161–170 of 211 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. I wanted to suggest an exact opposite. I'd love to have seen those products of yours. In the alternate universe I live in, almost all the SaaS products I see are toys, never progressing beyond MVP phase.
SaaS can not interoperate. Thus feature-poor SaaS are useless.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't call lamp oil a toy. The defining feature of a toy is that people use it just for the joy of using it, rather than to solve a problem.
Having an abundance of light at night was a novelty and a luxury in the past. Definitely toy territory in my book.
Should it be 'base'?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Additional question - what is the value prop for clients? Why do they buy your service?
Lego's "Serious Play" is a good example of this kind of marketing done really well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Serious_Play
Somewhat pricey (as all Lego is), but worth it for many scenarios IMHO.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's rephrase that: it would destroy capitalism. Somehow I don't think you'd have a problem with that.
I don't know if maybe you think capitalism is the only reason people don't just lie in bed all day, but theory has been soundly disproven.
I can't think of a single example where there's not at least a core nugget of capitalist incentives driving things.
Sure, let's layer on some socialist policies, I'm all in favor of turning that dial quite a bit further, but that's turning a dial, not blowing up the whole machine because it's not working quite as well as we'd like it to.
Yet look at the big N’s track record of innovative hardware and software integration: Wii motion controls, Switch’s Joy-Cons and (soon) the cardboard Toy-Cons, N64 rumble pack for haptic feedback, battery backup in NES and SNES cartridges, etc.
(And yeah, lots of misfires along the way like the Wii U, Power Glove, Virtual Boy, etc).
A massive advantage of being a ‘toy’ company is what I would call the Pixar effect: products work for kids and adults alike.
Lego is also worthy of a look, but made a major strategic error IMHO by not purchasing Minecraft and letting Microsoft snap it up.
hat tip to Google Cardboard, of course.
or maybe that was a success, given its marketing impact post ‘The Wizard’ :)
// edited a few spelling mistakes and added the gCardboard ref and Lego appendum
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it’s about time we turn “feature rich” around and start considering it a criticism rather than a compliment. So many products I’ve loved as a consumer and worked on as a developer were eventually ruined by relentless feature cram and their never being declared “done”.
Interesting. I wanted to suggest an exact opposite. I'd love to have seen those products of yours. In the alternate universe I live in, almost all the SaaS products I see are toys, never progressing beyond MVP phase.
MVP is a kind of overloaded term because it can mean that it lacks user features, but it can also mean that it contains technical debt that is a potential liability in the future, just like the choking hazard on a toy.
A "toy" application can have a minimum set of user functionality, but be "complete" in terms that it doesn't contain any of that future potential liability. There are some really nice "toy" applications and services that fill a really small niche and do it extremely well, without trying to tackle bigger problems. However, I wouldn't consider them to be MVP because they actually have a considerable amount of design beyond the minimum necessary to get it out the door.
Or tl;dr: "Toys" are uncomplicated, but not necessarily minimal. MVP is generally incomplete and not necessarily uncomplicated (because reducing complexity requires effort).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you please elaborate?
UNIX tools can focus on solving a single problem well because they interoperate between themselves, so you can join tools that solve different problems and make something useful out of it. SaaS has no such option. It either does every little thing you need, or it doesn't solve the problem.
Arguably, Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft all started out as toy companies. I don't buy the basic premise of this article. How a company starts out often has very little to do with how it ends up. But, I suppose the real goal here is to whip the incubator into line.