Kathy Sierra is brilliant - honest!

I got invited to DevShop’s private beta a week or so back and as I am on their site I also read their blog, specifically a linking post ‘Avoid the features Arms Race’ that led to Kathy Sierra’s blog post (links to come). Then today I was reading friend and habitual entrepreneur’s corporate blog Crowdstorm ‘Social Shopping 2.0′ and I saw a new post ‘The feature arms race of Social Shopping’ had just been published. Turns out their post was a Social Shopping focused derivative of Kathy’s post.

Wow. Talk about extending a conversation, Kathy makes a generalist post, and Crowdstorm spins it for Social Shopping, I love that about bloggers. Conversations start here and end there. What is slightly humourous for me is that it wasn’t until I saw the graphic ‘featuritis’ on DevShop and Crowdstorm that I made the connection to Kathy’s blog Creating Passionate Users post ‘Ignore the Competition‘. I guess I must be a visual learner. If I start using pictograms on my blog just shoot me.

What Kathy talks about is mostly bog standard common sense from my perspective but that doesn’t make it any less valuable. If you are young and inexperienced then its news, and if you are more experienced well then its a good read because you can never get reminded of the fundamentals of any business or process too often no matter your level of experience.

Personally I think a true to life example of this practice is Microsoft’s Word. Everyone uses it, there are a like a bazillion zillion features, and every release they manage to build more menus and deeper functionality. Best of all the paper clip has many different looks from which he can consistently annoy users. Basically its an imploding pile of dog sh*t that is the bane of the office.

However, yesterday I started using Microsoft’s Word 2007 (Beta) and I have to say, for the first time since well ever it was easier to use. Buttons were clear, menus were beautiful and functional, and displayed wonderfully communicative pictographic icons that actually communicated their meaning. Truly this is a product that isn’t about features (for once), its about functionality and thank god for that. I can’t wait to get it on my desktop at work. Hopefully Microsoft won’t screw it up before they release it.
Also if you read through Kathy’s post to the end you do notice she can’t help but mention a company famous for not allowing feature creap. But I won’t mention it here. You will have to go to her post for that.

Conspiracy Theory: I’m not sure but I want a print out of Kathy’s account statement because I swear she is getting pay checks from Microsoft because clearly they have had advance notice of her post as I can’t imagine anyone from Microsoft coming up with an idea as great as ‘less is more’. Scoble did you do it?