If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good (2010)

http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2010/02/if-your-product-is-great-it-doesnt-need.html

by skogstokig • 1 month ago

159 107 1 month ago

paulbuchheit.blogspot.com

Read something similar the other day about the original Walkman.

The engineers wanted to add recording function, thinking it would help with sales and to only cost a negligible amount to add.

Someone cleverer said no, because if you add that feature now people will be confused what it is for. If they don’t want to record audio, they’ll think the product isn’t for them.

sph2• 1 month ago

I have been thinking deeply about this problem. I bought a great, silent fan from Rowenta, with beautiful housing and does what it says on the tin with no fancy accessories. 3 speed + 1 very silent mode for sleep. Hey, it’s a European product, not some Chinese knockoff.

At some point during design, one person must have said “you know, why not add a brilliant white light that turns on in silent mode? Wouldn’t that be cool?” and there was no one powerful or smart enough to stop their hubris.

Every hot summer night, I turn off my bedside lamp, and scream internally when I notice I forgot to put a dark piece of cloth to obscure the blinding white light on the fan. In these nights, I dream of sending an email to Rowenta’s customer team, and asking them to present me the head of the person responsible for this.

I am reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance lately and how technologists have made the world ugly by forgetting to keep in touch with Quality and Beauty, and this is painful reminder of it.

lukan2• 1 month ago

That bright LED's became so cheap to allow putting them everywhere certainly had downsides. There are many devices now where I have to tape over to enjoy a dark sleeping place.

moffkalast3• 1 month ago

There are many problems in life that a brush and some black acrylic brush-on primer can fix. This is one of those problems :)

moring• 1 month ago

And yet, you did buy the fan despite the bright LED (because you didn't know it was there when you bought it). Rowenta got your money, so from their perspective, they did everything right.

mattio• 1 month ago

You can buy the version without the bright light, but the marketing people made it 10 dollars more expensive x-) /s

nottorp4• 1 month ago

Black... nail... polish...

Solves every LED problem.

Xerox, why did you think the power led on your multifunction should light up not only my home office, but the room next to it too?

michaelbuckbee• 1 month ago

Something that's improved my life has been buying a sticker sheet of those LED darkening dots. They're only a couple bucks and look much cleaner than other solutions I've tried while still allowing for _some_ light to come through.

jonplackett4• 1 month ago

Same problem with my electric toothbrush. And it’s super bright chafing light also FLASHES. Why? It must be a designer who hates everyone. It’s can’t be an accident.

lukan2• 1 month ago

I disagree here. That would be a marketing problem and I would have market it as for audio on the walk. With the focus on listening and the record option as a bonus.

boomlinde• 1 month ago

Deciding on a product design that's easily marketable is also a marketing problem.

You suggest adding it as a "bonus", but for whom? Recording what on the walk? How would you advertise that along the main feature people actually buy the thing for? If not, what purpose does it serve? It's a few cents, but that's still a few cents too much if that's not what you're convincing people to buy.

Try to think of someone who didn't buy a walkman because it lacked a recording feature. What's their story? Can that easily be represented in the marketing material?

Angostura• 1 month ago

You include it but with no mention of it. Allow recoding to be activated with an obscure undocumented button push.

Leave a subtle hong somewhere that someone clever can find out. Wait for news of the functionality to go viral and additional products to walk off the shelf bought by people who feel clever.

ben_w2• 1 month ago

More likely to go viral in that case, a headline saying "Walkmans sometimes record over your tapes!"

When I was about 10, someone lent the school a tape of Holst's The Planets for a school play, one of the other students pressed the record button, and shortly thereafter the teacher played to the class a recording of me shouting "no stop" as I rushed for the stop button having seen what they'd done just a moment too late.

Now imagine that happening by undocumented feature, where nobody knows it would happen before it does.

nottorp4• 1 month ago

... and later, the fancier and more expensive walkmans started to actually have a recording function among the differentiators :)

jeromenerf• 1 month ago

Case in point: minidisc :)

Recording was the killer feature for me. I recorded thousands of hours of band rehearsals with their stereo omni mics and the media quality.

tobyhinloopen• 1 month ago

Gotta love the LP4 mode. So much music on a single disk! Remember the cool rectangular batteries? Why aren't these gumstick batteries more used in modern devices!?

burningChrome2• 1 month ago

The crazy thing is these came out in 92' and they didn't stop production until 2013 so you can still find these players. I just found out Sony stopped production of the minidiscs just last year which is crazy. A 20 year run for the player and 30+ years for the minidiscs.

If you can find a player, you can still get the discs on Amazon which is awesome considering how disposable tech has become.

V__• 1 month ago

Rory Sutherland used the Walkman story in his book, and some YouTube Shorts.

Supermancho• 1 month ago

Survival bias powers these "insights", 100% of the time.

conartist6• 1 month ago

Maybe, but you can't count how many times I see it happen in reverse too. Without saying it directly, a person reveals that they believe there is nothing left to invent or that whatever is currently best established can never ever be replicated or (gasp) beaten.

Zak• 1 month ago

Sure, but how many failed consumer products can you name that solved a problem a large number of consumers actually had way better than anything that came before?

I should probably qualify that by saying that a product that looks to be amazing but costs way too much, is impossible to get because of manufacturing issues, or requires a third-party ecosystem that doesn't exist does not actually solve the consumer problem.

keane• 1 month ago

This writeup looks at a successful product with a small number of features that was thereby distinguished from a field of unsuccessful products with a large number of features. Accounting for many products, considering both successes and failures (i.e. using a wide selection of data), it argues that the distinguishing factor of less features was related to the device’s popularity.

In the canonical example of survivor bias, the only bombers being examined (for their characteristics) in the original flawed analysis were the ones that made it back; the planes that were shot down (and their characteristics) were not being considered — an error.

palata3• 1 month ago

Did you read it? Where do you see mention of "a field of unsuccessful products"?

It mentions the iPad, the iPod, Gmail as successful products. It mentions "laptops" (but in the description it actually includes all desktop computers, I would say) as unsuccessful products.

I wouldn't call desktop computers or even just laptops "unsuccessful products". Would you?

otterley3• 1 month ago

So what?

ChadNauseam• 1 month ago

Apple messed up one thing about the iPad, which made me never use mine and eventually give it away. Basically, my iPad would die in a couple days if left unplugged. Because I only want to use it about once a week, that means I have to leave it plugged in all the time. Of course I or someone else inevitably wants to plug something else into that charger, so the iPad gets unplugged and forgotten about. Then, in a week when I actually want to use it, it's dead, and I use something else. The result was, I literally never used it.

paulryanrogers• 1 month ago

Is it even possible for tablets to hold a charge so long and provide near instant wake?

Why didn't you try powering it off when done?

graeme• 1 month ago

I'm fairly sure my old ipad did, maybe the ipad air 2. My current ipad pro doesn't seem to work this way. I could be mistaken, perhaps I used or charged it more.

actionfromafar• 1 month ago

Of course it is possible. From fundamentals alone, it has space for a huge battery. Heck, many cheap laptops can sleep longer than a week and still has some power left.

inigyou2• 1 month ago

all of my phones hold a charge for 2-3 weeks in aeroplane mode with no installed apps. Even my 6yo phone with 6yo battery does. A tablet has a much bigger battery but not a proportionally bigger power drain when the screen is off, you might hope for months in aeroplane mode with no installed apps.

altmanaltman2• 1 month ago

I have a very old samsung tablet that i still use from time to time. It never connets to the internet and wifi stays off. It can last easily a week or more on a single charge still. With wifi on, it dies within a few hours

Retric2• 1 month ago

They boot reasonably quickly, just turn it off.

While on they are constantly listening for a “find my” signal so it’s easy to locate. For the overwhelming majority of people it’s a good tradeoff.

Our_Benefactors• 1 month ago

Not a solution. Something like “shutdown after n hours of inactivity” would fix it though.

fudged71• 1 month ago

Latest iPhones have Find My when they are turned off, do iPads?

loloquwowndueo• 1 month ago

my iPad would die in a couple days if left unplugged.

Something wrong with your iPad then. All three of mine would easily hold a charge for more than 2 days even when turned on but unused (so asleep).

vjvjvjvjghv• 1 month ago

Mine loses maybe 20% over 2 weeks if unused.

Jabrov• 1 month ago

Same

nottorp4• 1 month ago

I think sometimes we should believe a vendor when they say "a small number of users were affected".

I doubt the OP is making stuff up, but all my iPads (including an original model) simply don't show any significant battery loss when left unused.

DANmode• 1 month ago

Turn on Battery Save mode, it’ll last a month.

moffkalast3• 1 month ago

I've got the same problem with a Samsung tablet I got. I use it maybe once every two weeks, so naturally I turn it off for the duration... but it somehow manages to empty its battery while completely off?! And it takes like a million years to boot, half of it only after you unlock it for some damn reason, it's such tedium.

internet_points• 1 month ago

Same here! I was so annoyed that it didn't come with an auto-powerdown function. Did they really expect people to remember to turn them off "when they plan not to use it for a few days" (I mean who plans not to use something)

Hendrikto• 1 month ago

Basically, my iPad would die in a couple days if left unplugged.

I still have a first gen (!) iPad that still lasts for weeks on a single charge when locked. It is useless now, because there is no software support, but not because of the battery.

gunapologist99• 1 month ago

Was yours 3G? The first-gen was offered with 3G (mobile) as an option. I imagine that killed battery life much faster and might not have been tested as well as the wifi-only option.

robbak• 1 month ago

For markets that have purchasing processes with long lists of feature requirements, you should probably just crank out as many features as possible and not waste time on simplicity or usability.

This was great snark.

beachy• 1 month ago

ERP and corporate procurement in a nutshell.

inigyou2• 1 month ago

That isn't snark — it's reality.

Cockbrand• 1 month ago

Probably hundreds of millions, maybe even billions of people still suffer from this truth each and every day.

hyperpallium2• 1 month ago

Fewer features = smaller frame, easier to satisfy, better customer targeting.

momojo• 1 month ago

I've had so much fun writing small apps in pure JS and HTML witj Gemini (no harness or agent, just the free web chat) because it's forced me to keep my index.html below 1000 lines. I love the forced constraints. It's liberating. My day job is wrangling production-level codebases of a monolith service, so my tiny web apps let me live out the fantasy of cutting features instead of adding them.

ChrisMarshallNY• 1 month ago

One of the most important [to me] books, was The Simplicity Shift[0], by Scott Jenson.

It was written pre-iPhone, when phones had seriously limited screen real estate.

He talks about how important it is to “weight” features, and order them by importance.

I am wrestling with this exact type of issue, right now, with a screen of my app.

[0] https://jenson.org/The-Simplicity-Shift.pdf (a PDF of the entire book. It’s a short read)

admjs• 1 month ago

The hardest part of product management is saying no to reasonably good ideas. Bad ideas are pretty easy.

claw-el• 1 month ago

People generally classify the opportunity cost as zero, and if you want to say no to the reasonably good ideas, others will put pressure on you to just do it.

otterley3• 1 month ago

Sorry, I don’t follow. The opportunity cost of what is zero?

jongjong2• 1 month ago

In any case, the landing page needs to be perfect. Anything less and you have 0 chance.

The most important innovation is in sales and marketing.

If you don't have brand recognition, your landing page has to make up for that. Making up the difference seems to be getting more difficult with each passing year. People are extremely cautious and getting increasingly so.

The average B2B user nowadays is literally triggered by anything remotely unfamiliar.

skydhash• 1 month ago

I've never been enticed by a landing page (yes, datapoint of one). It's either recommendation from source I trust (which has included reddit) and some demo/review available somewhere. Never the landing page as they usually took too much scrolling to get to the point.[0].

Better host a quick video demo/video add instead of drowning the user in copywriting.

[0]: Compare https://nova.app/ and https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html. Everything bellow the six highlights in the former case should be its own page.

jongjong2• 1 month ago

If you don't have any connections to vouch for you/your product, you need a perfect landing page to get those first few users who will then recommend.

pilgrim0• 1 month ago

The landing page is the worst place to get in touch with the reality of the product. Take a STEAM store page, it says nothing interesting about the game, doesn’t even has a gameplay video. Much better to just get to know the product with real people with real stories to tell, then the landing page is just the last place you go to acquire it. I never understood people who actually reads marketing copy and goes “hmm interesting”, it’s so vacuous and boring.

lelanthran• 1 month ago

If you don't have brand recognition, your landing page has to make up for that.

And high traffic on a terrific landing page only tells you is that your product might be good enough.

OTOH, if you have a product that is dog-ugly, but still have people willing to pay for it, you have lightning in a bottle.

ANarrativeApe• 1 month ago

So firstly:

The guy who created Gmail is now 49 years old.

Why does that blow me away?

Secondly, where else does this apply beyond hardware, beyond the world of tech even?

wavemode• 1 month ago

You're blown away at how old he is, or how young he is?

pjc50• 1 month ago

My gmail account is over 20 years old!

mips_avatar• 1 month ago

I think we're about to be overwhelmed with good software that isn't great.

lwhi2• 1 month ago

If the barrier to adding that new feature is removed, what happens?

If the cost is reduced — and becomes closer to zero — there's probably more chance the feature will be added ..

.. in which case, the product is less likely to be great.

So perhaps, the key superpower in the age of LLM developed software is the ability to say no.

dijksterhuis• 1 month ago

So perhaps, the key superpower in the age of LLM developed software is the ability to say no.

no, it’s never not been a superpower.

sorry, couldn’t resist some wordplay. it has always been one of the most important skills, but it doesn’t advance your career easily. enshittification happens because people don’t say no.

lwhi2• 1 month ago

I agree, it's vital .. but more difficult to utilise when the cost of adding is reduced.

casey2• 1 month ago

It's less any technical breakthrough and more a concerted advertising campaign and collective hypnosis AKA a fad. People just decided there were all going to buy iphones. That's why the biggest threat to iphones is the trend of people buying dumb phones.

Having a "Great" product in this terms makes you subject to the whims of the crowd. As soon as they realize that your product is negative value, and/or they run out of disposable income, they will stop using it.

kristjank• 1 month ago

My iPhone is ready to use in under 1/2 second, while my laptop always takes at least a few seconds to wake up, and then there's a bunch of stuff going on that distracts me. The iPhone is a simple appliance that I use without a second thought, but my laptop feels like a complex machine that causes me to pause and consider if it's worth the effort right now.

Funny how it's become completely the opposite nowadays.

Elosha• 1 month ago

I remember the biggest "missing features" of the iPhone people asked for were MMS and OBEX, along with 3G.

I also remember Apple had cared for most missing things by the iPhone 3G respectively iOS 3. Then they improved photo quality, speed and videos until the iPhone 4 respectively iOS 4/5. Similar things can be said about the iPad 2.

After that, I've had the feeling the product didn't improve anymore, because there was nothing actually useful left to add. I've used my iPhone 4 for 10 years, while Apple enjoyed adding more complexity without true benefit, except maybe the file manager and on-device image editing.

nottorp4• 1 month ago

I believe this "more features = better" mindset is at the root of the misjudgment,

It always amuses me when some new device is launched and it has "bigger numbers" and "moar numbers" in every metric. And it's crap to use.

Unfortunately this article is from 2010. Apparently Apple's competition went so low, usability wise, that even Apple is forgetting what usability is.

jraph• 1 month ago

But this isn't about the iPad or the iPod -- it's about product design.

Obviously GenAI. The author time-traveled to us, stole that sentence and put it in his article. He got encoding issues on blogspot so he typed the dash himself.

fusslo• 1 month ago

im thinking about making a hackernews but only for articles written before 2021 (or so).

bflesch2• 1 month ago

The underlying problem of distinguishing honest contributors from AI hustlers is quite hard, but worthwhile to solve properly.

Maybe there is a way to reduce incentives for AI hustlers to join a certain platform, while attracting honest contributors. But even honest contributors might have a bad day or a new project and suddenly they're out in promotion mode.

jonplackett4• 1 month ago

Good catch!

phendrenad22• 1 month ago

Preach it louder for the people in the back. I get into "debates" (really one-sided shouting matches where I'm the one getting shouted at) any time I defend a product that doesn't match the checklist-like sensibilities of the nerd intelligensia. Ironically, the Unix Philosophy that everyone adores is basically the same concept.

Mohiuddin7• 1 month ago

truely agreed, the major focus goes to marketing n distribution then on the customer feedback, do the changes to the product. Thats how you will make customer satisfied n the product performs well...

yen223• 1 month ago

Are there any examples of the opposite?

Where NewGizmo beat OldGizmo by doing everything OldGizmo did, plus a few extra things?

If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good (2010)

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