Company philosophy

Let's talk about an interesting phenomenon in SaaS companies’ web design. Ever noticed that everybody wants to tell you just how just how totally freaking quickly you’re going to be able to sign up for their product?

About two years ago, a Vietnamese sandwich (banh mi) shop opened up near my apartment in San Francisco.

If there's one thing we like to talk about on this blog, it's great software. But unfortunately most software isn't great.

Today's post might seem off-topic, but it does relate to technology in the end.

Christmas is just a few days away, and businesses are scrambling to squeeze every last penny they can from desperate shoppers.

Unless you've been hiding under an Internet rock for the past few days, you've probably heard by now about the massive security breach of the similarly large blog network Gawker.com.

For the past month or so, We've been working on a project that we're calling "LAS 2.0". It's basically a complete re-thinking of our entire CRM product.

My last post discussed what it means to be a lean startup. In it, I suggested that lean startups need to "release early and release often."

The internet has opened up all kinds of new opportunities for businesses in the last decade. At Less Annoying Software, we're taking advantage of a relatively new internet-enabled approach to business called "the lean startup."

Over on the software side of the Less Annoying world, Tyler and I have recently been working on a pretty substantial redesign of the interface for LAS.

I just read this post on Lifehacker (and watched the accompanying video which I embedded above) and I'm feeling very liberated from normal grammatical constraints.

Last week I wrote about how AT&T's poor service effectively makes the Apple iPhone a bad product in many areas. This is consistent with a common theme on this blog: nothing matters except user experience.

I've recently had occasion to try out a variety of different sports websites. During the process, I ran across a live game cast from Comcast SportsNet that I hated on first glance; after about 5 minutes of using it, however, it had turned in to one of the best game cast tools I've used.

I live in San Francisco. As you may know, AT&T cell phone service is absolutely awful in San Francisco (like many other major U.S. cities).

When we made our own mobile website, we commented that many iPhone apps would probably be better served as mobile websites.

If you work at a software company, then you know how hard it is to avoid feature bloat. You obviously want to listen to feedback from your users, but if you implement every feature requested, your software will end up complicated and uninspired.

I've recently been reading a book called Built to Last about the properties and behavior of successful companies

As you may have heard, Google is giving up on Google Wave. Wave was a new communication and collaboration tool that was meant to reinvent email.

I have a confession to make: I'm terrible at negotiating. I'm a complete pushover and I just can't hold my own.

I recently started checking out an online collaborative desktop service called Kohive.

At Less Annoying Software, customer service is very important to us for two reasons.

For reasons that aren't worth going in to, Tyler and I have recently begun the process of setting up a server through Rackspace's cloud services.

If you own a smartphone, you generally have two different options when you want to read web content.

Tyler and I live on opposite coasts, so as you might imagine, we spend a fair amount of time communicating over various channels including email, IM/chat, telephone, and video chat.

Ok, so this title is a little inflammatory. Before getting into this, I should say that I am a huge fan of open-source software.