Do less

What I meant to say yesterday regarding reversing a string was of course that the real fun start starts when you want to have a new reversed string that only contains every other word:

>>> s="I am a cat with a tail"
>>> " ".join(s.split()[::-2])
'tail with a I'

37signals is a really cool company that builds clean, efficient, and good looking apps. Their company philosophy can be summarised as "do less". Instead of building 30 features all more complicated than your competitors, build 5 really good features and let your competitors wrestle with the complicated problems. As they write in their book "Getting Real":

Conventional wisdom says that to beat your competitors you need to one-up them. If they have four features, you need five (or 15, or 25). If they're spending x, you need to spend xx. If they have 20, you need 30.

This sort of one-upping Cold War mentality is a dead-end. It's an expensive, defensive, and paranoid way of building products. Defensive, paranoid companies can't think ahead, they can only think behind. They don't lead, they follow.

If you want to build a company that follows, you might as well put down this book now.

So what to do then? The answer is less. Do less than your competitors to beat them. Solve the simple problems and leave the hairy, difficult, nasty problems to everyone else. Instead of oneupping, try one-downing. Instead of outdoing, try underdoing.

We'll cover the concept of less throughout this book, but for starters, less means:

Less features

Less options/preferences

Less people and corporate structure

Less meetings and abstractions

Less promises