Status-Q

It is more important to read things with which you disagree than things with which you agree. How else will you broaden your horizons?

Notes:

1. A second form of this law may be phrased thus: It is more important to eat food that you don’t know, than food that you know you like.

2. Quentin’s First Law, for those who may have missed it, states that “The best way to be remembered is to invent a law”

I’ve always tried to maintain a rough balance of reading one book written before my lifetime for every book I read written during my lifetime. And so it is that, having recently finished Mrs Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, I’m moving on to Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters.

Wives and Daughters is wonderful, and is also the basis of a fabulous BBC dramatisation which is every bit as good, I think, as their rather better-known Pride and Prejudice. Having now read the book, I’m very impressed with how well they adapted it for the screen. Highly recommended; if you like P&P, you’ll also like W&D!

Paul Graham’s book is also splendid. I’m currently reading the chapter where he talks about why web-based software is so much nicer to develop than desktop-based software. One point he makes is that traditional desktop software requires the user to be the sysadmin. Web-based software requires the programmer to be the sysadmin. This is better for both of them!

You can hear some conversations with Paul over at IT Conversations.

And another good quote, this time from an interview with Will Shipley:

I started feeling like actual evidence and experience wasn’t as important to Omni as was what was written in management and software books; so I was branded the crazy guy who wanted to ignore all the sage advice of my elders. Time and again our old policies, which had led to our success, were replaced by more conservative policies recommended by ‘experts’.

My feeling was (and is): You don’t adopt the mannerisms of big, successful companies when you’re small, because those mannerisms aren’t what made the companies successful.

They’re actually symptoms of what is killing the company, because it’s become too big. It’s like if you meet an really old, really rich guy covered in liver spots and breathing with an oxygen tank, and you say, “I want to be rich, too, so I’m going to start walking with a cane and I’m going to act crotchety and I’m going to get liver disease.”

The really important thing to remember is that what worked once won’t necessarily work again, and in fact is less likely to work again because it’s been done.

For example, the lesson from the iPod should be, “keep doing good designs and exploring new markets and providing integrated solutions until you hit on something people love,” not, “come out with an MP3 player with a scroll-wheel and you’ll make a zillion dollars.” Because, as we’ve seen, companies that have done the latter have really flopped.