The Mile High Club: 37signals, fuck yeahs, and productivity stock-art
ryan / Tue, 03 Apr 2007 01:39:00 GMT
I’ve been bemused (and distracted) all day by a little tempest that the ineluctable DHH stirred up in the SVN comments teapot today.
The post was titled You’re not on a fucking plane (and if you are, it doesn’t matter)! The question raised by the article was simple: should web applications really go out of their way to support off-line access, particularly given that most everyone doing real work these days (from cabinet-makers to “thought workers”) is hooked into a big fat bandwidth pipe at home, at work, and in between on a cell phone?
Saying “Fuck Yeah.”
The post encapsulates everything I love about 37signals. As I have written before, their delightful schtick is all about giving businesses the courage to calm down, to ignore the pressure to come off as a credible member of the “enterprise” community when doing so defies your every other intuition, and instead to use a bit of common sense.
In the world of online start-ups and small tech companies, they’re the ones who remind us when the emperor has no clothes, or when we’ve gotten so wrapped up in our own little narratives that we forgot we were naked too.
At the Getting Real workshop, Jason Fried & DHH shared with us their mantra of Done!, and intimated “done” tends to take the form of “fuck yeah” within 37signals. I’ve always loved this tidbit, and we’ve only half tongue-in-cheeckedly adopted it at SHN. Among the many flustered and sanctimonious commenters, my favorite was by one named “whoa,” who said “The title of this post: “you’re not on a fucking plane” is way off brand for you guys.” Notwithstanding how vapid a person you’d have to be to anonymously diss something by calling it “off brand,” I couldn’t imagine anything more to the core of what 37signals represents than what another commenter called the “f-bomb.” The 37signals folks have always argued that you shouldn’t check your humanity at the threshold of your cubicle. People don’t stop being people when they put on a tie. If they do, they stop knowing how to make products that will fit into real people’s lives. The same goes for your language.
Little Sammy Stockart is so Productive
But the broader issue at the heart of this whole acrimonious discussion about whether you need access to your software while on a plane (on the elliptical machine, scaling Everest, on the funicular to Montmartre, etc.) is that companies selling “business” products can’t resist the image of the stock-art “professional”. You know, those people on your online banking site who just look do damn thrilled to be sitting in front of a laptop in a suit reading about their latest finance charges. Or the painfully diverse group of young professionals you see in those de-saturated photos on “B2B” sites pretending to brainstorm up a heap of enterprise solutions.
One of the most salient and ubiquitous of these images is the one of that slick-haired asshole in a monkey suit, who’s often depicted kicking back in business class seat on a plane, one arm up behind his head, maybe chatting on the Sky Phone (which he has patched through his bluetooth headset or something), and all the while dicking around with Lotus notes his Think-pad (the IBM sticker covered with black tape) with his other hand.
You know this guy. The King of the World. The 24 year-old-pretty boy model who somehow manages to be a bit-shot Executive, controlling the universe with his little utility belt of gadgets. It makes you think of Audrey Hepburn’s great line in Sabrina about the tycoon
You press a button and factories go up. Or you pick up a telephone and tankers set out for Persia. Or through a Dictaphone you say, “Buy all of Cleveland and move it to Pittsburgh.” You must be clever.
Companies like Brookstone, Levenger, SkyMall, and PalmOne know that air travelers in particular like to think of themselves as the sort of intrepid, executive, multi-tasking folk we see in these pictures. That’s why you’ll find their productivity and “executive lifestyle” kitsch in Airport concourses and their literature in the seat pocket next to your vomit bag.
Sometimes I think we all secretly want to be that guy who’s so important that if he stops working for 30 minutes it’ll cause a thrombosis on the Hang Seng. But nobody is. I’ve never seen that guy in real life—and I doubt he really exists. Sure, people work on planes. I love to read, brainstorm, write, and even sometimes program on my laptop in flight. But to build an entire software infrastructure around these silly edge cases just so we can think of ourselves as slick road warriors is merely to bow to some marketer’s idea of how real people work. A notion some ad guy invented fifty years ago to sell a Dictaphone.
I’ve bought into this idea myself before. Ever since I was quite young, I’ve been known to lust after a fancy notebook or a swanky phone headset, with dreams of how stylishly productive it’ll make me. (If only I had a space pen in my pocket with me everywhere I went, I could do anything!) But more often than not I’ve learned that my desire for those things grew not out of need, but a misplaced longing to be the guy in the stock-art. (Which I’m happy to say I finally ditched all together.)
Quite simply: people don’t need offline access; they merely want to think of themselves as the sort of people who need offline access.
Subscribe
That’s an interesting opinion. I admit I agree with a lot of what you say. I guess I am a little defensive however because I was on the side of ‘offline’ needs. But it wasn’t because of what you describe as ‘misplaced longing to be the guy in the stock-art’. It was the simple reality of everday work. If my apps had mechanics to provide me data offline as they do online my life at work could be enhanced.
It isn’t that I want to be on a plane doing work. It’s that I want to be at work doing work and not be dependent on connectivity to a data center somewhere.
Nevertheless your point is well taken. I just hope my point could be understood as well.
See I’d disagree with you…
A few years ago I travelled back and forth between the UK and US about ten times a year.
Being able to work on the plane as sometimes invaluable… How can I could I catch up with my email if it was only available online?
For what it’s worth, I love working on planes. It’s the isolation from online distraction that I really love.
Whenever I need something to support that work, I print it out. One of my favorite things in the world is to unhook for a few hours, print out those blog articles I’ve been meaning to read for weeks, and go sit in a cafe or a park and read and make free-form notes on paper.
I’m not saying we don’t all feel the need to be doing valuable work when we have spare time. I’m just saying that technological back-flips to support every kind of work in every kind of circumstance is a bit much.
If you can’t remember your to-dos, print them out. If you come up with new ones, pencil them in and enter them next time you’re wired in to the app.
Every day, I find myself rediscovering the elegance and value of paper and pencil, for helping me think and capture ideas. Web apps, on the other hand, are best at allowing us to visualize and group our data in interesting and useful ways, and to share that data with others. The latter has tremendous (and I would argue essential) value, but it’s just a part of work; it isn’t work itself. I would argue that the scribble in your notebook, or detatched from the internet, type in your off-line email or your TextMate window is far closer to real work than the (nonetheless very important) stuff you do while working in your web app.
Most of the (reasonable) objections to DHH’s view weren’t about a need for 24/7 access, they were about a use case for ocassionally connected applications in places where network cover is patchy.
I’ve just been in Uganda for a month and met lots of internet savvy people, but bandwidth is expensive and connections unreliable. For economic and geographic reasons this isn’t going to change any time soon (if ever in some areas) so the occasionally connected web app could be genuinely useful.
Mind you, I doubt helping the developing world is Adobe’s motive for Apollo ;)
“Quite simply: people don’t need offline access; they merely want to think of themselves as the sort of people who need offline access.”
The irony here is that many of the those who disagreed with the post were arguing that often the person who needs offline access is quite the opposite of the self-aggrandizing yuppie professional you describe; he is the humble business person trying to do his job effectively in rural Ohio or the college student trying to get access to her contacts while taking the Greyhound bus back home to Maine.
The original post broadly stated that offline apps are unnecessary because everyone is too connected. It just isn’t true for those who do not live in big cities or spend large amounts of money on wireless data plans. Implying that you’ve got to be in a “dark hole” somewhere not to have wireless broadband at your disposal is just flat out ignorant.
I grew up (and in fact started my technology company) in a rural town in West Virginia and we manged just fine with our humble internet connectivity.
It’s all well and good to talk about grandma out in the wheatfield being able to organize the family photos with an off-line Flickr, or Ugandan peasants getting good regular access to their Tadalists. It sounds so good that you forget the spurious nature of the argument underlying those wholesome-sounding examples.
The fact is, they have Sprint PCS and Verizon in Ohio and on Greyhound buses too. In those cases, I think mobile access will do just fine. In the case of the peasants, I think the riposte is obvious.
How many college students do you know with Sprint PCS data plans?
This is the flaw with making overbroad statements. If DHH had simply qualified his statement (at least to a particular sector), I don’t think most people would have been annoyed enough to even comment. But the guy’s post was so broad as to encompass even random college students who’d like to be able to look at their Facebook contacts. As I mentioned in my response to the original post, the guys at 37signals usually qualify their opinions with “let other people solve that problem” or “this is how we do things.” This post was an anomaly.
And by the way, I bootstrapped my technology business in rural Pennsylvania (not all that far from where you did, probably). Sure, I could have bought a $400 device and spent hundreds more in data fees, but I had other things to spend that money on like, you know, insurance and servers. And there was no city-wide wifi where I was. So off-line access would have been a godsend. I don’t think my situation was particularly unique.
I don’t disagree with you or DHH, but I do think that they do deserve some attention – they’re making web applications more useful and powerful. I really am referring to the one screenshot of Joyent Slingshot dragging-and-dropping something. To me, that is bringing Ruby on Rails to the desktop, which can only be a good thing.
Howdy JD,
I actually think Slingshot is kind of an interesting idea. I even thought about it briefly for a new app I’m working on right now. But then I noticed that they want to charge money for it. Charging for platforms and frameworks ain’t cool.
If they open-sourced it and just happened to provide the best support and hosting for it, they’d still make plenty of money. Maybe even more, because it would be more widely adopted (and cared about.)
The main theme of my post was (as usual) that people should calm down. (You should take a look at how ridiculous the comments on SvN got.) That, and to suggest that maybe we should ask ourselves where this need to be totally connected all the time to our shared data in all circumstances really comes from: utility or semi-frivolous desire?
Web apps are better for some problems, and desktop apps are better for others. That line is always blurring, but my feeling is that we’re heading towards the desktop applications being reasonably well replaced by online ones (e.g., gmail) and away from the traditional desktop app. (I’m a GTD freak, for example, and I actually like Tada lists better than any desktop list-manager I’ve ever used—including Kinkless GTD.)
I could obviously turn out to be wrong. But my intuition is that if we care about where we’re going to be in the near future, spending time worrying about offline syncing of our data models is probably wasted effort. (Still, if Joyent decided to give it to us for free, more power to them.)
Ryan, I agree about the gradual move from desktop to online apps being a good thing. There’s still one huge problem with online only apps in my view:
Every time you lose network access you lose your save button.
Is that something you’re comfortable with? Do you trust every wireless connection, telco, web hosting company and service provider to guarantee their uptime? I sure as hell don’t.
This isn’t about yuppies on planes or peasants in Uganda. It’s about the fact that as online apps get more mission critical, you need local storage as a fallback. It’s common sense and long overdue IMHO.
Yeah, the pricing model is not something I am interested in. But maybe the pricing model is free. We don’t know that yet. (Unlikely, though.)
As far as offline syncing, I agree, it is mostly wasted effort. When it comes to Slingshot, they didn’t design it for planes. Well, that’s what they’re saying now. :) As far as the other things out there (which I am not even sure what those are at the moment), well, that is their decision.
Back to Slingshot… as a developer and entrepreneur, its neat to think of having the ability to write a desktop application knowing only Rails. I don’t know how to write a Cocoa application, and one of the big things that I like about web development is my ability to make useful things in it without knowing Cocoa or C# or Swing/AWT/Java-framework-of-choice (Java is actually the only success I’ve ever had doing any desktop application).
Even in an “offline” usage scenario, I can’t deny that Slingshot is cool shit. And maybe that is why it is getting the attention that it is. True, the usefulness might be limited, but you have to admit it is pretty neat software.
Yea, the comments on SvN are insane as always. I can definitely see this one going off the deep-end, I don’t have the patience to read through them all. ;)
37signals, 37signals. Fuck Yeah!
America, America, Fuck Yeah!
After reading the article decrying the ambitious gotta-be-somebody attitude, its ironic the next thing on the page is effectively a ‘vote for me!’ button. ;-)
Hi Sandy. Good point. I just took those Reddit links off the blog. Thanks for reminding me that I’d been meaning to do this.
Reddit is so late 2006.
How about you’d like to get your work done while on a plane so you can enjoy the city you’re flying to for a while.
This post > A breath of fresh air.
I have no dog in this race, but I love your writing. The line about the online banking photos—hilarious.
Good writing beats connectivity any day.
I travel a lot for work, not really by choice. If I can’t work productively on a plane, I’m f—-ed.
BTW it’s not b/c I’m important- the important guys are the decision-makers who sit in business class and take a nap. It’s the guys who provide information to the decisionmakers who are the grinders. It is not glamorous work but it is necessary and it takes frickin time.
And I won’t even get into the latency issues that are critical for many types of applications- what online app allows me to visualize and interact with data like, e.g. Tableau? or R?
I love web applications, but I love the prospect of hybrid applications even more. Maybe I’m some crazy edge case, but I know a lot of people like me.
As a subscriber to 37signals suite (the whole damn kit) I’m bemused to say the least.
There is a use for offline web apps… how about when you decide that you need to take your servers down for a few hours. Nobody would deny you the need to do this, but wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t all have to take a break from using your incredible web apps just because you need to.
Your post is amusing, but it shows the danger of getting so hung up in your own rhetoric that you drive right by other answers. Offline webapps have a place and it is coming.
On the positive side, you made me chuckle.