"It's the user experience, stupid"

Does software needs to look ugly?
Relevant question, because most of them actually do!
However, this may change faster then expected according to the article below.

'It's the user experience, stupid'    ZDnet, 8th of May 2006
'A friendly face of business software'    BusinessWeek, 3rd of May 2006

"Good design is becoming more than a nice-to-have feature. Thanks to slick Web sites like Amazon.com, people are coming to expect software that takes no or little training to use."

There is a never ending list of Property Management Software, but have you ever seen a well designed one?

Get Real wtih 37 signals

37signals is a much hyped company in Chicago (read about their passionate user rating here) . But keep an eye on them if you're into product development and Internet.

For a background of the firm read the Salon.com article "The next web revolution".

However, it's not the company or even their products that caught my interest.
It's their philosophy, which includes;

• less is more
• design first (then code)
• find people who are enthusiastic
• don’t try to find “tricky” ways to get more cash. Earn it.

To find out more about the hilosophy, read their blog 'Signal vs Noise' or even better, download their book (no hardcopy) for 19 USD. Excellent and straightforward reading. Like their products.

Salesforce outages vs Competition

Since last October there has been a lot of writing about Salesforce and their outages. This has of course started a discussion about the reability of SaaS. Like this one 'Salesforce.com's hiccups'  (Rough Type, 2006-02-01).

In order to be transparent Salesforce created the site http://trust.salesforce.com.
A site that monitors the uptime for their service.

However, the surprising part is that other SaaS companies are using this to impress the market. "Some of its rivals have taken to monitoring the site and sending e-mails to reporters whenever something is amiss."   The Tech Beat 2006-04-27 

How clever is that?
I guess the question the potential customers are asking themselves are if to go for a webservice. Not which one. Like pointed out in this ZDnet article 'Are Salesforce's outages sullying the reputation fo the SaaS model?'