{"id":17987,"date":"2013-02-07T08:45:09","date_gmt":"2013-02-07T16:45:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.adobe.com\/jnack\/?p=8546"},"modified":"2013-02-07T08:45:09","modified_gmt":"2013-02-07T16:45:09","slug":"of-drills-holes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/2013\/02\/07\/of-drills-holes\/","title":{"rendered":"Of drills &amp; holes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>While building new apps I keep thinking of the quote attributed to the CEO of Black &amp; Decker: &#8220;People don&#8217;t buy our tools because they want one-inch <em>drills<\/em>. They buy them because they want one-inch <em>holes<\/em>.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>As technologists we think about the guts of things, but customers often favor the simpler thing (Twitter, Mac OS Spotlight) over the more conceptually powerful one (Google Wave, WinFS). My career&#8217;s full of this: advocating general, interesting stuff (e.g. <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.adobe.com\/jnack\/2010\/06\/feedback_please_html5_layers_in_photoshop.html\">HTML layers for Photoshop<\/a>) only to get pantsed by simpler approaches (just tweaks to the existing PS vector tools).<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve <a href=\"http:\/\/37signals.com\/svn\/posts\/600-secrets-to-amazons-success\">heard<\/a> that Amazon starts projects by writing a press release of what features the user will see, then working backwards to check that they&#8217;re building something valuable. We&#8217;d do well to do the same. As Einstein said, &#8220;If you can&#8217;t explain it to a six year old, you don&#8217;t understand it yourself.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>While building new apps I keep thinking of the quote attributed to the CEO of Black &amp; Decker: &#8220;People don&#8217;t buy our tools because they want one-inch drills. They buy them because they want one-inch holes.&#8221; As technologists we think about the guts of things, but customers often favor the simpler thing (Twitter, Mac OS [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17987"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17987\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}