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

paulbuchheit.blogspot.com

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

#101

Post by jonplackett »

boomlinde wrote: post #46
lukan wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Exactly this. You wouldn’t make a dictaphone and then be like, shall we just tout good speakers in it just in case someone wants to also listen to their music on it. So why the other way around.

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

#102

Post by jonplackett »

jraph wrote: post #72

> 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.

Good catch!

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

#103

Post by wincy »

lukan wrote: post #45
sph wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

This is my only complaint about the Bose QuietComfort Ultras. Nearly $400 headphones and they have an LED that glows while charging so I can’t charge them in my room at night unless I throw a shirt or something over them.

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

#104

Post by burningChrome »

jeromenerf wrote: post #89
jonplackett wrote: post #3

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.

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.

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.

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

#105

Post by burningChrome »

alnwlsn wrote: post #81
ben_w wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

I thought that's what the little breakaway tabs on the bottom of the cassette are for Though I'll admit, when I used to use cassettes, I never write protected them

My next door neighbor was a few years older than me and was constantly showing me all kinds of nefarious stuff. One thing he showed me was if you tape over the tab on cassettes, you can erase and re-record what you want on them.

One time my older sister and I got into a fight and to get back at her, I erased side A of her Michael Jackson's Thriller cassette she had just gotten a few weeks prior. She got it replaced at the music store and the salesperson was completely befuddled by the entire situation. That one day the music was there and the next day just gone? Inconceivable!

I just played stupid at the time, but felt like a god knowing that little trick. So, sorry sis. But John C, you were the man.

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

#106

Post by somenameforme »

stnikolauswagne wrote: post #61
palata wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

>I wouldn't call desktop computers or even just laptops "unsuccessful products". Would you? With the caveat of "Casually browsing the web" I would, actually. They have been near completely subsumed by Ipads or Phones.

People state stuff like this regularly, but it's not correct. The vastly overwhelming majority of people still have and use a PC. The only thing that's really changed is that a 10 year old PC is good enough for just about every normal task short of high end gaming or a handful of rare tasks. So sales slowed dramatically.

But even with dramatically slower sales, that's around ~300 million sold per year. By contrast, the iPad is selling about 60 million units a year. In the US at least, the number of people that replaced their computer with a phone is negligibly low, and it's largely made up of extremely low income families.

Incidentally, phones are also headed for the exact same fate as PCs. The one saving grace they might have is that lion batteries die over time which is why Apple is quite adversarial with regards to users changing their batteries, but they are already losing that fight on multiple fronts.

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

#107

Post by [deleted] »

dpark wrote: post #94
alnwlsn wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought that's what the little breakaway tabs on the bottom of the cassette are for Though I'll admit, when I used to use cassettes, I never write protected them

This story probably involves a cassette that someone copied at home and then didn’t break off that little tab.

[deleted]

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

#108

Post by chias »

sph wrote: post #40
jonplackett wrote: post #3

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.

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…

[dead]

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

#109

Post by kranke155 »

burningChrome wrote: post #104
jeromenerf wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

The minidisc was probably beautifully designed. I still have a player and some sample discs because I found them so beautiful. No wonder Ive and Jobs used to go “what would Sony do?” As a design round at early Apple 2.0
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