November 2004(This is a new essay for the Japanese edition of Hackers & Painters.It tries to explain why Americans make some things well and others badly.)A few years ago an Italian friend of mine travelled by train fromBoston to Providence. She had only been in America for acouple weeks and hadn't seen much of the country yet. She arrivedlooking astonished. "It's so ugly!"People from other rich countries can scarcely imaginethe squalor of the man-made bits of America. In travel booksthey show you mostly natural environments: the Grand Canyon,whitewater rafting, horses in a field. If you seepictures with man-made things in them, it will be either aview of the New York skyline shot from a discreet distance,or a carefully cropped image of a seacoast town in Maine.How can it be, visitors must wonder. How can the richest countryin the world look like this?Oddly enough, it may not be a coincidence. Americans are goodat some things and bad at others. We're good at makingmovies and software, and bad at making cars and cities.And I think we may be good at what we're good at for the samereason we're bad at what we're bad at. We're impatient.In America, if you want to do something, you don't worry thatit might come out badly, or upset delicate social balances, orthat people might think you're getting above yourself. If youwant to do something, as Nike says, just do it.This works well in some fields and badly in others. I suspectit works in movies and software because they're both messy processes. "Systematic"is the last word I'd use to describe the way good programmers write software.Code is not something they assemble painstakingly aftercareful planning, like the pyramids. It's something theyplunge into, working fast and constantly changing their minds,like a charcoal sketch.In software, paradoxicalas it sounds, good craftsmanship means working fast.If you work slowly and meticulously,you merely end up with a very fine implementation of your initial,mistaken idea.Working slowly and meticulously ispremature optimization. Better to get aprototype done fast, and see what new ideasit gives you.It sounds like making movies works a lot like making software.Every movie is a Frankenstein, full of imperfectionsand usually quite different from what was originally envisioned. But interesting, and finished fairly quickly. I think we get away with this in movies and softwarebecause they're both malleable mediums. Boldness pays.And if at the last minute two parts don't quite fit, you can figure out some hack that will at least concealthe problem.Not so with cars, or cities. They are all too physical.If the car business worked like software or movies, you'dsurpass your competitors by making a car that weighed onlyfifty pounds, or folded up to the size of a motorcycle when you wanted to park it. But with physical products there aremore constraints. You don't win by dramatic innovationsso much as by good taste and attention to detail.The trouble is, the very word "taste"sounds slightly ridiculous to American ears.It seems pretentious, or frivolous, or even effeminate.Blue staters think it's "subjective," and red staters think it's for sissies. So anyone in Americawho really cares about design will be sailing upwind.Twenty years ago we used to hear that the problem withthe US car industry was the workers.We don't hear that any more now that Japanese companiesare building cars in the US. The problem withAmerican cars is bad design. You can see that just bylooking at them.All that extra sheet metal on the AMC Matador wasn'tadded by the workers. The problemwith this car, as with American cars today, is that it wasdesigned by marketing people instead of designers.Why do the Japanese make better cars than us? Some say it'sbecause their culture encourages cooperation. That may comeinto it. But in this case it seems more to the point thattheir culture prizes design and craftsmanship.For centuries the Japanese have made finer things than wehave in the West. When you look at swords theymade in 1200, you just can't believe the date on the labelis right.Presumably their cars fit together more precisely than ours for the same reason their joinery always has.They're obsessed with making things well.Not us.When we make something in America, our aim is just to get the job done. Once we reach that point, we take one of two routes.We can stop there, and have something crude butserviceable, like a Vise-grip. Or we can improve it,which usually means encrusting it with gratuitous ornament.When we want to make a car "better,"we stick tail fins on it, or make it longer, or make the windows smaller, depending on the current fashion.Ditto for houses. In America you can have either a flimsy box bangedtogether out of two by fours and drywall, or a McMansion-- aflimsy box banged together out of two by fours and drywall,but larger, more dramatic-looking, and full of expensive fittings.Rich people don't get better design or craftsmanship;they just get a larger, more conspicuous version of thestandard house.We don't especially prize design or craftsmanship here. Whatwe like is speed, and we're willing to do something in an uglyway to get it done fast. In somefields, like software or movies, this is a net win. But it's not just that software and movies are malleable mediums.In those businesses, the designers (though they'renot generally called that) have more power. Software companies, at least successful ones, tend to be runby programmers. And in the film industry, though producersmay second-guess directors, the director controls most ofwhat appears on the screen.And so American software and movies, and Japanese cars, allhave this in common: the people in charge care aboutdesign-- the former because the designers are in charge, and the latterbecause the whole culture cares about design.I think most Japanese executives would be horrified atthe idea of making a bad car. Whereas American executives,in their hearts, still believe the most important thing abouta car is the image it projects.Make a good car? What's "good?" It's so subjective.If you want to know how to design a car, ask a focus group.Instead of relying on their own internal design compass(like Henry Ford did),American car companies try to make what marketing peoplethink consumers want. But it isn't working. American cars continueto lose market share. And the reason is that the customerdoesn't want what he thinks he wants.Letting focus groups design your cars for you only wins in the short term. In the long term, it paysto bet on good design. The focus group may say they want themeretricious feature du jour, but what they want even more isto imitate sophisticated buyers, and they, though asmall minority, really do care about good design.Eventually thepimps and drug dealers notice that the doctors and lawyershave switched from Cadillac to Lexus, and do the same.Apple is an interesting counterexample to the generalAmerican trend. If you want to buy a nice CD player, you'llprobably buy a Japanese one. But if you want to buy anMP3 player, you'll probably buy an iPod. What happened?Why doesn't Sony dominate MP3 players? Because Apple isin the consumer electronics business now, and unlikeother American companies, they're obsessed with good design. Or more precisely, their CEO is.I just got an iPod, and it's not just nice. It's surprisingly nice. For it to surprise me, it must besatisfying expectations I didn't know I had. No focusgroup is going to discover those. Only a great designer can.Cars aren't the worst thing we make in America.Where the just-do-it model fails most dramatically is in our cities-- orrather, exurbs.If real estate developers operated on a large enough scale, ifthey built whole towns, market forces would compelthem to build towns that didn't suck. But they only build acouple office buildings or suburban streets at a time, and theresult is so depressing that the inhabitants consider it a greattreat to fly to Europe and spend a couple weeks living whatis, for people there, just everyday life. [1]But the just-do-it model does have advantages. It seems the clearwinner for generating wealth and technical innovations(which are practically the same thing). I think speed is the reason.It's hard to create wealth by making a commodity. Thereal value is in things that are new, and if you want tobe the first to make something, it helps to work fast.For better or worse, the just-do-it model is fast,whether you're Dan Bricklin writing the prototype of VisiCalc ina weekend, or a real estate developerbuilding a block of shoddy condos in a month.If I had to choose between the just-do-it model and thecareful model, I'd probably choose just-do-it.But do we have to choose? Could we have it both ways?Could Americans have niceplaces to live without undermining the impatient, individualistic spiritthat makes us good at software? Could other countriesintroduce more individualism into their technology companiesand research labs without having it metastasize as strip malls?I'm optimistic. It's harder tosay about other countries, but in the US, at least, I think we can have both.Apple is an encouraging example. They've managed to preserveenough of the impatient, hackerly spirit you need to writesoftware. And yet whenyou pick up a new Apple laptop, well, it doesn'tseem American. It's too perfect. It seems as if itmust have been made by a Swedish or a Japanese company.In many technologies, version 2 has higher resolution. Whynot in design generally? I think we'll gradually seenational characters supersededby occupational characters: hackers in Japan will be allowedto behave with a willfulness that would now seem unJapanese,and products in America will be designed with aninsistence on taste that would now seem unAmerican.Perhaps the most successful countries, in the future, will bethose most willing to ignore what are now considerednational characters, and do each kind of work in the waythat works best. Race you.Notes[1] Japanese cities are ugly too, but for different reasons.Japan is prone to earthquakes, so buildings are traditionallyseen as temporary; there is no grand tradition of city planninglike the one Europeans inherited from Rome. The other cause isthe notoriously corrupt relationship between the governmentand construction companies.Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Barry Eisler, Sarah Harlin,Shiro Kawai, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, and Eric Raymondfor reading drafts of this.
