A. Because existing good enough is better than non-existent excellence. And it can be polished forever.
Ask HN: Good enough vs excellence -- which do you favor?
11–20 of 24 posts
Re: Ask HN: Good enough vs excellence -- which do you favor?
#12It is more of a continuum than an A or B question, and it would be a bad idea to get religious over the question.
From a pragmatic perspective, B should be favored when either production constraints (capital investment, etc) or distribution costs are tangible at the margin. So durable goods and long-term services (e.g. insurance) should lean toward B.
A is favored if and only if iterative cycles can be accomplished without additional capital investment and distribution costs are near-zero. So, basically anything that could be delivered digitally that is not embedded in a durable good should be released when "good enough" (and then only improved if the iteration creates more value than the development of a new good or provision of a new service--iteration as rent-seeking is wealth-destructive).
Re: Ask HN: Good enough vs excellence -- which do you favor?
#13Excellence in one thing. Good enough in everything else.
Concise, cogent, illuminating and thought provoking. Bravo.
Re: Ask HN: Good enough vs excellence -- which do you favor?
#14Good enough is never good enough. It leaves lots of room for mistakes and at that point "good enough" becomes "oops." Not worth the rapid iteration if there is room for it to come crashing down...
Re: Ask HN: Good enough vs excellence -- which do you favor?
#15Re: Ask HN: Good enough vs excellence -- which do you favor?
#16How do you know what is important enough to make excellent without trying lots of good enoughs?
Re: Ask HN: Good enough vs excellence -- which do you favor?
#17Obviously, the right choice depends on the situation. Companies should tend towards B if they already understand the needs of their customers or if they're in a slow-moving market where customers make big, infrequent purchases.
Probably it would be more useful if you described a few specific companies that you think release products too frequently. Then we could argue if they would benefit by releasing less frequently.
Keep in mind that the question of how companies should act to profit-maximize is totally separate from the question of what sort of company you want to work for. I'm only interested in the first one; you might not be interested in it at all.
Re: Ask HN: Good enough vs excellence -- which do you favor?
#18A is the route Google takes (e.g. there have been 6 updates to Android since Feb 2009, with a 7th due out in a few months, but still not matching the polish of iPhone OS). Apple does B (e.g. one major update to iOS each year, even if it means trailing the industry with features like copy/paste, multitasking, video chat until they can do them the pretty "Apple way"). Microsoft these days seems to have found a choice C…
It's amazing that the tech industry's three giants all do things totally differently and all make tons of cash.
Re: Ask HN: Good enough vs excellence -- which do you favor?
#19A is the route Google takes (e.g. there have been 6 updates to Android since Feb 2009, with a 7th due out in a few months, but still not matching the polish of iPhone OS). Apple does B (e.g. one major update to iOS each year, even if it means trailing the industry with features like copy/paste, multitasking, video chat until they can do them the pretty "Apple way"). Microsoft these days seems to have found a choice C…
It's amazing that the tech industry's three giants all do things totally differently and all make tons of cash.
It's likewise fascinating how different devices handle simple tasks in vastly different ways. Just look at GPS navigation systems for cars.
Re: Ask HN: Good enough vs excellence -- which do you favor?
#20Illogical question. The entire point of "good enough" is that it is excellent. Each iteration of the project has to be good enough. All you need to be excellent is enough iterations. Perhaps a better question would be, "Which do you favor, many 'good enough' iterations or one shot at perfection?" The answer to this question is obviously the former because the latter almost never gets done.
There are a lot of similar questions that are interesting.
For example, let's say that all product development activity falls in to one of three categories: "concept", where you're collecting ideas and talking to customers, "prototype", where you do your heavy lifting, and "polish", where you refine your product's performance/UI.
You aren't going to be able to control the amount of "prototype" you have to do to achieve a given product state. But you can control how much "concept" and "polish" you'll throw in with it. If you estimate that it will take you two months working alone to produce a prototype that will interest customers, what is the right amount of time to talk to customers before you write your first line of code? I'd say a few days--in my view, startups should do this early on, instead of jumping in right away.
As for the "ideas" part of "concept"--I've been surprised how easy it is for me to turn on ideas like a tap. The insight that made me completely rethink what I'm working on now came to me late at night when I had forced myself off the computer because I wanted to start getting to bed earlier. But even if you can't turn on ideas like a tap, how much time should you spend recording the ideas that do come up and doing research on the internet? My guess--quite a bit, but it'd be even better if you could outsource this work to a nontechnical cofounder. (Too bad I haven't been able to find anyone who meets my standards for this and wants to work with me on the product I'm building.)
The amount of "polish" you should do before serious PR efforts is extremely situation-dependent.
- If you're entering an established market with a bunch of small innovations over your competition (Quora), you should do a lot of polish so your product will genuinely be the best thing out there (and they did).
- If you're doing something totally new, a moderate amount of polish is probably better--just enough to avoid acquiring a bad reputation.
- If your customers are going to be spending significant cash with you, polish is key so you seem (and actually are) trustworthy.
"The answer to this question is obviously the former because the latter almost never gets done."
If you know you're likely to irrationally give up on a product idea because your morale is low or irrationally continue with a product idea regardless of whether customers say it'll be useless, obviously those are factors to take in to account.
Personally, I wouldn't be afraid to, say, spend a long time building a better version of Ebay without doing any releases if I was convinced that people would switch to my site if and only if it was a significant improvement. If my intuition changed partway through the development process (without any solid external evidence or new observations--just a change in my gut feeling) then I would say "well, my intuition now isn't much better informed than my intuition at the beginning of the project--they're equally valid intuitions" and operate as if the average of my two intuitions were true (say, wrap up what I've got so far and make a solid effort at releasing it. Or start working half time and spend the other half of my time plowing onward with my project.)