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Building slow companies

Jason Fried has a great interview on Fast Company:

Look at what the top stories are [on TechCrunch], and they’re all about raising money, how many employees they have, and these are metrics that don’t matter. What matters is: Are you profitable? Are you building something great? Are you taking care of your people? Are you treating your customers well? In the coverage of our industry as a whole, you’ll rarely see stories about treating customers well, about people building a sustainable business.

The story about his business icon is great as well.

NextDraft, and why email is still important

NextDraft is one of my favorite things on the Internet at the moment. It’s a daily newsletter with 10 interesting news stories, written by the brilliant Dave Pell. It also made me like email again, which I didn’t expect to be possible. But it makes sense now that I’ve read this great interview with Dave where he explains why email is still relevant:

Email has always been a great medium. It’s the content of most emails that’s problematic.

Email is still the killer app. It looks great on all your devices and the user experience is always exactly what you’ve come to expect. Look at the rise of Instapaper, Readability, and Pocket. People love plain, glorious, readable text. Email is also a technology that everyone understands, and it’s personal (if someone wants to respond to me, all they have to do is hit reply).

Tweets and status updates flow by and disappear into the black hole that is the Internet of five minutes ago. Interesting links and stories you find in an email newsletter are always right where you left them.

Also check out the NextDraft iPhone app. It’s fantastic.

Apple v Samsung v Patent Law: a tale of conflating arguments

Today’s verdict should not be viewed as a win for Apple, but as a loss for the American consumer. It will lead to fewer choices, less innovation, and potentially higher prices. It is unfortunate that patent law can be manipulated to give one company a monopoly over rectangles with rounded corners, or technology that is being improved every day by Samsung and other companies.

Samsung’s statement in response to their patent case loss

Conflation is the practice of “treating two distinct concepts as if they were one, which produces errors or misunderstandings, as a fusion of distinct subjects tends to obscure analysis of relationships which are emphasized by contrasts.” This is one of the things that’s happening with the Apple v Samsung patent case. Saying that Apple won the case against Samsung because OMG PATENTS ARE BROKEN is conflating two separate arguments.

No one in their right mind is arguing that the current patent system promotes innovation (as it was originally intended). If, for some reason, you are still trying to make this argument, just have a listen to the This American Life episode When Patents Attack! It’s sure to change your mind.

So, we agree that the patent system is broken. But this begs the question: How should Apple (and any other company) go about protecting their intellectual property? Is there another way except through the (yes, broken!) patent system?

Let’s say you have to be somewhere, and the only way to get there is on a crappy gravel road full of potholes. What do you do? Do you say “ah, screw it” and turn around, or do you rent a Land Rover and grit your teeth through the wobbles? “This road is horrible” and “I got to my destination” are not mutually exclusive truths in that scenario. Likewise, it’s completely legitimate to say “The patent system is broken”, and in the same breath, “We were able to stop Samsung from copying us”.

Please, let’s stop conflating these arguments. We have to work to reform the patent system, while we simultaneously work to stop blatant copying. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald said: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

Product discovery: a better way to build products that people love

One of the questions that really interests me is why certain digital products succeed and others fail — even if they look great and are easy to use. What can we learn from the failures to ensure that there are less of them? Is there a process that can help increase the likelihood of success?

The answer to these questions is the focus of my first article for A List Apart, entitled Usable yet Useless: Why Every Business Needs Product Discovery. From the intro:

All around us we see beautiful, empty monuments erected not for their users, but for the people who built them—and the VCs who are scouting them. Even sites and apps that go beyond beauty to usability often fail because they can’t find a big enough market.

Why can’t some interactive products find enough users to be sustainable? Why are there so many failed startups, despite a renewed focus on design? Most importantly, what can we do about it?

It was an absolute pleasure to work with the ALA team. I especially want to thank Sara Boettcher for being such a tough, gracious, and encouraging editor. I learned so much through this process — lessons I’ll take with me in my all my writing going forward.

So if these are questions you struggle with as well, have a look at the article. My hope is that we’ll see more businesses trying out the Product Discovery process as a way to build products that people love.

Good riddance to the free web

Cap Watkins says goodbye to getting stuff for free — and celebrates a better way — in Death of the Free Web:

As a result, the web is becoming more localized, more niche. And what startups are beginning to realize is that they don’t need to be the next Facebook or Twitter or Google to achieve success and to grow a large, sustainable business. What they need to do is create products that connect with these small, but passionate groups of like-minded people. Instead of passionate users making up the minority of a product’s customers, the new goal is to make them the majority from the start. Because those passionate customers, it turns out, create even more passionate customers.

Cap gives some good examples as well. His post argues for a similar approach to what I discussed in Imagining a future without traditional marketing.

(link via @bokardo)

An argument against the innovation argument

I’m trying very hard to understand Samsung’s argument that losing the patent case with Apple is “a loss for the American consumer” and “will lead to fewer choices, less innovation, and potentially higher prices”. It just doesn’t make sense. Jim Dalrymple states the obvious fallacy of this line of thinking in The innovation argument:

If Samsung is forced to stop copying Apple, there is only one option left — innovate. Instead of sitting back and making their phones and tablets look exactly like the iPhone and iPad, Samsung will now have to do some work. The hardware and software will have to be different, unique and innovative.

Marco Arment phrased it slightly differently:

What’s really going to disrupt the iPhone is going to be something completely different, not something that tries so hard to clone the iPhone that it hits Apple’s patents.

Unoriginal manufacturers will need to pay for their unoriginality. The most reasonable course of action, therefore, is to truly innovate and design products that aren’t such close copies.

Apple’s patent victory is a good thing for consumers. We don’t need companies that try to be Apple. But we do need more companies that solve difficult problems in elegant ways.

Dreaming about great things

Kyle Baxter wrote a moving tribute to Neil Armstrong. From One Giant Leap:

Let’s lay awake at night, dreaming up great things, things that could only be dreams now, and let’s build them. It need not be related to space; it could be related to an important advancement with renewable energy, or even with something as comparably small as re-creating education for this new century. But it must be something truly new, groundbreaking and meaningful, something that leaves you with the sheer joy of childhood excitement. Something that will make us better as a people. Let’s dream it, and let’s build it.

We’re going to see a lot of tribute pieces over the next few days. Don’t skip this one.

Pace, slow design, and codependency

Hannah Donovan wrote a great article for A List Apart proposing some solutions to the problems of real-time communication feeds. From Everything in its Right Pace:

We struggle not only to keep up with each other’s data trails, but more importantly, to know which crumbs in those trails are worth picking up, as well as how to find them again later—like when you want to relax on the sofa after a hectic week and you know there must have been a bunch of cool things to listen to or watch that flew by on Twitter, but gosh, where are they now?

Once you’ve read Hannah’s article, also read Michael Angeles’s follow up called Pace, in which he explores how the Slow Movement impacts designers:

I have mostly stopped consuming from the firehose, and seek out the products that deliver a signal that I get more value from, more satisfaction, or that fulfil my basic needs with less fluff and noise. The decision to work with a product and team that follows those ideals is important to me as well. […] The Slow Movement is not just a lifestyle choice, but as designers, we can choose to have an impact on the world based on these ideals.

Last night I joked on Twitter:

It’s only a half-joke though. I don’t want to break up completely with the Internet, but we definitely have a codependent relationship that might require some better pace so we can sort out our issues.

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