201–210 of 635 posts
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I love it -- the fellow countryman picked up, dusted off, and re-used the good business model that Netflix discarded so long ago. It's great.
Hmm, they didn't discard it so much as bury it alive[1], though? 1: https://dvd.netflix.com/
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I canceled my Spotify subscription because it was so dang buggy. Getting it to play music for longer than an hour was simply impossible for a myriad of reasons. I switched to Amazon Music and at the time the webapp looked pretty much just like mainstream Amazon: drab, white/orange/blue, simple. But dang, it was rock solid . I couldn't get it to error if I wanted to. I could leave the tab open for weeks and it'd play…
Subplot: I doubt they care. Since spotify is designed to lose money it has little reason to care if customers cancel, it's only going to be concerned if investors lose interest.
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My recently favorite question to ask people: why do you need a development team at a company whose product has already been developed, is feature-complete, and everyone's fine with it? A bank doesn't need a full-time development team for example.
“A bank doesn’t need a full time development team for example” Banks and finance are like the number one employer of software developers outside of pure tech companies. I might be misunderstanding your point, but a bank doing digital banking needs a huge IT staff, including software devs. Even if no new products are being developed (unlikely), they support changes to common industry systems, redevelop systems for ret…
Right now, with all the churn that only serves to update various financial numbers in databases and is generally useless for the society at large. As an end user, I view a bank as a box to keep my money so I don't have to deal with cash. That's really it. It already works for me as it is right now.
A rather popular bank in Russia is now trying its damnest to become a super-app. It's developing a voice assistant. Its mobile app has stories. A bank. Is developing a voice assistant and becoming an operating system. Where did we make the wrong turn?
And maybe, just maybe, regulatory change doesn't need to happen in the first place?
> It’s obvious. Every high-tech company has people called “Product Managers” (PMs) whose job it is to work with customers and management and engineers to define what products should do. No PM in history has ever said “This seems to be working pretty well, let’s leave it the way it is.” Because that’s not bold. That’s not visionary. That doesn’t get you promoted This mentality isn't unique to product managers. Mobile…
To counter your point, it's not just that product managers are easy to blame; it's that it's literally their job to change stuff. Developers want to change stuff and do greenfield because it's fun, but that's a whole different beast to a career track whose job it is to change things. This goes beyond just poor incentives ["Googler gets a raise because shiny new thing"], into "upper management have created a construct…
Sure, but companies aren't being blindsided by project managers who sneak into their org charts and start driving change unbeknownst to company leadership. They're hired to do these things and their performance is based on how well they do them, just like anyone else.
This might be a good example of the struggle of middle management: You get blamed from all sides for just trying to do the job you're assigned.
For example, imagine a web app that embeds Youtube videos, that will show you every new video published by channels you choose. No home page suggestions, no "trending", no "you might be interested in".
You could do the same with Spotify or with one of those terrible news websites.
Some examples of this already exist: Nitter (shows Twitter contents), Invido.us (shows Youtube contents) but they are not mainstream and not particularly polished.
Also, I'm aware that this concept when applied to news websites results in something that is terribly close to an RSS reader.
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I hope people will use Spotify as a case study in how to fuck up a UI over time. The service itself is fine, I quite like some of the music it finds for me on discover, but the UI is on a slow death march towards complete uselessness, and some features have always been hopelessly broken (queuing). From a business standpoint I find it fascinating. It's about as perfect as an example it gets of "if it ain't broke, don'…
My recently favorite question to ask people: why do you need a development team at a company whose product has already been developed, is feature-complete, and everyone's fine with it? A bank doesn't need a full-time development team for example.
Plus I don't know about you, but my bank's website and app are a hot mess. In theory I suppose they could be feature complete, but in reality, nope.
So, just visiting Earth, or are you here to stay? :)
I've worked for banks and while there's certainly plenty of unwarranted churn the notion that they're done and the dev team can go home is ... hilarious.
Edit: addressing your comment in an adjacent thread, a box to keep your money in (or, canonically, a sock under the mattress) does not need to offer/support:
- Debit cards
- Credit bureaus. Yes, even if it's just a deposit account and no, this isn't optional.
- Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations
- Anti Money Laundering (AML) checks
That's before you get into other account types, offering credit, currency conversions and the zillion other things that sock doesn't have to do.
Evernote. Evernote used to be a crucial component of my life. Quietly synced my notes between my computer and my phone. Let me collaborate with my husband on a few things. Then they rewrote it from the ground up as a sluggish piece of Electron crap. Added a bunch of new stuff that sure looks pretty but gets in the way of the core function of “taking out your phone and scribbling down an idea before it vanishes”. I co…
Switched from Evernote to Joplin, pretty happy, and since it is open source, it evolves and gets better all the time.
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This is right on the money. Everyone wants to do new and interesting work on a product, which naturally means changing things even if it isn't really an improvement. No one is going to put "maintained system that wasn't broken" on their resume. One thing that has likely exacerbated this issue in recent years is "data-driven" product design. While I'm fanatical about evidence-based decision making, so many of these pr…
Engagement metrics apply well beyond ad companies. Basically any product used by many users interacting with a UI is eligible.
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We can only blame ourselves for Spotify's bad UI! (jk) Spotify uses an internal experimentation platform that guides which features they determine are successful, based upon how our usage moves their metrics: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2020/10/29/spotifys-new-ex... So, basically, the bad UI is improving their metrics. Or something. Maybe this is a case of experimentation gone wrong.
I can only assume one of their metrics is the classic "time on app" or "user engagement" which is a bullshit metric for a music player. If I'm spending more time on the app then that clearly means I'm not finding what I'm looking for.
Now, similar example is Netflix. I've at times reached a point where I think I had watched everything on the platform I'd enjoy. Their UI keeps showing old stuff as new tough, different pictures for the same show, etc. This led to wasted time and frustrating engagement. (Aside: the best Netflix UI ever was a script I wrote myself when they still had a public API that just listed all movies ordered by how much they predicted I'd like it. That paired with IMDB ratings and filtered by what I've already have seen would be the holy Grail but it would be obvious when it's time to unsubscribe for a while)
There should be a new category of apps, where you can still get the contents offered by a given service (Spotify, Youtube, your favourite news service etc.) while at the same time not using the built in UI. For example, imagine a web app that embeds Youtube videos, that will show you every new video published by channels you choose. No home page suggestions, no "trending", no "you might be interested in". You could d…