Over on ‘Who is Farhan Lalji?’, Farhan picks up on Jason Calcanis’ use of Flickr to get quick, involved feedback on an upcoming Mahalo design change. Farhan is right in seeing the importance of adaptability in an ever evolving, hard to predict online world.
You can see this played out offline too, and Farhan’s post reminded me of Seth Godin’s Too late? post a while ago about Starbucks evolution from purely selling beans to, well, you know what it is now.
Of course, Flickr famously wasn’t even set up to be an online photo sharing app – never mind a design feedback tool or even – as I’ve seen Jon Hicks use it – a means of publishing.
What Flickr tends to get right more often than not is listening to, and riding with, where their audience wants to take it – and being prepared to play host to dissent too.
Flickr might be part of one huge company, Yahoo!, but it remains itself, a little outside of the Y! culture that exists elsewhere, with its founders still very much engaged.
Starbucks clearly listened well too, once upon a time, and had the ability to do something with what it heard. Economies of scale now seem to dictate its decisions, which leads to a one-size-fits-all template and an oil tanker of a company, struggling to flex and adjust. Market share and growth matters more than quality it would seem. For me, it’s now the epitome of a business that patently no longer believes in its own core product.
I could name you half a dozen other companies that share Flickr’s open, adaptive style, who get the balance so, so right between quality, adaptiveness and success. And it strikes me that they tend to be small, even if their impact and influence is huge. But more than anything, they really care about the quality of what they do. Even Apple, by no means a small company, gets it right by working small – tight little groups formed around a specific product.
For me, it’s 37signals who have been for so long, the exemplar of this approach and happily they’ve found a way of expressing what I’ve been struggling to:
Which brings me to my conclusion. If you, like me, have read Getting Real before, it’s time to read it again and keep going back to it. If you haven’t, treat yourself.
Postscript: and right after I click ‘publish’, here’s Khoi Vinh making a related point about design quality and size.
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