Early Observations of Web 2.0
The Web 2.0 Summit has gotten big. Really big. So big that is almost unmanageable. That said, I think it is both a necessary and a positive thing for the technology and media investment/entrepreneur/networking scenes, as there is nothing quite like it out there. At the end of the day it is probably 90% networking and 10% new information. Bottom line, it is most assuredly worth it.
Aside from some great meetings with friends and contacts old and new, the person whose Web 2.0 talk was most impressive thus far was Evan Williams’ of Twitter (and Blogger and Odeo). By a long shot. Now I am not a user of Twitter and I don’t really care much about the application, but I couldn’t have been more impressed with Evan’s vision, candor and brilliance in communicating a profound but difficult message: how to get more from less. And as one who both invests in and is actively involved in running technology companies, I can tell you how hard it is to do what Evan has done.
It is and has always been all about the user experience, and getting the right balance of ease-of-use and functionality is an art that has eluded me thus far. The siren song of added functionality is very, very seductive, until you realize that the value of the added functionality may be far exceeded by the degradation of the user experience and the added cost of developing and implementing the functionality.
Seems simple, right? Wrong. Especially when you are emotionally involved in a product or project and you want it to be the best it can be.
But when is just ok is good enough, simply because the value proposition is heavily skewed towards ease-of-use and not features? Look at Twitter. It is incredibly simple to use and has a sparse interface. Kind of like Google. Evan mentioned other examples as well of companies that have introduced constraints into their decision-making in order to bring the user experience to the forefront. It is the opposite of getting wrapped up in the “science project” that burns tons of cash, frays nerves of employees and investors alike and often leads to a product that is too complex for the market.
If all product development organizations, in both start-ups and established companies could internalize Evan’s words we’d probably save billions of dollars and better deliver to the end users what they want: things that work. Simply. Easily. It is a solemn goal. And one to which all companies with human end-users should strive.
