A few windows lit

A city at dusk has an almost unbearable amount of information. Rooftop after rooftop, chimney after chimney, mile upon mile of grey slate going vague into a greyer sky, more structure than any one person could ever account for. And yet the eyes go to the two or three windows that happen to be lit, a reading lamp, a shelf of books, someone’s evening carrying on behind glass. Nobody feels cheated by this, it is the most natural way of taking in something too large to hold at once.

There are products built from an enormous number of features, each one presumably solving something for somebody, but somehow leave a person feeling vaguely unheld. And there are products with almost nothing to them (say three buttons) that people speak about the way they speak about a person they are fond of. The second kind is not winning on austerity. It is winning because every part of it that a person actually touches has been lit properly.

In enterprise software, and especially as a data platform, this seems like a rule that cannot possibly apply. It has to federate a dozen kinds of source, survive a security review, satisfy an auditor who has never met the product and never will, speak politely to systems that were already vintage before our thing existed. Such a thing cannot honestly be three buttons. It is closer to the city than to the room, and pretending otherwise would be a kind of dishonesty dressed up as elegance.

But I notice the word I reached for there was almost, and almost is doing nearly all the work in that sentence. The city does not need to be small to be pleasant. It only needs a few windows lit well. A software is perhaps permitted the same mercy as the skyline permitted its miles of necessary, unglamorous structure, its configuration files nobody will ever find beautiful, so long as a handful of rooms are properly lit: the first query a new analyst actually runs, the one screen a customer opens before deciding whether to trust the rest, the single moment where a setup either clicks cleanly into place or quietly breaks. Everything else is allowed to stay roofline. It does not need to glow. It only needs to hold its shape and not fall in.

People fall for one window they can picture themselves sitting in, with the rest of the city left, gratefully, in the dark around it.