Even though Fog Creek, Trello, and Stack Exchange are now three separate companies, they are all running basically the same operating system, based on the original microprocessor architecture known as “making a company where the best developers want to work,” or, in simpler terms, treating people well.
What a great post about a great product and a great outlook on corporate culture. I wish Joel would start blogging regularly again…
In Doomed to Repeat It Paul Ford discusses our obsession with email and to-do list apps, and he makes an interesting point about this form of communication that we all love to hate:
Is there another form of communication besides email where the acknowledged goal is to hide all of the communication? Email has evolved into a weird medium of communication where the best thing you can do is destroy it quickly, as if every email were a rabid bat attacking your face. Yet even the tragically email-burdened still have a weird love for this particular rabid, face-attacking bat. People love to tweet about how overwhelming it all is. They write articles about email bankruptcy and proclaim their inbox zero status. Email is broken, everyone agrees, but it’s the devil we know. Besides, we’re just one app away from happiness. A tremendous amount of human energy goes into propping up the technological and cultural structure of email. It’s too big to fail.
There’s also these two little gems from the article:
Doing the work, responding to the emails—these all suck. But organizing it is sweet anticipatory pleasure.
Working is hard, but thinking about working is pretty fun. The result is the software industry.
And while we’re on the topic of email, here’s something else I’ve noticed recently:
“We’re implementing a new system to reduce our reliance on email.” “Cool, how will I know there’s an update for me?” “You’ll get an email.”
— Rian van der Merwe (@RianVDM) July 15, 2014
As a frequent flyer I started reading Michaeleen Doucleff’s How To Stay Healthy In Flight with great interest, but I cannot get this sentence out of my head:
In 2004, the Environmental Protection Agency found high levels of fecal bacteria in the drinking water of 15 of the 327 planes it tested.
Ummm…
I’m not sure if I should really link to Kids Don’t Care About Cars because there are very few things more annoying than old people pontificating about what “youngsters” like and don’t like. Still, this part did get me thinking:
The basic premise is you’ve got to go. How you get there is irrelevant. Furthermore, the costs of car ownership… the insurance and the gas, never mind the maintenance, none of them appeal to a youngster who believes all costs should be baked in.
I’m not convinced the conclusion that car ownership is a thing of the past is accurate1, even though this is not the first time the argument has been made — see Zipcar, Uber And The Beginning Of Trouble For The Auto Industry. But as an old guy myself, I do see the product opportunities that are created by this idea that how you get places is irrelevant as long as you can get there.
One of my favorite examples of companies taking advantage of this right now is car2go. It’s a network of smart cars that you can pick up anywhere, drive anywhere, and leave anywhere when you’re done. And it’s all done through a smartphone app (or the web — if you’re old and lame of course). No matter how much I think about this, I can’t get over how magical this idea is. What a great way to fill an unmet user need.
In A Corrected History of the Typo Adrienne LaFrance argues that maybe print errors aren’t such a bad thing:
What we’ve lost, in many cases, online, isn’t the integrity of print, but the traceability of its weaknesses. Centuries ago, “errata lists became, paradoxically, markers of well-made books.” The made in “well-made” is a key word here. Mistakes can serve as reminders that books are made at all—the physicality of the process, the “connection between the book going wrong, momentarily, and a sense of the process of production being briefly revealed, or implied,” as Smyth put it in a recent paper about print in Early Modern England. It’s why readers relish newspaper typos—they represent the lifting of a veil, and hint at the human (and that human’s fallibility) on the other end of the object.
If this kind of thing is of interest to you, it reminds me of post I wrote a couple of years ago called The unnecessary fear of digital perfection. It cites a bunch of articles that lament the fact that we don’t let ourselves make mistakes any more.
In Punctuated Equilibrium Joe Pinsker reports on an atrocity that doesn’t get nearly enough press — the death of the apostrophe:
A battle is being waged over the apostrophe, and the names of two of the online factions—the Apostrophe Protection Society and Kill the Apostrophe—suggest an extremism usually reserved for blood, rather than ink or pixels. The former, founded by a retired British copy editor, provides a gentle guide to deploying the apostrophe. “It is indeed a threatened species!” the site warns, a little preciously. The Web site Kill the Apostrophe, meanwhile, argues that the mark “serves only to annoy those who know how it is supposed to be used and to confuse those who dont.”
This important article comes hot on the heels of a report on another alarming trend. A recent poll discovered that 43% of Americans don’t believe in the Oxford comma.
We should all know this by now, but just a reminder — this is why the Oxford comma is important:
Two recent articles about technology and our perception of time make some interesting related points. From the clickbaity (yet surprisingly good) Feeling More Antsy and Irritable Lately? Blame Your Smartphone1:
Our gadgets train us to expect near instantaneous responses to our actions, and we quickly get frustrated and annoyed at even brief delays. I know that my own perception of time has been changed by technology. If I go from using a fast computer or Web connection to using even a slightly slower one, processes that take just a second or two longer—waking the machine from sleep, launching an application, opening a Web page—seem almost intolerably slow. Never before have I been so aware of, and annoyed by, the passage of mere seconds. […]
More interesting is [a recent study of online video viewing’s] finding of a causal link between higher connection speeds and higher abandonment rates. Every time a network gets quicker, we become antsier. As we experience faster flows of information online, we become, in other words, less patient people.
Turns out this phenomenon isn’t new — technology just makes it worse. We’ve always adjusted to our circumstances quickly, and we respond by wanting more. From Elizabeth Kolbert’s No time:
“Most types of material consumption are strongly habit-forming,” Gary Becker and Luis Rayo observe in their contribution to Revisiting Keynes. “After an initial period of excitement, the average consumer grows accustomed to what he has purchased and … rapidly aspires to own the next product in line,” they write. By Becker and Rayo’s account, this insatiability is hardwired into us. Human beings evolved “so that they have reference points that adjust upwards as their circumstances improve.”
The more we have, the more we want. The faster the internet gets, the faster we want it. What can we possibly do with 1000Mbps that we can’t do just as well with 50Mbps? It doesn’t matter. 50Mbps is the standard now. We’re adjusted. And so up we go…
Two articles on the color yellow caught my eye this week.
The first is Object of Interest: The Yellow Card — Rob Walker’s history of the yellow card as it’s used in soccer. In a 1966 World Cup game a referee apparently failed to adequately communicate a penalty warning, which resulted in the birth of the card:
As objects go, it doesn’t look like much. It’s, you know, a yellow card. But when theatrically brandished by an official, almost literally in the face of a player who has done something uncool, it has wild power. It sets off a stadium-full of whistling, and cartoonish arm-flailing from the carded player and his colleagues. A yellow card has real consequences: Possession, a free kick, and the possibility that if the carded competitor blunders again he’ll leave his team understaffed for this match, and will sit out the next. […]
The cards are a such a brilliant solution to the problem of making sure a penalty has been adequately signaled — they transcend language; they’re clear not just to everyone on the field, but in the stadium, or watching on a screen — that it’s hard to imagine the game without them.
The second is Dan Saffer’s ode to a ubiquitous object in cities: The Hidden Genius and Influence of the Traffic Light.
The yellow light is by far the most sophisticated and cognitively challenging part of any traffic light. Red and green lights have had to consider timing, namely: how long should one side of the intersection remain green, the other red. This creates the “capacity” of a signal: how many vehicles can move through on a single change of the light. […]
The yellow light doesn’t really control capacity, but instead creates an ephemeral Zone of Decision around the intersection. When a light turns yellow, nearby drivers have a choice to make, quickly: do I speed up and drive through the yellow light, or do I slow down and stop? Driving instructors will of course always tell you that a yellow light means slow down and prepare to stop, but on the street, that’s not always how it works. Sometimes it really would be more dangerous to stop than to run the yellow. And sometimes those driving instructors are right: running the yellow is a terrible, dangerous idea. How do you know which is which?
So here we have two yellows, the one extremely clear (“I’ve made a huge mistake…”), the other an object of anxiety (“Should I stay or should I go?”). And yet we all know what the color means based on history and context and common understanding. I don’t know why that strikes me as fairly remarkable, but it does.
Also, apropos of nothing, does anyone else remember this?
Ian Bogost wrote a pretty controversial viewpoint on the Net Neutrality fight. He asks, What Do We Save When We Save the Internet? In short, he thinks it might be time to blow the whole thing up and start over, because we haven’t been very responsible with it:
Another day’s work lost to the vapors of reloads, updates, clicks, and comments. Realizing that you are hyperemployed by the cloud, that you are its unpaid intern. Wondering what you’d have accomplished if you had done anything else whatsoever. Knowing that tomorrow will be no different.
Harsh words, but worth a read even just to think about how we spend our time online. Perhaps we have grown a little bit entitled about our access to a medium that we’re mostly using for messaging and the weather, as opposed to improving people’s lives?
Jessica Pressler wrote an article called “Let’s, Like, Demolish Laundry”, and it’s a wickedly funny (and, unfortunately, very accurate) look at the tech world’s obsession with solving First World problems:
We are living in a time of Great Change, and also a time of Not-So-Great Change. The tidal wave of innovation that has swept out from Silicon Valley, transforming the way we communicate, read, shop, and travel, has carried along with it an epic shit-ton of digital flotsam. Looking around at the newly minted billionaires behind the enjoyable but wholly unnecessary Facebook and WhatsApp, Uber and Nest, the brightest minds of a generation, the high test-scorers and mathematically inclined, have taken the knowledge acquired at our most august institutions and applied themselves to solving increasingly minor First World problems. The marketplace of ideas has become one long late-night infomercial. Want a blazer embedded with GPS technology? A Bluetooth-controlled necklace? A hair dryer big enough for your entire body? They can be yours! In the rush to disrupt everything we have ever known, not even the humble crostini has been spared.
Or as Mike Monteiro said, slightly more succinctly:
We used to design ways to get to the moon; now we design ways to never have to get out of bed. You have the power to change that.
Related post on Elezea: Legacy