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I have a lot of respect for Jason, his company, and his contributions. However, the idea that all software should be pruned to the essentials does not work in

I have a lot of respect for Jason, his company, and his contributions. However, the idea that all software should be pruned to the essentials does not work in all cases. Simple software does not always scale at the enterprise level. What I mean by that is that resisting a commonly requested feature for Basecamp means that maybe 5000 of your x-million customers have a problem and need a workaround 5 times a day - 25000 workarounds, but only 5 times per company per day. If you resist a feature for Massive Company 1, then they have to execute a workaround 700,000 times per day. That doesn't scale. Then, if you resist feature 2 for Massive Company 2, they have to execute a workaround 600,000 times a day. So, software aimed at the enterprise gets bloated and terrible to use. However, this leaves a gap at the bottom for those who can choose a good minimal feature set to exploit. We should not condemn them.

dasil003 16y ago
The trickiest part of enterprise software is requirement gathering. You basically have a situation where no single individual has a detailed enough picture of operations in order to distill requirements down to the essentials. The 37signals philosophy could certainly be applied to some extent if the key people had the right training and the appreciation for the complexity costs of software, but the particular challenges of doing this in the enterprise, and fraught with obstacles which 37signals wisely chooses to avoid by their very business model. And what percentage of stakeholders in a large enterprise have anything approaching the usability or complexity sense of the average 37signals employee? Certainly everyone creating software should be aware of what 37signals has to say, but they don't actually offer any insight on the truly hard problems of enterprise software. They choose not to solve those problems, but it doesn't mean they aren't real.
sp4rki 16y ago
It's not that all software should be straight forward, simple, and as you say 'pruned to the essentials'. It's not a case of simple, it's a case of as simple as it can be. If your product or app or whatever needs to be more complicated because of some business need, then it should be more complicated, but there's a point where more features can be too much and it will decrease the quality of the software. Again, it's not 'keep it simple stupid', it's more like 'keep it as simple as you can while satisfying your requirements'.
tjogin 16y ago
My observation is that enterprise software usually sucks, though not for a lack of features. Usually it has to do with extraordinarily poor useability and massive amounts of clutter, due to featuritis (needing to meet the demands of all those Massive Companies).

dasil003 16y ago

The trickiest part of enterprise software is requirement gathering. You basically have a situation where no single individual has a detailed enough picture of operations in order to distill requirements down to the essentials. The 37signals philosophy could certainly be applied to some extent if the key people had the right training and the appreciation for the complexity costs of software, but the particular challenges of doing this in the enterprise, and fraught with obstacles which 37signals wisely chooses to avoid by their very business model. And what percentage of stakeholders in a large enterprise have anything approaching the usability or complexity sense of the average 37signals employee? Certainly everyone creating software should be aware of what 37signals has to say, but they don't actually offer any insight on the truly hard problems of enterprise software. They choose not to solve those problems, but it doesn't mean they aren't real.

sp4rki 16y ago

It's not that all software should be straight forward, simple, and as you say 'pruned to the essentials'. It's not a case of simple, it's a case of as simple as it can be. If your product or app or whatever needs to be more complicated because of some business need, then it should be more complicated, but there's a point where more features can be too much and it will decrease the quality of the software. Again, it's not 'keep it simple stupid', it's more like 'keep it as simple as you can while satisfying your requirements'.

tjogin 16y ago

My observation is that enterprise software usually sucks, though not for a lack of features. Usually it has to do with extraordinarily poor useability and massive amounts of clutter, due to featuritis (needing to meet the demands of all those Massive Companies).