There is an insane amount of talk going on in the internet technology world today. By far the most acclaimed technologists are those that are acclaimed writers or video bloggers. For the rest of us, I suppose twitter is a bit helpful to mount meager attempts at getting in the fame game. Everybody is pushing something. A product, a platform, or (my least favorite) a process. Scram, scrum, agile, blech. Whatever happened to people doing things the way that make sense in their unique situation? Making good decisions… Thinking? Do we need to have the world validate our processes? Oh we should be agile? And the best way to do that is by reading books and going to conferences? I don’t think so A-hole.
Here’s the bottom line for me… I may or may not listen to your talk. I may find it interesting, inspiring, or helpful. And I may not. But at the end of the day, I’m going to judge you on your products. Not to sound negative, cuz for a lot of shops this is an ideal outcome. But for a lot of other shops… it’s going to be very exposing. You have your Gary V’s who talk A LOT and it’s a part of the product. Then you have 37signals, who talk a lot and it’s part of their product. But for me, 37signals better start building up the inventory to match it. Less is less guys. Project management software and hammers are not similar.
So I guess I’d better keep this short. The world clearly has a serious need for more/better technology so I’m going to build it. Can we make our products actually speak for themselves? I’m thinking of some big time success stories (Zappos, Google) that have done just that.
