Skip to main content

The business of all that is complex

Very recently I have been following Jason Fried's posts on 37signals.com. I am impressed by his minimalist thoughts and the whole idea of customers 'growing out of' and 'growing into' your product. Per Jason, there are just a certain simple features that customers really want and a product company should strive to be the best at those features. But beyond these features, your customers will always have some desires and will keep asking for more features. One should learn to say no to such demands and crowd the Product with features that only a few of your customers will actually use. These frills not only hamper the performance of the product technically, but also make the Product manufacturer waste a lot of effort in the form of product support and other allied activities. This seems to have been working for folks at 37signals.com and many more such companies (SFDC, Flip Video recorders etc.)

I then started thinking of this philosophy in the context of Indian IT companies. How could we go bare and minimal? How could we leverage the stance of simple and minimalist products taken by some of the product Cos. That is when I realised that we couldn't. Simply because we are in the business of complexity. We are here because our customers buy products (ERP / CRM suits which are very very complex) and then ask us to further customize them to meet their desires. With whatever implementations I have done till now, I have realised that no company utilises more than 50% of a product features, yet they want some modifications, bolt-ons to that product to meet their needs. That means the product already comes with a 50% flab. The product company has tried to put in as many features but our customer still wants more.

Our sales therefore is driven by rosy dreams shown to the client. Our requirement compliance sheets are full of compliance's and we can get the products to do anything. Sales pitches are full of 'we can do all this with a little bit of customization'. The customer never thinks about why the feature did not come with the product itself? I don't see (netiher do I want to see) a way out of this as complexity and desires seem to be earning me my daily bread!
Labels:

Comments

Kiran said…
Excellent post. I agree.

Another reason we in Indian IT are wasting man-hours on inconsequential features is that the customer knows how to manipulate us to extract maximum mileage. Enter, "competition".

"Your competing product has this feature ... ... " - that trailing voice is enough to make us go into a shell and not come out till we have introduced that feature in our own product.

And mind you, most of the time, the customer is not even using that feature. Its just a matter of "We're paying, we might as well get this feature included". Just like we, as individuals, think in the case of consumer goods like electornics, automobiles, furniture etc.
8:48 am
Jay said…
http://thevoiceofjay.blogspot.com/2010/06/time-and-peace.html

not related to business but this is 4 u :)
10:19 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

RSS - an answer to the caste discrimination

One of my old post on Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh drew a comment today. It posed a few question about the stand RSS takes on the issues of caste system in our contry. The reader also asked if RSS could be a possible solution. And this, my dear readers in the fuel for this post. Let me put forth some facts about the organisation called RSS right at the beginning. RSS is a social organisation. There is no formal registration and participation is completely voluntary. It is not a political, religious or profit making orgnisation. There are no posts, there are only responsibilities (in fact that what they are called). These facts make it clear that this is a place where entry and exit is pretty easy. There are no costs involved with either. Which means there is no-one who can tell you that he will get you registered with the RSS and do you a favour. RSS is for everyone. In my opinion it is a perfect place where caste ism cannot exist. There are no reservations for a certain community. T...
9 comments
Read more

The oscar for dilemmas

As I was travelling from Goa to Pune in a Bus, I overheard some conversation and could see a lot of dilemma on the face of a fellow passenger. As the story evolved, I could connect with him. Thus it went: They were a couple, he was with his fiance/wife/girlfriend (a non-ma/behen relationship). There was another girl (pretty) who wanted to a lady's seat. She could get it only if this gentleman would give up the company of his travel mate as there were no other female passengers on the bus. I have been through similar situation and have said no and felt guilty about it till the society at large did something equally unjust to me. But this incident in the bus the other day, sparked off some more such dilemmas that I have come across quite often. I thought of having a golden globe of dilemmas; put them on the blog and see which is the most common dilemma. First being the one above, the second dilemma that comes to my mind is of cheating in exams. No No. Me cheating is taboo enough! It ...
2 comments
Read more

A Beginners guide to working from home

I just switched jobs a month ago. Along with other things, my new employer is a huge supporter of working from home. While my previous employer wanted me to be in office for 9 hours 15 minutes (I know, it's a weird number!), now I am pretty much by myself. This is a drastic change in work environment, schedule and methodology. Not just for me, but for my family as well. It has it's merits and demerits though. On the positive side, I save time and money on commute, get freshly cooked lunch, can help my wife with chores and plan my evenings better since I know when I will be home from work(!). On the flip side, there are challenges like being taken for granted, assuming your availability all the time, domestic distractions (kids, food, sleep, guests, salesman, TV etc.), infrastructure issues (electricity, Internet and telephone) and personal lethargy. I badly wanted to overcome the challenges because I began to feel that my productivity while working from home was worse than wh...
6 comments
Read more