Labnotes » Authenticity is the side-effect of being small, Redux

A few clarifications in response to Tara’s post and comments on her post.

When I talk about size and scaling, size is not how many things your produce, how much money you’re making, or how many people are in your community. Small is the distance between the people setting making change, and the people asking for it. Small is the least number of tiers of management and procedures, all of which turn great ideas into bland experiences.

Firefox is small, because the distance between users and developers is zero. You don’t like a feature? Help make it better. Or e-mail someone who can make it better. So do small companies like Opera. You’ll notice that in any company where the CEO responds to their customers in person. Open source has the advantage that it can stay small and scale big.

MySpace is small. Who’s your first friend when you join MySpace? Can you think of a new feature before they go and add it? Can you control your space by changing how it looks?

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Quality, a word that deserves a post of its own, measures how well something meets expectations. It’s easy to scale zero defect quality, but zero defect quality works great with average products. Just ask Toyota.

A small coffee shop is not necessarily better than Starbucks, most of the small coffee shops I know are worse than Starbucks. Starbucks gives you the zero defect quality, it always taste the same. But Starbucks doesn’t give you taste or service quality. That’s because shop owners have to go through training, executive approval, corporate standards and performance reviews. They all have to be the same, they all have to act average.

A good Starbucks shop has more seating space, stays open until late and has easy parking. A good Starbucks shop doesn’t serve better coffee than any other Starbucks shop (it can’t), doesn’t play better music (it can’t), doesn’t respond to what you want it to be (it can’t).

A small coffee shop can do that. A passionate owner that can interact daily with passionate customers. One on one. They can make the experience better without going through layers of red tapes. People don’t like the music? You change it. People like smaller tables? You change it. People prefer darker roast? You add it to the menu. You never have to stop and think “how do I get this though management, and plan a release in 6 months over 1,000 nationwide stores”. You just respond.

And what it gives you is quality that is personal, quality that people can feel but can’t quantify into working procedures and performance reviews. Quality you can’t put in an Excel spreedsheet. That’s the authentic quality, the in-person quality, and that one doesn’t scale.

And I leave it as an excercise to the reader to find out how this is all related to Pinko marketing and “get out of the way”.

_{Image by King Seven.}

Mar 23rd, 2006

Labnotes » Blog Archive » Authenticity is the side-effect of being small

[...] Update: More here and here. [...]

Sterling Camden

One of my clients provides software development tools for a relatively large number of software developers world-wide. Some of my other clients are users of that same toolkit. Quite often, one of my other clients will ask me to implement something for them, and then they’ll say, “Shouldn’t this really be in the toolkit?” Often the answer is “yes, but for them to include it (even if I am the one they get to implement it) will take months for the requirements, implementation, documentation, testing, and release — and it won’t be tailored to your needs because it will be targeted to the developer community as a whole. And that’s assuming you can get them to prioritize it above everything else on their list. I can provide this to you directly in a few days, and it will be exactly what you want.”

Apr 5th, 2006

Linsday Fox

We’re open to all discussions. But any meeting will have to be on the basis of withdrawing the First Job Contract. There have been five one-day public sector strikes in which millions of workers and students took part. An employers group has warned the protests are starting to hurt the economy. No Pasaran!