Campfire Discussion...

Campfire has just been released over at 37 Signals. For those of us who love our IM tools, this is a very cool, yet simple solution. This post by Jason talks about something that Daniel and I discuss nearly daily with our PHOTOtool and Total Control products. 'Bells and Whistles' vs seriously important solutions. We have always leaned toward the simple and important over the 'cool factor' whistle. We want to solve the most important issues as simply as possible and then we add, judiciously, the items that will help get the job done for the majority of our users.

And we get similar questions. Why doesn't the PHOTOtool have the ability to handle EU sales? (Because the tax issues there are horrendous and coding them into the PHOTOtool would bloat the hell out of it and we have not seen much interest from EU nations.) Why doesn't the Total Control site have a cool 'drag and drop' organization tool for the portfolio? (Because the simple numerology sort takes very little resources and we think that our users are smart enough to know that image 25 will display between image 20 and image 30.)

Now... for the heart of this post... What are we doing in our lives that over emhasizes the bells and whistles instead of focusing on a bit more simplicity? Billing systems for photographers have become huge, bloated tools that most photogs use about 10% of. Wouldn't it be nice to have one that did that 10 or 15% really well. On the rare chance you needed and addendum, I'm quite sure you could create something that would work just fine.

I was recently talking with a shooter who had just spent about 60K on new stuff. One of his recent purchases was a lighting system that had more buttons, knobs, switches, meters... sheesh... you would just marvel at this thing. I asked him what they all did and he responded that he didn't know, he just plugged the lamps in and fired it up. Yes... that's what I do with my 26 year old Norman packs.

The most important distraction this all causes is the encumbrance it puts on creativity. Instead of getting out there to market, we wait for yet another 'cool, shiny thing' to come along to dazzle us. Instead of getting a solid website up there and work it to bring in leads, we over examine every product to see if it will deliver something we read about at another site. The question should be, 'will this deliver what I need?'

The rest... just doesn't matter.

It just doesn't matter - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals): "Today I spent a lot of time fielding questions about why we did this or that with Campfire. Why we added certain things, why we left out others, why the UI looks like this and not like that, etc. It’s always a blast to interact with people who are genuinely curious (and not just there to bust balls).

My favorite answer to the “why?” question is always: “Because it just doesn’t matter.” I think that statement embodies what makes a product great. Figuring out what matters and leaving out the rest."