I heard that the guys at 37signals were Tim Ferriss fans, and as a result I was a bit leery of their book ReWork.   I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it.  The book is full of folksy, practical wisdom for small companies and small group leadership.  Much of it is extensible to larger product teams.  I loved the book despite a few claims that are just not true in my mind.

I think there are three great themes throughout the book that make it a must read for executives, product managers, managers and engineers.  The first is that you can always do less.  We all simply try to build too much worthless crap into our products.  As a result costs go up, deadlines are missed, morale tanks and budgets are blown.  Striving to do less is a great idea when developing products.  Small, evolutionary changes beat the big bang in our experience as well.

The second great point is that one should grow profitably and try to avoid taking outside money.  Being the master of your own destiny and beholden to no one except your customer makes work so much more enjoyable than trying to please customers and shareholders.  Cash is king – just make money!  Be profitable.  Don’t measure yourself by employees – measure yourself by profits.

Their third point is the notion of work life balance.  Sleep is essential to creativity and productivity.  Burnout is the enemy of companies, culture and people.  The new world order includes working across geographies, from home, and from different hours that fit the needs of great employees.  I couldn’t agree more.

While I loved the book and could go on about some of their other good points, I believe it’s also important to address a few flaws.  The authors say that learning from mistakes is overrated and cite a HBS/HBR article indicating that successful entrepreneurs have a higher success rate on successive tries at new companies than entrepreneurs who have failed.  I don’t doubt this statistic, but as it applies to learning from failures it does not pass the nonspuriousness test; there are other potential and even more plausible explanations for this statistic.  Success begets success, attracts other people who are likely to be successful, attracts better funding and advice, etc.  Academic research shows that we do in fact learn from failures – as long as they are the “right type” of failures and as long as we process them correctly.  Whether you learn or not is an individual characteristic.  I doubt this is a Stanford vs. Harvard issue – we all know we can find information that backs our points if we look hard enough.  The point is that you can learn a lot from failure – both your failures and the failures of others.

I also do not believe that their wisdom in its totality is extensible to all businesses.  Generally this is true of any “wisdom” – but they would seem to believe that what makes them successful as a business will make everyone successful.  Quite honestly, they are successful at least partially because they are in a market segment that is underserved and simply unattractive to many other companies.  There’s nothing wrong with that – in fact it’s a great business opportunity and I would love to have their business.  But some companies need capital (especially hardware companies) and need larger numbers of employees to capitalize on market opportunities that might otherwise be taken by competitors.  Can these companies be even more successful by employing the 37signals approach?  I believe so.   But the competitive dynamics are different and the 37signals approach needs to be tweeked as a result.

Lastly, I simply do not agree with their view on workaholics.  The authors seem to claim that workaholics are intellectually lazy.  I haven’t found this to be true in all or even most cases.  Some of the smartest people I know work quite a bit and they aren’t intellectually lazy at all.  Some people (like me) who aren’t so smart use commitment to make up for their lack of IQ.  I do agree that we shouldn’t expect people to be workaholics, but to say that they are intellectually lazy seems a bit overboard to me.  No doubt that the authors have had bad experiences with people who are overly committed – or perhaps they simply haven’t seen people who work both hard and smart.

In summary – this is a great and easy book to read.

We’ve heard some very nice comments about how people have used The Art of Scalability such as to convince their teams on the proper approach to scale their system and to share leadership and management ideas with managers. No one has admitted to using it as a door stop…yet at least. We did have someone tell us that they read a page each night before falling to sleep but they didn’t explain whether that was causal or just correlated.

We thought we’d also share a picture of a well used version of the book.

One of my favorite comments was from an individual to whom we sent a copy. He responded that he now had two copies on his bookshelf, one active and the other a hot fail over.  We love the comments, please keep them coming.

We often consult with clients who have storage costs overruns.  These aren’t just the actual cost of storage, which as we all know have been dropping fairly drastically.  Rather, as we outline in our book, it’s all the other costs of storage:  space for the storage, power for the storage, the cost to traverse huge indices and the resulting response time, etc.  Most often these clients have a single solution for their storage needs.  Regardless of the actual value of the data being stored to the business, it goes into a cookie cutter high speed SAN; easy to access – overall costly to maintain on a relative basis.

Our solution to this is simple:  Not all data is created equal.  No, we aren’t going to tell you to “enslave it” but we are going to violate certain constitutional rights and tell you that you should absolutely “profile” it.  TSA be damned.  We are going to borrow a technique from our marketing friends and apply something known as an RFM cube to the data.  RFM stands for recency, frequency and monetization.  Marketing gurus use this technique to make recommendations to people or send special offers to keep high value customers happy or to “re-activate” those who haven’t been active recently.

“Recency” accounts for how recently the data item in question has been accessed.  This might be a file in your storage system or rows within a database.  Frequency speaks to how frequently the data is accessed.  Monetization is the value that specific piece of data has to your business in general.  The three of them help us calculate overall business value and access speeds.  By matching the type of storage to the value of the data in an RFM-like approach, we might have a cube that has very high cost storage mapped to high value data in the upper right and an approach to delete and/or archive data in the bottom left:

The product of our RFM analysis might yield a score for the value of the data overall.  Maybe it’s as simple as a product or maybe you’ll add some magic of your own.  If we plot this on a cost and value curve, we can start matching storage needs to it.  Low value data goes away or goes on low cost systems with slow access times.  If you need to access it, you can always do it offline and email the report or whatever to the requester.  High value systems might go on very fast but relatively costly SSDs or some storage area network equivalent.  We’ve made some mappings below, though the escalation isn’t meant to represent today’s market prices:

Now go save your company some cash!

I’ve been a proud owner of the Kindle DX for about 6 months and the iPad 3G since it’s launch date (see Fish’s review of the iPad here).   Both of these platforms are excellent examples of the advances we can make in usability and interface design when we focus devices on a narrow set of tasks.  We’ve labelled this trend “purpose built design” and these two devices are excellent examples of what we can accomplish in interfaces and usability when we limit the functionality of a device.

Bottom line up front:  If you are just looking for a book reader, you should consider the Kindle or the Kindle DX.  The Kindle has significantly greater battery life (if you turn off the 3G radio when it is not needed) than the iPad; I charge mine about once every 10 days.   The Kindle’s very narrow focus on being an excellent reading interface makes it very simple to use.  Page forward, page back, menu and home buttons get you 90% of what you need.  A built in dictionary helps you look up words and at least on the DX pdfs are easy to read and display. The e-ink technology and no back lighting eliminates eye strain and allows the device to be read easy in direct sunlight.  More importantly, most airlines with which I fly do not make you turn it off on taxiing.  On that note – turning it off does absolutely nothing as the device displays random cover art – take heed airlines – stop asking people to turn off Kindles.  I take novels, my dissertation research papers, client research and my non-fiction research.  While Amazon is trying to extend the functionality of their ereader into general purpose use like interacting with social networking sites, it simply wasn’t meant to do this and the interface is clumsy.  The strength of the interface is its purpose built focus on reading, but this focus limits its abilities to be useful as anything but a reading platform.  3G operation is “free” with no monthly charge for downloading books and you can shop on your computer or the Kindle and get books downloaded to your Kindle in about a minute.

If you want a general purpose media consumption device including movies, books, music, browsing and light computing (word processing), then the iPad wins hands down.  The battery life is enough to last a standard business day and is therefore enough for most domestic or short international flights.  The interface is intuitive and easy to use and the relationship with Netflix rocks.  For light usage, note taking, etc the iPad is a great alternative to a lightweight notebook.  By downloading the Kindle reading application, you can have access to the large library of Kindle books though the device is more power hungry than the Kindle.  3G coverage will cost you $30/month for unlimited usage which is a steal compared to laptop 3G data plans, but is nevertheless expensive compared to Kindle’s free coverage for book downloads.   Airlines will no doubt make you turn your iPad off during takeoffs and landings.  Because the iPad has less of a laser focus on a single interaction like reading, the user interface is a bit more difficult than that of the Kindle.  That said, the folks at Apple are world class at interface design and the touchscreen and limited functionality of the iPad relative to a computer mean that the interface is more intuitive than the typical keyboard and mouse setup.  iPhone users will be up and running in seconds.

If you are only looking for a way to transport books and get easy access to them, get a Kindle.  If you want a computer replacement, or a general purpose media consumption system then choose the iPad.

The 3G iPad arrived a couple days ago and I’ve been playing around with it since.  Here  are my initial impressions of the device.

Aesthetics - As we’ve come to expect from Apple, the device is beautiful.  The aluminum back feels solid and the device is surprisingly heavy. In fact its heavy enough that you’ll want to rest it on your lap or a table periodically. The user interface is, again typical Apple, intuitive and easy to use even for non-Mac people. There is a rather large border around the screen but given that you often want to hold the device you need this space to grasp it without executing commands.  With 1024-by-768-pixel resolution at 132 pixels per inch (ppi) the screen resolution and color are great. They claim “fingerprint-resistant” but I’ve not found that to be the case.

Performance - The speed is snappy for most applications including launching applications such as the iBook or the Kindle reader.  I purchased the 32GB version and at first synched my iTunes library which took up half the available space.  I resynched only my playlists so I could have more room for applications.  Speaking of applications, I’m writing this on Page which works really well for basic word processing tasks. As most Mac users know it does import word documents but has trouble with the Microsoft Office Graphic Object such as those from PowerPoint.  In trying to import and modify the reports that we issue to clients, it deleted our company logo (Apple – are you trying to tell us something?) and screwed up most of the formatting like indentations, etc.  Don’t expect to use this to move Word documents back and forth between systems.

I’m also using a wireless keyboard to type. The onscreen keyboard, when expanded by flipping the screen horizontally, is surpassingly easy to type with. It’s not big enough for me to have proper finger placement on the a-s-d-f & j-k-l-; keys but with a modified finger placement I can type fairly quickly.  The wireless keyboard is nice because it adds just enough space between the keys and tactile resistance to make typing pleasant.  My one pet peeve so far is the lack of an “end” button for quickly moving to the end of the line after I’ve backed up to change a word in the middle of the sentence.  I’m sure there is a way to re-program the function keys for this but I haven’t bothered yet.  The iPad’s battery life seems reasonable, dropping about 10% every 30 minutes of continuous usage. The claim is between 9 – 10 hours depending on whether you are using Wi-Fi or 3G.

Productivity - One of the primary reasons that I purchased the iPad was to consider it for replacement of my laptop when I travel. I’m a bit of a fanatic about ultra-light travel and have used the X-series IBM’s for several years now. Exceeding 150K miles per year in the air and not one to check luggage, space and weight are a premium to me. One of the first applications I downloaded was TouchTerm, an SSH tool.  This works well but realized afterwards that for connection to EC2 I needed the Pro version which supports importing private keys. Another must-have application for me was Skype, which was downloaded, setup and working within minutes.

Network - The one reason I’ve stuck with Blackberry over an iPhone has been the AT&T network. My perception of their service from friends and family is that it drops calls and has much less coverage areas than my Verizon service. Using the iPad with AT&T 3G service for a few days has reinforced my opinion that the network is spotty. While the unlimited data plan for $30 / month is an exceptional bargain, I’d hate to have to rely on it for all my connectivity.

Overall I’m very impressed with the iPad and will likely use it for many of my trips where I don’t require specialized software that can only be run on my laptop.  I also think it’s likely the best device available for young children interacting with computers. Little fingers, a touch screen, and brilliant graphics make for a winning combination.