The irony of trying to plan accidents, and orchestrate their frequent occurrence, is not lost on Mr Williams. So he tries mental tricks. One is to ask βwhat can we take away to create something new?β A decade ago, you could have started with Yahoo! and taken away all the clutter around the search box to get Google. When he took Blogger and took away everything except one 140-character line, he had Twitter. Radical constraints, he believes, can lead to breakthroughs in simplicity and entirely new things.
The temptation to add features is never-ending. I run a venture capital database and I’m constantly looking for new capabilities to add. Perhaps at some point, I’ll remember this post and look to see what I can subtract!
That sounds nice and is good advice to get started but then you have to deal with these laws below(they have been proven), 6 and 7 are killers for me. Also why small teams are better, easier to manage the incrase in complexity, but chaos is inevitable, then boom and you start all over. Blogger explodes/implodes and you get twitter, then twitter explodes/implodes, what’s next, fun stuff keeps everyone employed. What’s that sound I hear oh it’s the Google time Bomb ticking. It’s a race for them to become a monopoly or blowup, that’s the only way to defy these laws is to break the law, ie MS. This I think is unique to the software industry, probably a good research project. But I guess it was already researched and the result is below. Thank you MM Lehman
1. Continuing Change – A system must be continually adapted else they become progressively less satisfactory in use.
2. Increasing Complexity – As a system is evolved its complexity increases unless work is done to maintain or reduce it.
3. Self Regulation – Global system evolution processes are self regulating.
4. Conservation of Organizational Stability – Unless feedback mechanisms are appropriately adjusted, average effective global activity rate in an evolving system tends to remain constant over product lifetime.
5. Conservation of Familiarity – In general, the incremental growth and long term growth of systems tend to decline.
6. Continuing Growth – The functional capability of systems must be continually increased to maintain user satisfaction over the system lifetime.
7. Declining Quality – Unless rigorously adapted to take into account for changes in the operational environment, the quality of a system will appear to be declining.
8. Feedback System – Evolution processes are mult-level, multi-loop, multi-agent feedback systems.