continue to make things people want. By focusing on his customer feedback, I'm assuming Don Norman can also be successful. There is no One Right Answer, and it riles me to no end when people insist that there is. In fact, these approaches aren't even mutually exclusive. Does Don Norman honestly believe that 37signals NEVER reads customer feedback and NEVER does any usability studies?
Paul Graham insists that a startup should not focus on revenues, but Viaweb did in fact sell a service and was profitable. Should he then write angry blogposts condemning his past self for "doing it wrong"? Should he yell that young Paul Graham is "bound to fail"?
The only thing that I learned from this article is that I never want to work for Don Norman. He should have a nice cup of tea, reflect, and then delete this blog post.
Their thinking is that they know themselves and what they want, so they seek to satisfy their needs. If they tried to satisfy other people's needs – needs they don't have or understand – how will they know how to succeed?
Companies do that, yes. Apple is doing it by adding enterprise features to the iPhone – I'm not sure Apple gets the enterprise culture, and Apple employees probably don't use Microsoft Entourage, but they're adding enterprise features to satisfy a customer that isn't them.
37signals has chosen not to do that. And I think that's a choice they can make. I also don't find anything inherently wrong with arrogance.
Norman's article seems contradictory. He says at the beginning that simplicity is bad, but says customers complain about complexity, then he highlights Southwest Airlines refusal to add requested features as a good thing – but 37signals is bad because they don't add requested features.
I love my Backpack. I've enjoyed using Writeboard in the past. Ironically, I feel like Norman's saying I'm dumb for being satisfied with these tools.
Norman's post reminds me of designers complaining about the success of MySpace. "It's so poorly designed, it's success must be a fluke! If people only saw a well designed option they would abandon MySpace." Here Norman is saying 37signals doesn't deserve success because they aren't doing things the way he's familiar with.
I don't think that's true. I think the correct statement is:
"It's not that 37signals writes software for themselves and no one else: they write it for themselves and people WHO HAPPEN TO BE like them."
There's a difference.
I think you are utterly misunderstanding Norman. He's not saying you're dumb for using those tools-- he's saying that 37s is dumb for not trying to understand and adapt to their customers. (Incidentally, is exactly what Apple is doing with the SDK and Enterprise features)
Because of their arrogance, they are leaving money, customers, and customer happiness "on the table". No harm in that-- they're rich and have enough happy customers...
You assume that trying to please a completely different type of customer doesn't alienate your current customers.
What if Apple added half the features of Final Cut Pro to the next iMovie, or if Microsoft made Windows Movie Maker nearly as complicated as Adobe Premiere? The advanced video editors would rejoice, but the people with simpler needs would be left out in the cold or have to wade through all the new modes and settings they didn't have to worry about before. The old users would be less satisfied. And the pledged new users would likely still be unsatisfied because they're expects and eventually push the limits of whatever software they choose to use.
And don't you think 37signals would have to raise their price if they started making their software more "advanced"?
It's like complaining that an apartment complex should radically improve their apartments with tiled kitchen areas, more bedrooms, and individual laundry rooms – because that's what you want. But that apartment complex may just be trying to serve people looking for moderately priced places to live.
If so, my complaint goes back a couple of years - when someone on my team suggested using Basecamp for managing our web site projects.
Without too much thought, we signed up and began to use it. To pay for it, I used my personal credit card. Of course, that meant I had to expense it.
To give you some perspective, the expense system at our 5,000-plus person enterprise heavily weights ass-covering over ease of use, meaning that it takes about 30 minutes, 85 clicks, two printouts, an in-person signature from a superior, and a short jog up the stairs to deposit a hard copy in a finance department inbox, regardless of whether you have one receipt or ten.
I didn't think much of it the first or second month I paid, but by month three, I was thinking, boy, there must be a better way. At least let me prepay for a year of service, I thought - and I looked around the site for just such an option.
Not finding one, I sent an email to the site admin to ask if I could prepay for a year, or preferably even longer.
The reply I got was: "We only bill monthly, sorry."
Thinking that perhaps they hadn't considered the reason I might be asking, I replied and explained just how arduous the expense process was at my organization, and suggested that offering a prepayment option might make it more likely for large enterprises to start using their product.
The following was the reply I got:
"I understand your position, but we are a month-to-month service. Some of the largest companies in the world use Basecamp and gladly pay month-to-month. And the smallest companies in the world love it too."
(No, the answer isn't because you pay them $25 a month.:-)
Then, a lot of people are selfish. If you are doing something they don't like, they'll say you're bad, and if you help them out, they'll say you're good.
My (probably inaccurate) conclusion is the people you piss off will say you're arrogant, and the people that you helped out will say you're self-confident.
Nota bene: this is all pretty tentative. My guesses don't represent my opinions, or those of any startups I start in the future.
From your link: The genetic fallacy is a fallacy of irrelevance where a conclusion is suggested based solely on something or someone's origin rather than its current meaning or context.
Notice how it says solely? There's no solely about this. To consider a root is not to ignore current meaning; one can do both. That's, uh, what dictionaries do.
http://www.fallacyfiles.org/afonedis.html
There's another point. The genetic fallacy refers to historical origin. The root of a word is certainly that, but it's also a piece (the main piece, in fact) of the word as it is now. If your point were correct, then a botanist examining the roots of a plant would also be committing the genetic fallacy. Happily for botanists and etymologists, the genetic fallacy applies to one sense of "root" but not the other.
What this means, of course, is that anyone who exhibits even a shred of self-confidence will probably be accused, by someone somewhere, of being arrogant. The symptoms are largely the same. The difference is one of degree, and of results.
Arrogance is hard to diagnose without the benefit of hindsight. It is now evident that Marc Andreesen was being arrogant when he proclaimed that Netscape would kill the Microsoft desktop. But Linus Torvalds was apparently not being arrogant when he claimed that he could build a better VC system than CVS in less than a month, because... he did.
I don't understand people who say success justifies arrogance (or worse, makes it not-arrogance altogether). Success just shields you from the consequences of your arrogance.
Yes, but whose attitude? That of the "arrogant" person, or that of the person who interprets a certain set of actions and statements as "arrogance"?
The problem is that there's only one (e.g.) Linus Torvalds, but he has thirty thousand critics, of all shapes and sizes and cultures, with a widely varying range of personalities. Some of his critics are bound to have no sense of humor. Some of them are bound to have a tin ear for dialogue. Some of them are bound to be jealous as hell. Some of them are enemies. Some of them are trolls.
Successful douchebags (by whoever's standards) are still douchebags.
Someone is labeled arrogant when they're successful enough that others have to pay attention to them, yet those same people are jealous it's not the other way around.
IMHO, the difference is in attitude. Self-confidence says "I'm OK, I'm pretty good." Arrogance says that, plus "oh, and other people suck."
Also, being pretty good implies being better than others. Whether you praise yourself or dis others, you're still saying you're at a high percentile. Being good or sucky is relative.
I do not think 37signals or Jobs is blinded by their confidence. Though one could easily claim Jobs confidence led to his downfall in 1987. He even explained this at the commencement speech at Stanford (I think).
Look at the evolution of the iPhone-- the SDK and Enterprise features. He essentially did a 180 degree turn on the SDK and embraced a lifelong enemy (MS) to help his customers.
Any examples of 37s ever doing anything like this?
Secondly, I see no evidence whatsoever that Apple "did a 180 degree turn" on the SDK. The plan of waiting over a year to release the SDK is working out great. There are good reasons to have done so -- it strings the hype cycle along (if Apple had released everything at once, what do they do for an encore?), it lets the UI designers get some real-world experience, it shakes out the hardware, etc. Embracing MS is also something Apple has done for years -- MS software is a cornerstone of the Mac's success (Excel was a Mac app first!)
Finally, it's a mistake to equate the actions of 37s, or the Rails community, or Apple with the actions of individuals. No one person runs these things. Even a tiny company like 37s has more than one person, and Apple is a huge company with lots and lots of smart people.
Not here though, it'll be fun to write but boring to read.
As for messaging, I mainly use gtalk or skype. For gtalk you have my contact info, and I think I used the same address for skype.
Also, like my personal mail, I'll only be able to use skype and such when I leave work. So, I won't be online until this coming weekend (hopefully).
Concerning child raising, I saw your conversation with that other guy. While your philosophy does seem like the best, it also seems to me that I can act unreasonably at times. Aristotle pointed this out, people can lack temperance. I think the keyword is akrasia.
Socrates, on the other hand, thought all moral failings were based on ignorance. From what I've noticed, the older people get, the more they lean to the former viewpoint. I'm not sure which view is correct; I like Socrates', but practically I follow Aristotle's.
But you seem to have brought up your own imperfection as a point of possible disagreement. I'm guessing that has more to do with this other issue:
The fundamental issue is that if you can't persuade someone of your ideas, that is a bad reason to force him.
Here your comments about different ways people can be unreasonable are important. If a problem is due to someone's ignorance then it makes sense that good ideas can solve the problem. Ideas clearly are capable of reducing ignorance.
If it's a problem of akrasia, lack of self control, emotions run wild, or solidly entrenched bad ideas, then what to do is less clear. What if the person, adult or child, won't listen to reason? If what he wants isn't based a reasoned decision then why would reason change his mind?
I have some answers to those questions. But first I want to check in to see if you agree so far, and if this is the sort of question you are interested in.
PS FYI I might potentially be able to give a more helpful reply in private; I try to avoid personal comments in public about both myself and others.
Please consider yourself to have no obligations to me, and continue things only if you want to.
In fact, a lot of beliefs on parenting amount to trying to say both, "Children are so ignorant and gullible that they'll believe almost anything. They pick up bad ideas very easily." And, "Children are so stubborn that they never listen to my good ideas." But you can't have it both ways. If a child can pick up ideas causing him to disagree with his parent, there have also been opportunities for him to be persuaded of ideas in agreement with his parent. The parent is blaming his ideas' lack of appeal on the child's stubbornness, while denying the appeal of rival ideas based on the child's gullibility.
Here we have a different issue. We accept (or I do, and I'm clarifying, and if you don't we should probably discuss that) that ignorance is nothing to fear (indeed people face it all the time when exploring a new field.) And we further accept that ideas that are part of a truth seeking process are nothing to fear. Those will be amenable to criticism, improvement, persuasion. But what if a person has thoughts or preferences that are very unreasonable, or not even intended to be reasonable, or not created via a rational process? I will answer each of these cases separately.
'Very unreasonable' ideas are nothing more than ideas that the speaker strongly disagrees with. This isn't actually a comment on whether the process behind them is truth seeking, or whether they are held open to change.
Ideas that aren't intended to be reasonable are harder to address. But people aren't perfectly consistent, so sometimes it doesn't turn out to be much of a problem. Just because someone's philosophy isn't compatible with taking advice for good reasons (they deny their being such thing as truer reasons, say) doesn't mean they won't sometimes take your advice.
But if it is a problem, then we can focus on something else: why doesn't this person intend to be reasonable? He has a bad idea about how to approach life. He has little or mistaken understanding of what approaches will solve his problems, or will be enjoyable. Many people have an idea something like, "arguments are unpleasant" and avoid them. They can be! But there are ways of thinking and arguing which make them pleasant and helpful. One could begin by teaching/explaining those, and then the person could try using reason, find it's a good thing, and then intend to have reasonable ideas and make some effort to hold his ideas open to rational improvement. There is a rational path forward.
(Note for upcoming paragraph: By 'knowledge' I do not mean justified, true belief. What I mean is closer to 'understanding' or 'good ideas'.)
What about ideas that aren't created via a rational process? Well, like what? All knowledge is created via conjectures and criticism, aka evolution. If you actually left out criticism entirely it wouldn't be possible to get anywhere: very bad guesses would run amuck. You might think that some people are a bit like that. But that would underestimate how difficult daily life is. For example, having a conversation about the weather in English requires rational processes. You have to make guesses about whether the other person is talking to you, and what he means to say, and you have to criticize those guesses. If you don't, you won't create knowledge. In particular, you won't create knowledge of what he's trying to communicate. You won't understand and won't be able to reply coherently. Forming your own sentences is also a matter of knowledge creation. You must create knowledge of which words would express your intended meaning (not to mention what intended meanings should be said or not).
These conjectures and refutations that create knowledge mostly take place at a sub-conscious level. But we know they must be taking place or people would not be able to function at all for practical tasks or simple conversations. Whether there is a different way of creating knowledge is another can of worms, which we can discuss if you'd like, but I'll omit it for now.
The reason I went through each case of, "what if a person has thoughts or preferences that are very unreasonable, or not even intended to be reasonable, or not created via a rational process?" separately is that they are actually distinct claims. They are intended to be roughly synonymous descriptions of something, but they aren't. The question contains misconceptions about the types of situations it is intending to describe. When what's going wrong in each situation is understood more precisely, then it's easier to address.
We may still be wondering about those times people seem very unreasonable, agree they were unreasonable afterwards, and do intend to be truth seeking and rational. What could be going on there if they are, at least subconsciously, thinking with rational, knowledge-creating processes?
Part of the answer is that people make mistakes.
Part is that people generally have mistakes in their ideas about what their personality and ideas are. One consequences is that many mistaken ideas they "used to have" are actually still in their personality, but they don't realize it.
Part is memes, which really needs a separate post as well as a note that I think most published ideas about memes are terrible, so this may not be what you expect.
I'll stop here for now. Let me know what you think. No hurry.
PS I've bookmarked this thread and will check periodically unless you want to suggest another approach.
http://dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20080223.h...
They only work 3 days per week? Rails becomes more popular? They become the media darlings of Mars and Venus?
If you design for someone else it is harder to know if building the right thing. Also you are less likely to be enthusiastic about the product and therefore quality will probably suffer.
This attitude doesn't show contempt but courage. The courage to be able to say no and disappoint a few to protect the quality of the product that serves many very well.
I was frustrated by the 37s attitude. "We don't comment on development plans" was a common refrain from their staff. So... no hints on where you're heading or whether there's any plan to add a feature I so desperately need? And the focus on simplicity over suitability to customer needs was also surprising.
"Use it or don't" seems to be their take on customer relations. It's their business and they can run it how they want and, yes, I can think of lots of rationalizations for the way they do things, but they're not a company I want to do business with. Maybe, as an earlier poster wrote, 92% of their customers are happy. I wonder how many potential customers they've lost.
Maybe it's a good thing: It leaves a place in the market for a better product, and maybe a better company.
There's lots not to like about their attitude (look how they handled their last outage), but we're still customers.
I've never seen a more obvious troll.
(I'm assuming it was killed automatically so humans don't have to take the time to moderate all his comments.)
We decided against doing it because we estimated it would be too difficult to market our products, regardless if they are superior to their competitors, because of the target market. Although our plan was selling actual software, in a pre-web technologies world. How 37signals has been successful in doing that is quite impressive. That gives them the right to be arrogant in my opinion.
Now whether or not it is going to help or hurt their sales is an issue that needs to be addressed. Just because they CAN be arrogant doesn't mean they should. But if they are trying to start some 'beef' to get some PR going and its working, then kudos.
Don Norman with the zinger!
Perhaps the perceived arrogance is that this model probably doesn't work for all industries, and the 37 signals guys are sure... well, loud, about how great their model is.
If the actual results of 37 signals' philosophies are bad, the market is the judge, and so far, the market seems to be saying "nice work."
Attitudes aside, it's great that they are successful.I understand the concept of forced scarcity through limited features and staffing, but I don't agree with their attitude with their customers.
Sure, 92% of their customers are happy with them, they provide a month to month service, the unhappy ones left long ago.
That said, the best of luck to them.
Is he trying to be ironic here?
Vote accordingly.
But, he's contradicting himself here.
"But I would prefer someone who designed software for other people. If you want a hobby, fine, indulge yourself."
...
"Use Southwest Airlines as the model ... It is not because they ignore their customers. On the contrary, it is because they understood that their customers had a much more critical need."
...
That's exactly it. 37signals isn't trying to ignore their customers. They're keeping apps simple because feature bloat is to web applications what reserved seating is to Southwest Airlines.
I am at a loss to explain why Don doesn't see this.
As if ROR were not "a brilliant success."
He looked "arrogant" up in the dictionary? I mean, he said something like, "What duh heck is dat dey keep calling me...arrogamunt...arogint", and then reached for his well-worn copy of Webster's Dictionary of Words I Should Already Know as a Functioning Adult...
(???)
This helps explain the calorie-free content of his blog.
Well, that's who I'm referring to.
For example, the word "irony" has a more nuanced definition than you might think. It can be either: saying something but meaning the opposite, something happening when you thought/expected something else would happen, or its use in theatre when things are clear to an audience but not clear to the characters.
I'm sure there are plenty of other examples, but looking up a word and thinking carefully about its meaning is just good writing.
Its also an easy way to start an article. High schoolers do that a lot at valedictorian speeches. ;P
I don't care if he's arrogant, for what it's worth. My problem is that he is a dispenser of humdrum truisms and humdrum falsehoods that mysteriously result in adulation.