Listening to his list of specific dos and don’ts in more detail just now made me realize that there’s one overarching philosophical tenet that guides all the details and that is the following.

Run your business and build your product for yourself, not for investors or shareholders or analysts or “big” customers. Run your business to sustain your own life-style and your own integrity. Build things you believe in, not what some purchasing manager put in an RFP.

Investors want you to grow without bounds. That makes you put in crap you don’t want. Salesmen want you to put in a useless feature so they can get a big sale. Big customers want you to put in things only they want. While some of these forces may have some benefits, in the long run, they only push you to do things that dilute or muddy up the product with noise. Truly great products are simple, coherent, easy to understand and perform quickly and reliably.

For me, this means satisfying the artist, artisan and craftsman in myself, not somebody who makes money off of what I do. That is where great works come from; not from a balance sheet, an enhancements list, a specification or god knows, Microsoft Project.