Category: Felix

Software needs to have a vision. A software program can’t be everything to everyone; you’ve got to decide who your users are and what you want to do for them.

I had a very clear vision for Felix (then TransAssist, then “Translation Assistant”): it would be powerful, simple, and get out of your way when you weren’t using it. It wouldn’t force its users to adapt to it; it would adapt to its users.

After all, that’s why I created Felix in the first place. I had been working with a couple of the major translation memory systems out there, and I was appalled at how hard to use and buggy they were, but most of all at how arrogant they were. They treated the translator like some trained monkey who had to jump through their hoops, rather than a professional knowledge worker who had just shelled out $1,000+ to use their crappy program.

Going Astray

Somewhere along the way, however, that vision started to get clouded. It was my fault for not stepping up and handling the marketing of Felix myself. Instead I left that to a company that understood the art of selling, but not of making software. In sales meetings where I wasn’t present, they were promising this feature or that feature; then they’d come back to me and say we had to hold up the next release yet again in order to implement feature X that Big Company Y said they absolutely required. Not quite coincidentally, that feature was usually on some checklist put out by one of the big players in the market.

Fire and Motion

Joel Spolsky describes this kind of feature war very aptly as Fire and Motion. Your competitors put out a slew of features that are useless for 99% of users, much like how an octopus sprays out an ink cloud. By the time you catch up the octopus is long gone, far ahead of you.

Implicit in my desire to finally take over the marketing of Felix was a determination to get back to my vision: simple, easy-to-use software. When you talk to users of translation memory, a lot of them will tell you that they bought their translation-memory program in order to get more work, or because their clients told them to. The classic captive user base. A captive user base is why most enterprise software sucks.

Select and Concentrate

I don’t want Felix to suck. I don’t want people to use Felix because somebody makes them. I want people to use Felix because it helps them work better, faster, and smarter. Sure, not implementing the feature smorgasbord will lose me some users, for whom feature X is a deal maker and deal breaker. On the other hand, keeping a well defined vision should make the software better for my target users.

That’s not to say that I’m not going to add features. In fact I have a big list of features that I’m working on right now. However, my focus is on features that reduce complexity from the user’s point of view, ideally making the program more powerful in the bargain.

Japanese has a handy expression, 選択と集中 – select and concentrate. The idea is that you pick your spots, and focus your efforts there. Rather than trying to be everything to everyone, you become indispensable to a niche that you select. That’s the direction I plan to take Felix.