Give me simplicity, not feature bloat.

Jason Fried sat down with Wall Street Journal technology writer Walt Mossberg for an informal chat about Fried’s business and design philosophies at the end of today’s first session.

The reason, argued Jason, is that the software industry is structured to build crap (borrowing the term Mossberg used to describe Outlook). Software is designed to make money on new versions shipped every year or so, and in order to convince users to keep upgrading developers feel pressure to add new features. 37Signals, on the other hand, offers its software over the web as a service. When people are paying a monthly fee, the company can release updates on a continuous basis and focus on making things work as simply as possible, rather than adding more features.