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A camel is a horse designed by committee

03:25PM (EST) on February 1, 2006  
There was a really funny exchange between Ricky Gervais and his idiot sidekick Karl Pilkington on his podcast the other day.  They started talking about Chinese proverbs and quickly devolved the conversation into Noah's poor decision to let similar animals onto the Ark.

This is paraphrasing, but you get the idea...

Ricky: "One of my favorites is, 'A camel is a horse designed by committee.'"

Stephen: "Carl's already wondering who's on that committee."

Karl: "I was just thinking why would you request the hump bit, cause that's just gonna get in the way, innit?"

Ricky: "Ok, Karl.  I'll give you an animal, and you tell me where it has gone wrong. The Octopus."

Karl:  "It should have some bones.  I never understood why it would like to get in a jar anyway."

Ricky: "A Giraffe."

Karl: "Noah should have seen some of the animals coming in and said, 'Hold on.  Just saw one like you.' and then throw it out."

Not sure if I captured the humor there, but, regardless, I like the premise of the initial statement.  Design-by-committee is bound to produce suboptimal results.  I think the Internet business is very good at rolling out visionary products invented by passionate people.  But how do you institutionalize that drive as the company evolves?  How do you formulate a process for initiating vision and committing to its delivery?

I can point to a few Yahoo! products that suffer from camel-ness, but out of respect to my colleagues, I'll pick on other people instead.  Here are some of the industry's worst design-by-committee products (mind you that doesn't preclude success):
  • Google Video Search and Google Reader
  • The new IE browser and Live.com
  • Amazon's left-hand site navigation
  • iTunes Music Store
  • Every home page on the Internet
This issue is everywhere.  It's the classic Marketing 101 mistake at big car manufacturing companies where they take the concept of giving customers what they want a little too far.  On more than one occasion Detroit has designed cars entirely by feedback from people who were asked what features they wanted in the ideal car.  Of course, the result is always a variation on the minivan.

Tags:  management, design

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A camel is a horse designed by committee