Daring Fireball: Complex

http://daringfireball.net/2009/04/complex

by dmytton • 17 years ago

76 40 17 years ago

javanix• 17 years ago

Apple is also one of the few companies that comes out with unique hardware. When you can start from your own simple designs it is possible to engineer unique and genuinely more useful hardware (see: the new battery in the 17in Macbook Pro).

Unfortunately, the cost of developing from the base case as described in the article is very high - and reflected in Apple's prices.

jimbokun• 17 years ago

'The “phone” in “iPhone” is much more about ubiquitous always-on wireless TCP/IP networking than it is about the 20th century conception of telephony.'

Recently, my 7 year old son asked me "Dad, can you call people with an iPhone?"

(We don't have one, but he sees the commercials on TV.)

jhawk28• 17 years ago

Creating a simple framework to build on is probably the best way to create a compelling complex product. One can see this pattern in other things such as RoR - Basecamp, XUL - Mozilla, etc. Over time they seem to become more complicated and people move on to other things.

neilc• 17 years ago

Your examples seem about as strangle as Gruber's. The initial releases of RoR, XUL, and Mozilla were not "simple" by any stretch of the imagination (RoR was less complex than XUL/Mozilla, but still much more complex than many other web frameworks).

unalone9• 17 years ago

Simple doesn't mean lacking complexity in terms of code. It means lacking complexity in terms of usage.

Say what you will about Rails, but people using it can develop things pretty incredibly quickly, and there's not an enormous learning curve. That's simplicity.

access_denied• 17 years ago

"It’s not enough just to start simple, you have to start simple with a framework designed for future evolution and growth."

Vi vs Emacs? The former lacked extensibility, so it kept being a "phone". Until the mighty Vim came along...

nickb3• 17 years ago

Initial iPhone was anything but simple! First gen iPhone was YEARS in the making and rests upon decades of Cocoa engineering. Gruber is completely off the mark in that regard and is overplaying his hand. Every company iterates. Even MS iterates and evolves an initial product and you can see that with Windows 7.

There are lots of reasons for success of Apple but the thing he stated isn't one of the major ones. Apple loves to work in vacuum with no user feedback whatsoever since SJ likes to say that 'people don't know what they want until they see it.' To have a truly evolving system, you need to have a user feedback loop and Apple has one of the worst feedback loops in the industry since they almost never act on feedback and when they do, it takes them years.

ashot• 17 years ago

agreed, this is not a good metaphor

cubicle67• 17 years ago

Prior to the unveiling of the iPhone there were a large number of people who attempted to guess what an Apple phone would be like. Loads of high quality art was produced by lots of very talented people.

And guess what? Nobody foresaw anything like what the iPhone ended up being. Most people couldn't get past trying to fit a phone into a click-wheel iPod.

Do you seriously think the iPhone would have been better if Apple had asked people what they wanted?

nickb3• 17 years ago

>Do you seriously think the iPhone would have been better if Apple had asked people what they wanted?

That has nothing to do with the article's argument that Apple's secret is evolution of simple systems.

As for your point, each approach has its virtues. What works for Apple probably won't work for the rest of us. Apple has hundreds of brilliant designers that create three different pixel perfect designs for each piece of new UI. Three different teams (and all brilliant at what they do) working against each other... how many of us can afford something like that?!

I still contend that Gruber's argument about Apple's secret being simplicity and evolution is bullshit. He probably came across Gall's law and decided to spin it into an article about Apple.

wallflower• 17 years ago

As someone who loves design (and is not very good at it): it's interesting how simple the iPhone appears after seeing it - but to design something like it before seeing it is something else...

http://appleiphone.blogspot.com/

http://www.mobilegadgetnews.com/index.php?showtopic=11533

jhy• 17 years ago

Well, it was simple relative to other smart phones. Not simple relative to a phone phone, sure.

nickb3• 17 years ago

Simplicity and sophistication of the UI/UX has nothing to do with the simplicity of the overall system. Underlying system is probably more complex because the UI/UX is simpler.

So maybe Gruber should have said that UI is simpler, but not the iPhone. If iPhone is so simple, why aren't other big companies as successful at creating new phones? Clearly, things are not as simple as some people would make you believe.

Also, a jump from Razr or Palm (for example) to iPhone is much bigger than that of iPhone 1.0 to 3.0.

Had Apple released a Razor-like iPhone and then iterated to iPhone 1.0 system over a year or two, I'd buy Gruber's argument. But iPhone was clearly 'from the future' when Apple presented it and everyone else was scrambling to catch up. So Gruber's argument is not really serious.

10ren7• 17 years ago

The article uses Microsoft as an example of iterating (from Windows 3.0 to Windows 95).

10ren7• 17 years ago

I think Gruber's main point is that it could have been much more complex - people could think of dozens of extras, for both the mac and iPhone. "So where do you draw the line?" he asks. Add everything essential for it to be its basic cool thing, and stop. The features serve one purpose; they aren't an end in themselves. It's a kind of integrity.

Apple went Exupery on the shuffle too, reducing it to the minimal feature-set.

nessence• 17 years ago

"store" simply doesn't exist in this article

sachinag• 17 years ago

If Apple has learned anything with the iPhone, they've learned it from Nintendo's Game Boy strategy.

When the Lynx and Game Gear came out, it had to have a bigger, color screen. It had to have more buttons. It had to have a bigger storage unit.

And yet, Nintendo made calls - we could do these things, but battery life would suffer. And no one can play something that's dead.

And then, when Sony decided to go after the Game Boy Advance with the PSP, Nintendo said "let's make a new device, not a better Game Boy." Even now, I submit only two games get everything out of the hardware: Phantom Hourglass and Chinatown Wars. But things like Nintendogs and Brain Age make such good use of the touch screen - the zigging when the obvious zag was to support more colors, more storage, and more functionality (MP3 playing, Skype support, etc) to compete with the PSP - that they've outsold the PSP 2-to-1. (And let it be said, the PSP is a massive, massive success that no one talks about - you try selling 40 million of anything.)

I'm really excited about the Pre, but if its battery life isn't better than the iPhone's, it'll die and it'll die quickly. Users can live with well-designed compromises.

unalone9• 17 years ago

Nintendo is a terrific company to compare Apple to. They have a similar grasp of the gaming industry that Apple does of the tech world, and it's why they've had such an edge designing. Similar to Apple, they go unexpected directions, and other companies don't seem to get why it is that they surge ahead. They assume it's because of "gimmicks," and add similar gimmicks to their products. Look at how SIXAXIS went compared to the Wiimote and you see something similar to the touch phones that non-Apple companies released to beat the iPhone.

It's worth noting that Nintendo is an outright slaughterhouse in terms of sales. In the top 50 weekly VG sales, they have 18 in-house games. 6 of the top 10 (10 of the top 15) are for Nintendo consoles. Only one other company has a game on the list that's sold 5,000,000 copies. Nintendo has 13. Things like that are why I laugh at people who say the 360 isn't that far behind the Wii, because the Wii is in a universe unto itself.

madh• 17 years ago

I read your post and had to go look up some the numbers. - 28 million 360s sold since 2005 - 50 million Wiis sold since 2006 - Nintendo has sold 2.7 billion games to date

pg• 17 years ago

"How small? How simple?"

We advise startups to launch when they've added a quantum of utility: when there is at least some set of users who would be excited to hear about it, because they can now do something they couldn't do before.

unalone9• 17 years ago

Excitement is a terrific metric.

It's possible to get people involved with a product if they're not excited about it. There's still growth involved. But the difference between that and a project people actively fall in love with is extraordinary.

10ren7• 17 years ago

Yes, making it exciting is more important than making it easy to develop for.

"Excitement" is a benefit, not a feature. This distinction from advertising is obvious, but hard to drive into engineering (even when it's me).

bjclark• 17 years ago

I think this advice matches up really well to one of the things you say in your "5 Founders" essay about Paul Buchheit:

"PB made a point in a talk once that I now mention to every startup we fund: that it's better, initially, to make a small number of users really love you than a large number kind of like you."

boucher2• 17 years ago

Apple doesn't release simple things because they wanted to ship as fast as possible. In fact, I'd say Apple behaves in the opposite fashion. They take as long as necessary to release something intentionally simple. Arguably the iPhone started out as a hugely complex system that needed to be paired down to what was really essential.

10ren7• 17 years ago

For example, they pared down Flash, and therefore YouTube. It seems like a crazy omission, but it hasn't stopped them.

I'd guess they omitted Flash because the iPhone is too low-powered for it to look good; the iPhone needs optimized native apps. Since "looking good" is a huge part of the iPhone experience, it makes (painful) sense to drop that feature. Same for Java.

It seems they couldn't justify omitting Javascript too, but I bet they would have loved to, as it's 78-90 times slower than a desktop iMac: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2007/08/iphone-benchmarks-...

Tichy• 17 years ago

Daring Fireball == glaring fanboyism.

rimantas• 17 years ago

Far from it. Daring Fireball—best writing abbout all things Apple you can find on the net. When I see DF post marked with a star in my RSS reader I know that high quality read waits for me, with some work, thought and insight put into it. Or maybe I am just a DF fanboy…

unalone9• 17 years ago

I'm a DF fanboy and an Apple fanboy. For me fanboyism means realizing that something's good enough to be a fanboy about.

Gruber's a Mac fanboy, but he's also one of the most critical Mac users I know, along with John Siracusa. When Apple does something bad, Gruber is vocal about it. He's still critical of a lot of OS X's interface, and writes about it often.

philwelch• 17 years ago

"The problem with Apple in the 90s was that they stopped doing this. The Mac had a great run from its debut in 1984 through the end of the ’80s, where both the hardware and software improved every year. Then that stopped."

Even that is somewhat misleading. The original Macintosh operating system was designed specifically for singletasking on the original Mac 128k hardware--a design choice that hamstrung Apple for years afterwards, and became the root cause of Apple's need to completely replace their operating system. It's not that Apple gave up on incremental development and started on quixotic missions to the next big thing. It's that the system architecture of the Mac OS was years past its prime and Apple couldn't fix it iteratively anymore.

fleaflicker• 17 years ago

Fleaflicker is evolving using the same idea.

The other advantage to this approach is mental. If I knew how much effort it took to get to this point I would have never started.

Daring Fireball: Complex

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