Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Want a killer product? Become more opinionated

adilaijaz.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 156 posts

Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated

#131

Post by andrei_says_ »

geoah wrote: post #82
kuu wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess some of the reasons are that Sidewalk is: - For a product that was already owned and did not need it until now - Activated by default, as optional opt-out instead of opt-in

Isn't it the same with airtags? Your iphone will forward data about other people's airtags as long as you have upgraded to the latest ios. You can opt-out, but you need to know about it first. Same deal I think with sidewalk.

You’re right, it is.

I think it comes down to trust and a track record of commitment to privacy.

Also IMO apple handled the PR for airtags very well.

Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated

#132

Post by throwawayboise »

mistercow wrote: post #62

I think the tweet in the opening screenshot is simply wrong. I would argue that you almost always want paste to preserve the pasteboard formatting. Most copy/paste is within the same document, where you obviously want the odd bolded or italicized word to retain its formatting. But you don't notice those cases, because everything is working as expected. What you notice is that when you paste from an external source, t…

I almost never want paste to preserve any formatting, because I've almost never seen it work perfectly. If I need to reformat it anyway, I'd rather not have to clean up its messes first.

BTW in most programs that handle rich text, SHIFT-CTRL-V does a plain-text paste without the source formatting.

Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated

#133

Post by j45 »

dathinab wrote: post #65
hermannj314 wrote: post #9

Amazon recently turned on support for Amazon Sidewalk on all of their hardware in my home (convention) and decided it was fine to do this because I could opt out (configuration). That decision was the final straw for me. Every Amazon device is now unplugged, Prime membership and Amazon music canceled, no longer shopping on their site. Doing what is "easy for the average user" is not sufficient for me, some configurat…

I would argue there is a difference between "being opinionated about how to implement a use-case" + "being opinionated about focusing on a small set of use-cases" and "forcing new use-cases on the user". The article is about the former, Amazon Sidewalk about the later. Also nothing while being opinionated can be very use-full for product design there is no reason why people can't be opinionated in a "bad" way. What t…

Default opt in to all changes could be Amazon’s self interested and opinionated position.

The comment above can also be an opinionated response as well.

Saying a company is client centric, but then not.. can be a mixed signal. There is plenty of brainpower to allow customers to tailor and optimize their experience so are less likely to leave, especially influential power users.

Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated

#134

Post by philosopher1234 »

ccity88 wrote: post #11

I feel like I read something new every week on HN about design philosophy; make your product this way not that way, try to do this and not that, here's 10 examples of products that failed because of x, here's 5 products that were successful because of y - maybe it's time to realise that there's no monolithic overarching "right" way to design a product. This is how we ended up with the current trendy cohort of minimal…

>This is how we ended up with the current trendy cohort of minimalist apps with flat dark designs, with mobile apps that all look the same, with products that miss killer features for the sake of simplicity, with the annoying typefaces that all tech companies use that make it "trendy".

i like all these things, and am glad this is the way the world is.

Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated

#135

Post by throwawayboise »

arbuge wrote: post #17
jhunter1016 wrote: post #8

If you are chasing RFPs, propose and build everything that checks all the boxes. If you are a product company and building for people who will hopefully love your product, it’s your job to understand the customers, understand the data, and build the right solution rather than building ALL the solutions.

This goes some way to explaining why municipal and government software is such an unusable pile of crap for the most part.

I'll be honest, because most people who work for municipalities and other governments are not the best and brightest, and they will ask for a lot of stuff "because that's how we do it on paper" or other similar reasons, without much critical thinking.

Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated

#136

Post by throwawayboise »

mgkimsal wrote: post #29
MattGaiser wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Former municipal software engineer, that built a product to serve other municipalities. That, and nobody pushes back on what they order as you can just bill them more. We had governments move single buttons (literally, they wanted the stock application, but with one particular button on the right instead of the left), get to use a paint bucket to set colours throughout the application (not a theme, but customise by b…

> as you can just bill them more I've done a bit of municipal work, and had the opposite experience - there's almost always a fixed budget, and while people may ask for loads of changes, no one ever had authority to authorize a single dollar more for the project. It probably depends on the project and more likely the people involved, but "you can bill them more" isn't a given in all situations.

Depends on the municipality. Small ones don't have a lot of flexibility. Big ones (Chicago, etc.) have lots of wiggle room especially if you're willing to kick back some of it to an aldermans's preferred subcontractors, etc.

Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated

#137

Post by alpaca128 »

onion2k wrote: post #19
rob74 wrote: post #13

> Conventions create an opinionated product. Opinions create user delight. User delight creates successful businesses. The problem with opinionated products is people who have very strong opposite opinions. Go for example is a famously opinionated language - it even has a standardized way to format source code via go fmt which everyone uses. But if these opinions clash with the opinions of equally opinionated people,…

The problem with opinionated products is people who have very strong opposite opinions. Unopinionated products have to cater for everyone though, and that creates bloat and complexity. Those will kill a product quicker than limiting it to a small portion of the market that agrees with the opinion you choose.

> Unopinionated products have to cater for everyone though, and that creates bloat and complexity.

I don't think one has to lead to the other. Flexible/configurable software often also means extendable (and thus potentially smaller out of the box) software. If it's bloated from the start that's not because of a lack of opinions; in fact for me it makes the software more opinionated because it may come with a lot of stuff users don't need. For example Firefox is pretty flexible and extensible, you can even rearrange the UI, but it comes with things like Pocket that nobody asked for.

Imho programs shouldn't try to cater to everyone, but they should be flexible enough that they are able to if needed.

Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated

#138

Post by will4274 »

mhluongo wrote: post #26
Mauricebranagh wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's a pretty low bar for power users BTW. Google cloud is ok for "formatting your Christmas card list in Norwegian" to use a literary allusion. But when you come to writing specs and reports used by multiple teams word /excel is still by far the best solution.

Makes sense, that must be my Microsoft office products are winning at software shops /s Best for you, maybe. I haven't found a real use for either in the past 5 years writing software and running product. The only role in the org that has needed Excel over Sheets is finance, and the only time we touch Word is when we're dealing with outside legal and they aren't comfortable with anything but Word for redlines. Even t…

Why did they apologize? I have to say, this smells political - if Excel and Sheets are just two pieces of software, then there's no reason to apologize for liking one more than the other. For somebody at the partner level to apologize and ask for a change in a users' workflow - seems like catering to people who have a political issue with Microsoft, rather than judging on technical merits.

Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated

#139

Post by SubiculumCode »

hermannj314 wrote: post #9

Amazon recently turned on support for Amazon Sidewalk on all of their hardware in my home (convention) and decided it was fine to do this because I could opt out (configuration). That decision was the final straw for me. Every Amazon device is now unplugged, Prime membership and Amazon music canceled, no longer shopping on their site. Doing what is "easy for the average user" is not sufficient for me, some configurat…

I just cancelled my Prime as well. Too far. And I don't even have their hardware.

Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated

#140

Post by [deleted] »

pranau wrote: post #64
hermannj314 wrote: post #9

Amazon recently turned on support for Amazon Sidewalk on all of their hardware in my home (convention) and decided it was fine to do this because I could opt out (configuration). That decision was the final straw for me. Every Amazon device is now unplugged, Prime membership and Amazon music canceled, no longer shopping on their site. Doing what is "easy for the average user" is not sufficient for me, some configurat…

Can someone explain why there’s so much outrage against Amazon Sidewalk when it’s doing a similar thing to Apple’s Find My/AirTags which was met with almost universal praise?

[deleted]
Post reply on HN