“Steven Frank”:stevenf.com/2007/11/t… on Google’s phone announcement:
"Find someone, ONE person, with a unique vision. Lock them in a room with some programmers and a graphic designer. Twenty people, tops. Change the world. Quit re-hashing the same old bullshit and telling me it's new, exciting, or in any way innovative. Be ready to fail, many times, but for love of all that is holy take a stand on something."
I heard about the Google phone consortium pretty much exclusively through Twitter, and the reaction seems about universal from the folks I follow (admittedly, half of them are total Mac geeks). I’m honestly not sure how the Google phone is relevant to me, but then again, I don’t like Gmail.
Although this week’s “37signals post on personas”:www.37signals.com/svn/posts… isn’t about Android, some of the points are relevant to committee-led design:
"I don't think you can build a great product for a person that doesn't exist. And I definitely don't think you can build a great product based on a composite sketch of 10 different people all rolled into one (or two or three)." [...] "Every product we build is a product we build for ourselves to solve our own problems."
Not using your own product can turn into a real problem, and I realized after I bought an Apple TV that “Wii Transfer”:www.riverfold.com/software/… suffered from it. So I forced myself to use my own product instead, and that made all the difference. Plus, it was easy to unplug the Apple TV because the thing got so hot I was worried it would burn the house down while I slept.
