Cocoa & Medicine

For some time now I have wanted to post about the value of creativity and original design in software development. Much has been written in the last couple years about the importance of presentation in the Mac community. Forget lickable, nowadays a good Mac app needs to be downright delicious. But less has been said about the value of higher level of design — that more ephemeral quality that captures application flow and feel. Fortunately, Google’s recent HuddleChat debacle provides a perfect context for such a discussion.

Google burns Campfire

In case you missed it, earlier this week Google created a big stir by announcing a new application called HuddleChat during one of their campfire sessions. It was intended as a working demo for their new App Engine service, but it quickly created an uproar from many in the development community who felt that Google developers had blatantly ripped off another application. As irony would have it, that application’s name happened to be Campfire, and it was created by some company called 37Signals (never heard of them, but apparently they’re big in the mining transportation industry). Anyhow, sensitive to the bad PR they were suddenly generating, Google quickly yanked the cord on HuddleChat.

That should have been the end of the story, but it wasn’t.

As soon as HuddleChat was shut down, a second uproar arose from users who insisted that HuddleChat was killed unfairly. Much of their anger was directed at 37Signals. With straight, albeit apoplectic, faces they argued that 37Signals somehow twisted Google’s arm, forcing them to kill HuddleChat in order to quell competition. The punchline is that 37Signals, this company that reportedly goes around bullying online behemoths only has 10 employees.

So in the span of a few days, two actions by Google created two angry groups who were angry for two different reasons: (1) developers angry at Google for creating HuddleChat, and (2) potential HuddleChat users angry at the first group for killing HuddleChat. To keep this simple, let’s come up with labels for these two groups. We’ll call the first group “the brewmasters” and second group “the freeloaders.”

Freeloaders

I’m not going to convince the freeloaders they’re wrong because they’re unlikely to listen to me, and not just because I’m calling them freeloaders. They cite idealistic principles like competition and unfair power wielded by The Man (apparently implying that DHH is, in fact, the man), but if you sift through their rants, it becomes clear that basically they’re just mad that someone took away their keg. You see, 37Signals actually charges money for Campfire, while Google was providing HuddleChat for free.

When HuddleChat was announced, the freeloaders came running (”Free beer!”). Unfortunately, the brewmasters who showed up recognized that Google was in fact giving away someone else’s beer for free, which just didn’t seem right. When the grown ups at Google learned this, they agreed and quickly pulled the tap. The brewmasters applauded the move, while the freeloaders cried party foul and started protesting. Of course, the freeloaders had done nothing special to earn free beer, let alone someone else’s beer, but to the adolescent mind offering something for free and not following through is akin to stealing something that already belonged to them. The freeloaders posted angry blog comments, insisting that they were important decision makers who would drive business away from 37Signals in retaliation, and to demonstrate this they went and created an online petition… via a facebook group. (Awww, how cute.)

So that’s the context. Next post I’ll elaborate on the value of design by extending this gratuitous beer analogy to brewmasters and brewers.