This is Signal vs. Noise, a weblog by 37signals about design, business, experience, simplicity, the web, culture, and more. Established 1999 in Chicago. Visit the Product Blog for more information on our products.

Avoid the middle of the road
“As a company, you have to be the most of something—the most exclusive, the most affordable, the most responsive, the most friendly. Companies used to want to be in the middle of the road — that’s where all the customers were. But now, in an age of hyper-competition and non-stop innovation, the middle of the road is the road to ruin. What do they say in Texas? ‘The only thing in the middle of the road are yellow lines and dead armadillos.’”
-Bill Taylor, author of Mavericks at Work

Put your business model in beta
“So my advice to startups in this particular category is if you’re going to put your product in beta — put your business model in beta with it. Far too often we are too product focused and not business-model focused. That’s one thing I definitely would have done differently with JotSpot.”
-Joe Kraus, CEO of JotSpot

Work in small bits
“When dealing with git, it’s best to work in small bits. Rule of thumb: if you can’t summarise it in a sentence, you’ve gone too long without committing.”
-Git for the lazy

The schizo thing about software development
“Here’s the schizo thing about software development (at least on Macs): 1. Everybody praises apps that don’t have a ton of preferences and features. 2. Everybody asks for some new preferences and features. (Okay, not everybody. Not you, I know. I mean everybody else.) To make it worse: 1. Everybody thinks they’re representative of the typical user, so what they want ought to be a no-brainer. 2. And they act like you put skunks in their fridge if you don’t do whatever-it-is. (Okay, again — not you. You’re cool. I’m talking about the others.) The problem is 100 times worse when it comes to deleting features.”
-Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire

Major in learning
“It’s easy to educate for the routine, and hard to educate for the novel. Keep in mind that many required skills will change: developers today code in something called Python, but when I was in school C was all the rage. The need for reasoning, though, remains constant, so we believe in taking the most challenging courses in core disciplines: math, sciences, humanities.” Google’s advice to students

Learn from mistakes
“If all you ever do is all you’ve ever done, then all you’ll ever get is all you ever got.”
-An old saying in Texas