I’ve been thinking about the conflict between marketing and developers for some time, and then yesterday, I read an article by Don Norman about the death of simplicity that goes right to my point. Here’s a snippet:

It appears that marketing won the day. And I suspect marketing was right. Would you pay more money for a washing machine with less controls? In the abstract, maybe. At the store? Probably not.

Notice the question: “pay more money for a washing machine with less controls.” An early reviewer of this paper flagged the sentence as an error: “Didn’t you mean ‘more money’?” the reviewer asked? That question makes my point precisely. If a company spent more money to design and build an appliance that worked so well, so automatically, that all it needed was an on-off switch, people would reject it. “This simple looking thing costs more?” They would complain. “What is that company thinking of? I’ll buy the cheaper one with all those extra features — after all, it’s better, right? And I save money.”

Marketing rules — as it should, for a company that ignores marketing is a company soon out of business. Marketing experts know that purchase decisions are influenced by feature lists, even if the buyers realize they will probably never use most of the features. Even if the features confuse more than they help.

The idea of listening to marketing is a painful one for me, as a product developer. There’s a painful disconnect between what makes the most sense to me and what motivates customers to buy a product.

One of the best examples of designing software that looks good in a brochure is bumping up the number of anything that can be counted. If your competitor’s software can produce 100 different reports and your product can only produce 10 different reports, marketing is going to ask for more reports. It doesn’t matter if your 10 reports are the greatest thing since sliced bread, or that they more coherently present the same information that the competitor’s 100 reports display. To marketing, you’re 90 reports behind in the reports race.

The thing is, as much as it offends me aesthetically, the marketing guy may be right. When a sales rep is trying to sell that product to a customer, that customer will ask where those other 90 reports are, and they will probably dismiss any claims that your 10 reports make those other 90 reports obsolete as hand waving.

I do think that design is the wild card here. If your product is achingly beautiful, then you can jump out of the feature rat race. That’s why the iPod and the Mini and the KitchenAid Mixer are winners. Building products that transcend checklists, enables you to ignore marketing. Good luck with that.

Read this and then read this.

I am on a mailing list with some friends from college, and a year or two ago, someone finally got up the gumption to make a list of everyone’s addresses, anniversaries, birthdays, kids’ names, and so forth. That list took the form of an Excel spreadsheet, which gets emailed around periodically and updated sporadically. Whenever someone needs an address or other information, they generally send an email to the list and someone else coughs up the spreadsheet. It’s an imperfect system.

This morning I imported the document into Google Spreadsheets, and sent an email to my friends letting them know that it’s there and giving them permission to edit it. It will be interesting to see whether the gang takes to the Google spreadsheets version of the document, which has the advantage of being accessible from the web and stored in a central location so that when one person makes a change, everyone can access those changes. My friends are notoriously slow to change when it comes to technology, so we’ll see if Google spreadsheets takes with them.

Google has finally enabled Gmail to fetch mail from other accounts. I use Gmail for a lot of my email, but if you send mail to some of my addresses, it still goes to my own server, and I download it with Thunderbird. Unfortunately, the accounts on that server get about 1000 spam messages a day. About 2/3 of them are filtered on the server by amavis. The rest make it into my inbox, where the Bayesian filter in Thunderbird tries to handle them. Sadly, it fails.

I’m going to configure Gmail to fetch my mail and see if it can do a better job. I get plenty of spam on my Gmail account as well. I have over 4000 spam messages in my Gmail spam folder, which throws away everything over 30 days old. However, Gmail seems to do a much better job than Thunderbird does, as I get less than five spam messages in my Gmail inbox every day.

Note: Actually this is what I’d like to do, but I can’t actually do it right now. I’m not sure why the Mail Fetcher options aren’t available for my Gmail account, but they aren’t, at least not yet. I’ll keep checking.

Last week, over on the link blog, I pointed to a kottke.org blog post that in turn pointed to a New York Times article about email sign-offs. For some reason, that article has been bumping around in my brain since then, because it relates to a topic that has been much on my mind for the past year or two, which has something to do with thoughtfulness.

My first reaction upon reading the article was to think about possible alternative default sign-offs for my email messages that may work better than what I use now. (Usually just my name.) I thought of “Best” or “Regards” or any number of other alternatives, but that’s missing the point. The point of the article, and maybe the point of life, in some ways, is to be more thoughtful. Or at least to be thoughtful about a wider variety of things.

When I’m programming, I put a lot of thought into what I should name things, how my code should be organized, and plenty of other seemingly small details. I can spend days thinking about the right way to design a database or making sure my code is properly idiomatic.

Before reading the article, I thought about how to sign off on email messages for maybe a tenth of a percent of the email messages I send. I’m going to try to raise that percentage significantly, and see how it works out.

I got an email yesterday offering me 1500 bucks if I’d put ten text links to “sponsors” for one year in the sidebar of this site. Lots of other sites have gone this route, so there’s not really any novelty here, other than that I’ve never gotten such an offer, and I never knew exactly what kind of money people were getting for this sort of thing. The arrangement, of course, is straight PageRank farming. The ten links aren’t to actual sponsors, but rather to sites that want to up their PageRank through links from other sites that have already earned their PageRank the hard way (or at least by just being around for a long time).

To make a long story short, I’m not taking the money. I love the Web too much to take money to improve the search engine rankings of spammers.

A wry commentator on office life, he may be, but he should probably reserve his opinions on politics. His assessment of the Presidency:

I doubt Bill Gates is considering a run for president right now, largely because it’s so hard to make a difference from that job.

You’d think that Adams had been living under a rock these past six years. There are several million people in Iraq who I’m sure would be happy to tell him how big a difference George W Bush has made in their lives.