In my last post, I talked about how everything can be improved.  I didn't make this distinction at the time, but I implied that I was talking about improving existing features as opposed to creating new ones.  Obviously new features can be great and they can help expand old products, but that's not the same thing as improving on what already exists.

Companies often use new features to trick customers into thinking that they're actually doing something useful.  This works a lot of the time because customers forget what the company is actually supposed to be doing for them in the first place.

I get at least one email per week from Chase Bank telling me about how the rewards structure for my credit card has been improved, or how every time I spend money I might win some sort of prize, or how there's some sort of new concierge service.  I see these emails as a red flag that Chase isn't actually doing anything useful.  They aren't emailing me about how their terrible website has been improved.  They aren't telling me that they worked with Visa and Mastercard to lower processing fees so that more businesses will accept my card.  They haven't figured out a way to combine checking and savings accounts so I can earn interest and pay bills with the same account.

If you're responsible for creating a product, you have to add new features sometimes in order for the product to grow.  Just make sure that the features you add enhance your core functionality rather than distract from it, and make sure you aren't adding features at the expense of improving your existing product.

If you find that your design just doesn't stand out enough, but you're not sure what you can do to fix it, there's an easy trick that you should try out:  Add gradients.  A gradient is a graphical element that fades from one color to another.  For example, here's a gradient that fades from white to black:

If you add subtle gradients to your design, things will look more 3-d and realistic.  Basically, Gradients are to design as auto-tuners (like what T-Pain uses on his vocals) are to music.  If you're not sure what you're doing, just throw some in there and things will look better.

On the right, you'll see some examples of how gradients can be used to spice up common design elements.  You can do things like add the appearance of a shadow, or make things look shiny.  

In real life, nothing is one solid color.  Because of differences in lighting, reflections, and textures, objects all have slight color variations.  When you look at a solid-colored button or navigation bar on a website, it looks weird to you because nothing exists like that in nature.  Adding a slight gradient basically tricks your eyes into believing that the computer screen is somehow more realistic.

I'm not suggesting that things look bad when they're a solid color, they just look different.  If you look at the lessannoyingsoftware.com design, there are very few gradients, so I obviously don't advocate abusing gradients.  My point is that if you're looking for some random bling to catch your audience's attention, gradients are a nice trick.

To drive home my point, here are two different versions of the same login screen.  They are identical except that one uses gradients and the other doesn't.  Which one stands out more?

One of the things that I find interesting about Google is that despite being a huge company, they are remarkably agile in moving into new areas as well as dropping old projects. The latter of these is the one that I actually find more intriguing. Over the past couple of years, Google has basically stopped developing Google Notebook, Google Video, Orkut (a social networking site that you've probably never heard of if you're from the US), and probably plenty more web services with which I'm not familiar. If you've visited Gmail recently from IE6 or Firefox 2, you may have noticed Google Apps is phasing out support for older browsers. Over the past few months or so, they have also transitioned away from Google Gears (a framework for webapps to store data locally to allow offline access) in favor of HTML5. Gears seemed to be a huge part of Google's webapp strategy for a while as they integrated it into almost all of their services, but they seemingly jumped to HTML5 without any major qualms.

So how does this relate to small scale software development? Seeing that even Google feels the need to focus it's resources on the important aspects of it's huge suite of web software emphasizes how important it is for a small company or individual to think carefully about what features are really essential, and which ones are worth forgoing in favor of improving the core experience. Similarly, it's easy to hold on to older technologies even in the face of clearly superior alternatives. If a company as big as Google is able to readily update their technology platforms -- despite significant investment in the previous one -- a smaller company has no excuse to exhibit less agility.

"Google Buzz is just a repackaged combination of Facebook and Twitter"

This criticism seems to suggest that a new products don't have any merit unless they offer never-before-seen features.  Aside from the fact the Google Buzz does have tons of new features, that's not a legitimate criticism anyway.  I absolutely agree that every new product needs to be unique in some way, but that doesn't mean that it needs radical new features.

Toyata didn't invent the car, so why were they (until recently) so much more successful than the companies that actually did invent the car?  Why did Google search beat out Alta Vista and Yahoo?  Why did Netscape lose to Internet Explorer, and why will Internet Explorer lose to Firefox and Chrome?  The companies on the winning side of all these examples had one big thing separating them from the competition: they were better.

Toyata didn't feel the need to put out a five-wheeled car just because Fords have four wheels.  They just made the same types of cars Ford was making, but they did a better job.  Being better can be what makes your company unique.

At Less Annoying Software, we offer a CRM (or "Customer Manager" as we prefer to call it).  Our CRM doesn't have any special features to differentiate it from the competition.  Here's our business plan: "There are a lot of CRMs out there.  Let's make a better one".  It's that simple, and so far it seems to be working.

So when I hear people complain that Google Buzz can't possibly be worthwhile because it's just stealing ideas from Facebook and Twitter, I have to disagree.  What if Google just does a better job than other companies?  Isn't that worth something?

About a year ago, we purchased 32 compute nodes for a new cluster. Even if you've never been in a server room before, you've probably seen one on TV (and in the picture included in this post). Basically, there are a bunch of metal racks lined up next to each other, and the computers are stacked on top of each other inside the racks. The racks in our lab can hold about 40 computers each. Cooled air is blown up from the floor in front of the computers, then pulled over the processors by fans inside the computers.

Anyway, when we bought these computers, the company from whom we purchased them came out to do the installation. As I said, we had purchased 32 machines and had room for 40 machines in the rack, so we were going to have 8 empty slots in the rack. I was a little surprised to see that the team installed the computers with all 8 empty spots placed at the top of the rack. When I asked about this, they told me that installing machines from the floor up is "The Rocks Way" (Rocks is a version of linux designed for high performance computing clusters). When I prodded a little further , they told me that it was done to improve the airflow through the computers: put all the machines as close to the air conditioning as possible, and create a continuous block of machines to get even airflow. Satisfied with their answer, I left them to their work.

Somewhat later I noticed that by stacking the machines from the floor up, the computer named node-01 was placed on the bottom with node-32 on top. Previously in the lab, we'd always installed our machines in the opposite order (01 on top). For consistency's sake, I asked if there was a good reason to have 01 on the bottom. Again, I was told that this was "The Rocks Way," but when I prodded further, I didn't really get any further explanation. As such, we asked them to rename the machines to stay in line with the rest of our layout.

And now we get to the point of this unnecessarily long and boring story. Our lab is about to purchase 8 more computers. We want to add them to this cluster. They will be numbered 33-40. But if we put them into our rack, our nicely number machines are suddenly going to be out of order. From top to bottom, they will read 33-40,1-32. Obviously, that's not a huge deal for those who aren't as anal retentive as myself, but if we'd just done things the Rocks way (and understood why), we would now have nice sequentially numbered machines.

It's pretty safe to say that almost every best practice has some reasoning behind it. In plenty of cases, this reasoning might not apply to your situation; but if you don't find out what the reason was in the first place, you've got no hope of determining whether it is relevant to you.