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October 10, 2007

BIF-3: WSJ's Walter Mossberg

Co-host, WSJ columnist -- and Warwick native -- Walter Mossberg, right, is interviewing Jason Fried of 37 Signals, which makes Web-based software for businesses:

-- Basecamp collaboration tool -- messaging, scheduling, calendar.
-- Highrise -- customer relationship management tool that keeps track of conversations and next "things to do."
-- Backpack keep all your notes, photos and files together online

Mossberg compliments the wonderfully named, open-source* Ruby on Rails, a web development framework that helps in writing write web based applications.

"How come most of America is shackled to a piece of crap like Outlook?" asks Mossberg, to much laughter.

He's stealng the show here.

"Outlook was made by a small, smart team at Microsoft-- a combination of a PIM (personal information manager) and email in one product. (It was) sleek and small and clever and it just has become, I think, a sort of mess."

(Walt doesn't like Google's gmail either -- "I don't look to read mail like a conversation.")

He doesn't buy that Web-based software eludes the mess. "Different delivery model, but not a new service model. It's still subject to the pressure of feature creep."

"How do you balance the mantra of simplicity? (Have you tried to buy a clothes dryer lately -- it's like a 747.) ...the demands of a vocal set of customers who want more features?"

Fried: "You have to be Steve Jobs. You have to say no."

Mossberg agrees, quoting Jobs: "I'm prouder of the things we haven't done."

His best line: "People who write open-source sourceware would not know a normal consumer from a bag of Cheetos."

Fried agrees: "Customer experience is not the point of open source software."

*Open source: "Refers to software that is distributed with its source code so that end user organizations and vendors can modify it for their own purposes." The Firefox browser is open source, and most of the extensions written for it come as a result of someone writing a little tool for their own use and releasing it to everyone else.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 11:25 AM | Permalink

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Charles Grams | October 12, 2007 10:51 AM link

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