He’s found his own path.

He’s come back to me - pushing back on ever single issue I brought up with him yesterday.  Its the perfect blogging experience.  You disagree - you got a platform to disagree with - in public.

And since I was responding to a couple of his posts anyway, what better way to ‘get back’.  Thank god Ross sees that this is just the way the system works and doesn’t take it personally.  My use of sarcasm to suggest that sleeping on the floor at O’Reilly’s offices is a metaphor to simplicity in UI design - was completely picked up by Ross - and smashed to pieces.

Coincidentally the first half of his response was about that very topic - the piling up, over complication and general disarray that many could say my ideas represent.  The hodge-podge, cuisinart everything together and flow it into some mold approach.  The ‘all things for all people’, inclusive ranting that suggests that social networks and blogging tools can all join together at the hip in some whacky, distributed, meshed together world.

This would be as opposed to the “don’t even give them the feature or functionality” approach.  The “let them eat cake”, high minded-ness approach which says “we know what you want, so don’t complain” approach.  One would think that the proper resolve of this conflict - would be to say “each to his own”.  But in fact that’s wrong.

The proper resolve to this conflict is our marketplace and the world of software - as it represents exactly what’s going on when you have many different kinds of people grokking many different kinds of paradigm shifts, new models, break trhough ideas and just plain old regurgatated ideas - all simultaneously.

Ideally all software should adapt to who the person is and adjust its feature set, UI and skinning accordingly.  But this is yet ANOTHER futuruistic, dreamers kind of scenario - and what Ross is bringing up is exactly the challenge every software entreprenuer has today - to balance innovation and pushing the envelope, with easy to use, understand it once you see it - learning curve scenarios.

Everybody wants the best of both.  They want people to sit down and say “Dam - why didn’t I think of that - its so simple and straight forward and powerful at the same time.”  Certainly 37Signals think that’s what they’ve got down pat with Basecamp and Backpack.

But to me when I sit down in front of those excellent pieces of software, I feel “dam - where’s this button, and how could they have NOT put this in?”  That’s because I’m a nerd and I need those advanced features - before I’d ever invest any time or energy into learning that software.  But I’m not normal.

That’s what Ross is talking about when he refers to the disconnect between what people wanted out of Blogrolling versus what its opportunities were - back there 2+ years ago.  And he’s smack on it - correct!  In fact so much so - I’m dam proud of him!

Ross’ instincts (and apparently research) told him “no - this isn’t what people want, so we’re gonna ignore Canter and his wahcky malpropisms.”

So to Ross - I just wanna say this - “we missed our opportunity 2+ years ago.  There are more ahead.  But I can understand why from now on - why you will ONLY build what people want.  I just wanna point out that in 1989 - when they asked Italians would they walk around holding these little boxes - talking into them - 85% said no. 

They were talking about cell phones.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 27th, 2006 at 10:52 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.