Jason Fried is the CEO of 37 Signals, a company that's garnered attention for delivering great Web-based tools like Basecamp and Writeboard. I've used these in my lab at BYU to great effect. At IT Conversations, however, we found that they just weren't right for the project management tasks we had. Obviously, these tools aren't right for everyone and that's the story.

In one of the IT Conversation shows I really liked last week, Jason delivers a short (12 min) talk from Web 2.0 called "Less is More." In the talk, Jason talks about how to win by "under-doing" your competition. A contrarian notion, to say the least.

A development effort I've been involved in lately has been using some of these ideas. We've been very pleased. You won't be surprised to find out that David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails is a partner in 37 Signals. Many of the ideas that Jason espouses about managing the development of software are reflected in the design of Rails.