Please read getting real ! and modify your ideas about your work

Please read ASAP or even read its contents online (for free) the book GETTING REAL ! It is one of the most interesting book I have ever read, it seems to deal with software and it does actually but not only. Behind software ideas there is a wonderfull business and marketing book that will help you to work better in your daily life. Keep it simple and have fun creating value for your customers and your company. Let's me share with you some quotes and comments I found on the web :

"Lori Baker-Smithson: Anyone working on a web application including entrepreneurs, designers, programmers, executives, or marketers — will find value and inspiration in this book. Over 500,000 people around the world use these applications to get things done. Now you can find out how they did it and how you can do it too. It's not as hard as you think if you Get Real. I think this was well worth the price of the book and I used the principles in the book to build my site that is devoted to website design and moneymaking ideas.

Massimo Sgrelli: This book is really great. If you have a small company to run day by day, it is the perfect choice to share a mantra and a method with your people. It works. I'm so enthusiastic about it, that I'm contributing a lot in translating it for free.

Chris Burbridge: This book was very helpful to me. I have found that you can readily apply it to any kind of project you might like to create. It is funny, fun, and embodies the spirit it espouses. Keep it simple. Get to the point. Have fun. It is about a way of creating things that keeps work fun, and gets products out fast, where they can be responded to by the actual users, and modified based on their feedback as required. Of all the business and marketing books I have read in the last year, this is one of the top ones. The only thing is: Don't assume it just applies to software! It doesn't.

Don't bother me about process complexity !

All the time, every day, I hear my customer saying about how their own business processes are complex. OK ! Each customer thinks that, when it comes to his own work, there is something special about his job. It is the rule : we have to understand these processes and then we have to show to our customer how our software meets its main requirements in a simple way.
But what struck me a few weeks ago, was to hear the same sentence from a top software manager " Our software are complex because our customer processes are complex" oh I do not agree with that at all ! To my mind we do not have to create complex software but we have to make softwares that allow our customer to transform their so called complicated processes into simple flows. Otherwise, it doesn't worth it.

What do you thingk about this ?

Ordering pizza in the future : a funny video that shows why a lot of software options is getting your customer mad !

Just having an idea of the result provided by too much software features in your application ! At the beginning of this order example, everything sounds OK with the call center system that provides a nice CTI integration and allows the woman agent to know automatically the name and the historical interactions of the customer ! But things went probably bad the day when the pizza shop company management decided to add some more business value to their business buying expensive licences for other vertical solutions like an healthcare software databases preventing their customers from cholesterol risks. Additionally they bought all the files and software databases they could, trying to improve their customers knowledge in order to run more efficiently their up-selling operations... But sometimes the customer want to be better serve and not to be better manipulated, too much knowledge seems suspect and a Big Brother oriented thing - We can have some doubts for instance about the advertising campaigns we would receive by mail (spam) that would be so-called based on the telecoms company knowledge of our private downloads on the Internet-

Why less coding is more ?

As a guy working for a big software company which provides a lot of features for their customers and used to add additional coding for each release i have been thinking for years that the best product was the one with the higher number of features . And i assume that idea is still regarded as belonging to the conventional wisdom.
So in order to overcome competition the companies spend more and more time and money to build big products with many options.
However, i think now that such behavior leads to a dead-end by increasing dramatically both the software price and their implementation complexity. I changed my mind reading the online book "Getting real" from a small company called 37signals and whose team creates simple and focused software. Their philosophy is to build product that do less than the others but that work smarter, allow their customer doing their way and are easier to use.

For 37signal's book less coding is more means :

"Less features

Less options

Less corporate structure

Less meeting and abstractions

Less promises"

Less coding is more because it allows you to be more flexible for quickly changes : you can react and evolve, you can focus on the good ideas and drop the bad ones. You can listen and respond to your customer. You can integrate new technologies now instead of later.
Less coding enables the companies to lower their cost of change. Less coding allows companies to rapidly modify their entire business model: they can change their product, their marketing issues, they can change their priorities and focus, they can make mistakes and fix them. And above all "they can change their minds."

This video with Barry Schwartz, the paradoxe of choice's author is not directly about software but you will find anyway some ideas that are fully applicable to it