The myth of simplicity…

I note 37 Signals have a CRM product called Highrise in production. I’m a great fan of the 37 Signals blog which you can find here. Though I haven’t seen Highrise, and I certainly will be looking at it, I have a few alarm bells ringing. Yes, the premise sounds good. We all want really simple intuitive software. And the notion that 80% of the users use 20% of the functionality rings true. However there’s just one flaw about the 80/20 rule in this respect which Joel Spolsky points out in his article ‘Strategy letter IV: Bloatware and the 80/20 myth’, and, as he is considerably more eloquent than I, I’ll quote fairly extensively:

“A lot of software developers are seduced by the old ‘80/20’ rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.

“Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features. In the last 10 years I have probably heard of dozens of companies who, determined not to learn from each other, tried to release ‘lite’ word processors that only implement 20% of the features. This story is as old as the PC. Most of the time, what happens is that they give their program to a journalist to review, and the journalist reviews it by writing their review using the new word processor, and then the journalist tries to find the ‘word count’ feature which they need because most journalists have precise word count requirements, and it’s not there, because it’s in the ‘80% that nobody uses,’ and the journalist ends up writing a story that attempts to claim simultaneously that lite programs are good, bloat is bad, and I can’t use this damn thing ‘cause it won’t count my words.”

From my own experience of several hundred CRM implementations, I can think of no, and I mean no implementations, that I worked on where the out of the box package met the requirement without needing at least some additional development and customization. And since this was with fully featured rather than ‘lite’ software, I can’t help feeling a certain level of skepticism that 37 Signals can take a nice concept and apply it in a practical way. That said, I’m more than happy to be convinced.

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