Monthly Archives: November 2008

Business

iPhone vs G1: How I picked my new Phone

After enjoying my trusty t-mobile dash for 2 years, the time had finally come to upgrade phones. As I do with most tech decisions, I spent too much time obsessively researching the alternatives out there.

Mainly I was looking for a phone that did email well, supported 3G, full web browsing, and had good task/calendar support. My search led me to two contenders — the much-hyped iPhone and the brand new G1 running the google android OS.

The G1

g1

First, I went and checked out the G1 because I was already a t-mobile customer so that was the path of least resistance. After trying it at the store, here were my initial observations:

  • Form Factor: Due to the slide out keyboard this is really a chunky phone, it was much thicker than my existing t-mobile dash.
  • Google Linkage: This phone is tightly linked to all things google which means it wants to use gmail and google calendaring.
  • No Exchange Support: This hurt the most. I live and die in exchange. I’m sure it will get support soon, but it does not have it right now.
  • Real Keyboard: I like that it has a real keyboard rather than a virtual one. That’s what I was used to with my Dash. The only problem was that the outlaid chin-rest made it hard to hold while typing.
  • Android OS: This was the gem of the G1. The OS had some really nice features like a notifications pane that told you whenever processes finished or email was received.

I actually went into the store planning to buy this and stick with t-mobile, but after trying out the phone I just couldn’t do it. The big deal-breakers for me were the no exchange support and the strong ties to google mail (which I didn’t even use). Not to mention, the clunky design of the phone bothered me.

The iPhone

iphone

After being disillusioned by the G1, I decided to check out the iPhone and possibly switch to AT&T. Here is what I discovered after trying it at the store:

  • Form Factor: Much thinner and sleeker than the G1.
  • Exchange Support: This version had great exchange support.
  • Virtual Keyboard: At first, I had a REALLY hard time typing on this, and it was almost a deal-breaker for me.
  • OS: The OS running on the iphone is simply gorgeous. There’s just no other way to say it. Everything is wonderfully rendered and where you expect it to be. The flicking your finger around the screen is really a great way to navigate and all of the icons just float into place.
  • Task Management: It was missing a good task manager though the calendar was pretty good.

After using the iPhone, I was very impressed. It’s just an extremely intuitive device and the combination of phone, ipod, email and calendar in one device is makes it very compelling. My main issue was that I struggled to type on the virtual keyboard and have never been a huge apple fan, given that I make my living doing Microsoft programming.

The Winner

I went back home and read some reviews on the iPhone keyboard. Most users said that it took time to get used to but they did finally become proficient.  I also found some good 3rd party task managers for the iPhone. That was enough to remove my last few stumbling blocks, so I finally settled on the iPhone.

It’s two weeks later, and I don’t regret it one second. The iPhone has really grown on me as I’ve gotten deeper into it and played with the many apps available. I compare to Tivo in that the UI is just so well done, that it puts so many other devices to shame and makes it a pleasure to use!

It just goes to show that the UI is so important because that’s how the user interacts with the device. If you can make the UI lovely you will make your user enjoy the experience.

For someone that regularly uses the google set of apps (mail, calendar, etc) and who highly values open systems, the G1 might be a stronger candidate. Or maybe a killer app will soon be released for the G1, but we’ll see…In my mind the iPhone has a big head start.

-Bryant

Standard
Business

What We Can Learn from Successful IT Founders

I just finished reading Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston of Y-Combinator. The book consists of Q&A sessions with founders of wildly successful IT companies including (Hotmail, 37Signals, Tivo, Flickr, Gmail, Apple, Adobe, etc). Three key lessons stood out to me:

1) The Team is More Important Than the Product

Many “great” companies don’t know what they’re going to build in the beginning. They just are smart, hard-working people that know they want to build a great company. The product that becomes their big hit, is often not the one they planned to build.  Here are few examples from the book:

  • Flickr started out creating online games and the photo-sharing was just something they built as an add-on to their game
  • 37Signals was a design shop that created basecamp as an internal app to track their projects
  • Paypal was a seller of crypto software for handheld devices. In fact they created something like five different types of products before settling on becoming the transaction middle-man.

2) Build a Customer Base First

This may be specific to internet companies, but many of them started with a plan to build as big a user base as possible before really trying to monetize their product:

  • Fog Creek Software built a huge following from Joel’s widely read blog Joel On Software which turned into the majority of their first customers. 37Signals did much the same thing of transferring readers of their blog into paying customers.
  • Hotmail (which was a 2-person startup that Microsoft bought) focused solely on getting the most people using their system because they knew that the idea of web-based email would catch on and the barrier to building a competing system was very low. So they correctly assumed that if they could build a large user-base then no one could catch them.
  • Hot or Not followed pretty much the same model. Once they released the site, they started to tell all their friends and it went viral. After they had a billion page views it was pretty easy to monetize, and even if someone created a competing site, it didn’t matter because they had all the eyeballs.

3) Don’t Compromise

As a founder or startup many people will tell you that you are crazy to leave a high-paying job and forge into the unknown. Also, if you are creating a truly new product it will by definition seem unrealistic to many others. The founder of blogger.com (which got bought by google) put it best:

I think one of the things that kills great things so often is compromise — letting people talk you out of what your gut is telling you. Not that I don’t value people’s input, but you have to have the strength to ignore it sometimes, too. If you feel really strongly, there might be something to that, and if you see something that other people don’t see, it could be because it’s powerful and different. If everyone agrees, it’s probably because you’re not doing anything original -Evan Williams, founder of blogger.com

-Bryant

Standard
Projects

How Important are Best Practices?

I was listening  to hanselminutes tonight and they were discussing code quality. Jeff Attwood of Stack Overflow and Coding Horror fame was discussing with Scott how they managed their production server. Let me just say that they did not follow what would be called “Best Practices”. Let me highlight a few of the items they discussed regarding StackOverflow.com:

  • They run their Prod Web and Prod DB on the same server
  • They run their Dev site on the same server as prod!
  • They remote desktop into their publicly exposed box!!

Now as jaw-dropping as this is, you have to ask the big question…does it matter if their site solves their business need? Their site is highly successful and probably soon to be the next digg.com for techies.

I think that sometimes we get so worked about following best practices that it slows us down and distracts us from the business at hand. As Jeff described in the podcast, they wanted to get the site out fast and didn’t have a week to set up the ideal set of test cases.

They just coded it. Was it perfect from an architecture perspective?  Definitely not but it solved the problem and they got the site up and their users are none-the-wiser. It works and adds value to their lives (ie – solves the business problem).

At the end of the day, maybe that should be the only metric for success…

-Bryant

Standard