Marcelo Calbucci

    First of all, MG Siegler has joined TechCrunch a few weeks ago and he’s by far the best writer TC has ever had. He actually brought back my interest on reading TC after so many bad writers were ruin it (more on that on a future blog post). But MG has a piece on how startups must keep their product simple that I disagree on many levels.

    I don’t disagree that simple is good, as long as it gets the job done. And this whole talk about KISS is much easier said than done.

    When MG Siegler mentions Twitter, Atebits, Instapaper and others he’s talking about single purpose services. Same thing as Flickr, YouTube or Google search. Multi-purpose products like Facebook, Gmail, Outlook, Windows, etc., are much, much harder to keep it simple.

    The “KISS” meme keeps coming back every 6 months or so because some blogger somewhere was presented with a new startup product that should have been simpler, but it’s not. Or he (or she) try to do something on a service they use and can’t figure out how. Then they pile on with examples of successful services that kept it simple (I’m surprised he didn’t mentioned 37Signals on his post).

    Then, I come and talk about single-purpose (easy to make it simple) and multi-purpose (hard to make it simple) and I top it all off with a list of products that are not easy to use, not simple, yet they are huge winners, which includes: Windows, Office, MacOS, Linux, Ruby, C#, eBay, Facebook, MySpace, Photoshop, Typepad, etc.

    Dear Facebook, I don't mind so much the new redesign (I actually like it), but I'd like you to collapse all the updates from individuals into some kind of thread. The problem is that 2-3 of my 'friends' make 15 updates at a time and the ruin the experience for me because they are so much 'on my face'. I don't want to 'hide' them, since I do want to know what's going on on their lives, but I need a dial to slow it down. You can do it two ways: Only display 1 update per person (the latest) and have a "more from this person", or make each person a thread and list all the updates below him/her. The first updated being expanded and all consecutive updates collapsed.

    Dear GMail, stop saving empty drafts. If there is no one on the TO/CC line, no subject line and no content on the body, feel free to discard that message automatically. For the record, spaces (whitespace) is the same as no content. You guys are smart. You can do that.

    Thanks all.

    This commercial about a person trying to buy a laptop for less than $1,000 and going for an HP w/ Windows instead of Mac just show how technology companies (big and small alike) don’t get it: it’s not the technology.

    Pretty much all technology companies are founded and ran by technologists and we (yes, I’m a technologist as well) tend to think different. We like numbers. We like to compare things. We like to evaluate options and come up with a formula which once we input the data will give us the definitive answer: Will you buy or rent a house? Will you lease or buy a car? Should you run your own server or use a cloud solution? Should you hire 4 developers in the US or 7 in Asia? That’s how engineers and most business people think.

    Turns out that’s not how customers make purchase decisions. Your customers don’t care if your product has 10,000 or 300,000 lines of code. They don’t care if your software has 2MB or 7MB to download. They don’t care about Windows vs. Linux on the server. They simply don’t care.

    Customers care primarily about their usage of the product. Is it something enjoyable? Do they need it? Do they want it? What color is it? What colors can they chose from? Will I look good in front of my friends if I tell them I’ve been using this product?

    Yes, I’m a wounded technologists by the marketing battles I fought and lost. It’s like I brought a bullet-proof vest, but they came with the torch-throwers. Then I’ve brought the fire-extinguisher and they built a moat, and I build a bridge and they weren’t there.

    Marketing is a battle that most technologists are not prepared to fight. They don’t even know what they don’t know. Most startups are going to suffer (and fail) because of their lack of understanding on how to do marketing. And no matter how much I talk about this, pretty much all entrepreneurs will say they understand the importance of marketing or understand marketing itself.

    Microsoft trying to make the Mac vs. PC fight to be about price is just to show how clueless their marketing department is about what customers are looking for.