I recently bought my wife an Amazon Kindle for Christmas. Yes, I know it's March but they were backordered. But at least this way I was able to give the Kindle two. Anyway, she loves it.

The thing that's striking about it and the reason I am writing this post is that I'm impressed with how the Kindle completes the scenario. By this I mean that the designers were relentlessly focused on the book reading experience and didn't stop at the natural boundaries if it meant that this experience would be compromised. There are always compromises to be made, but whenever they were faced with a decision they compromised in areas outside of the core scenario and never strayed from the fundamental vision.

Take Whispernet for example. It allows the kindle user to buy and download books from anywhere. They easy solution would have been to require synching with a PC in V1, WiFi in V2, and building mobile apps later on. But they wanted to make sure there were nothing in the way of buying and reading books . I don't know how they pulled this off, but I'm sure it included some animated discussions both internally and with the various wireless providers. It's a big bet.

The next big call is the screen. It's a monochrome LCD screen. It's not well suited to rapidly changing graphics or other applications. The screen flashes a bit when you turn the page. But when you think about it, a book has a similar experience. The there are few really nice things about it from a perspective of completing the scenario. One obvious benefit is that's cheaper than the alternatives. But the two factors that I believe really drove the decision are battery life and readability. The screen doesn't draw any power just to display a page. It only draws a minimal amount to change the display. This lets you treat the Kindle much more like a book. You don't have to think about charging it the same way you need to with a cell phone or a notebook. The second benefit is the readability. I was a little surprised at this one, but reading something that's not backlit is might easier on the eyes and much more suited to a book-like experience.

But it's the compromises that really illuminate these decisions. It's easy enough to articulate how to complete a given scenario. It's difficult to make the tradeoffs necessary to make it happen. When you start out you have to know that you won't be able to complete every experience. Some of them will be decidedly sub-par. Some you'll cut altogether. For example, don't rely on your Kindle to be a web browser. But you can't nail the important scenarios unless you make these compromises.

This is where leadership comes in. Someone needs to provide the vision to keep the project on track. Even more importantly they need to provide the vision in a way that is easily digestible and enables everyone to easily make decisions based on the same clear criteria. Completing the scenario is just as much about saying 'no' to other great features as it is to spending the resources to get that last mile.

Joel Spolsky talks about this a bit too. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/12/09.html. He focuses more on the benefits to simplicity to the design then on clarity of vision. He is certainly right, but I'm talking more about the less appealing underside to the same discussion. Sometimes you have to have to make decisions that cut or reduce really good ideas and perfectly good scenarios just to make the core scenario complete and not just 80%.

Anyway, back to my book.