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Want a killer product? Become more opinionated

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Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated

#141

Post by np- »

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?

1) A big thing is trust - people trust Apple to keep their data secure much more than they trust Amazon, especially when you contrast both company's main business model.

2) Apple's "Find My" was pitched first and foremost as a feature and benefit for the user. And the value proposition was very clear and useful from day 1. You can find your lost phone even in a place there is no signal. Now with Airtags you can find any device. It's easy to imagine a horror story where you lose your $1000 phone in a basement bar or drop it in a parking garage somewhere. Apple in general has better PR.

3) No one's losing their Alexa device. I mean for 99.99% of users it's never moving once it's placed. So what's the point of this feature? It's just pure revenue gain for Amazon with like zero benefit to the average user. They want to use our wifi purely for their benefit? Come on. I know there is Tile functionality, but it's still creepy - you're using my _home_ as a tracking beacon? At least when it's my phone, I'm on the move and could be anywhere.

Just to expand a bit on the last point - the way Apple's "Find my" works is that the only information shared is that there was an iPhone at some location and crossed paths with a lost item at that location. The way Amazon's Tile will work is that a lost item is crossing paths with an "anonymous beacon" which happens to reside in a very specific location.

In Apple's implementation, there is almost no way to personally identify whose iPhone made the detection. In Amazon's case, it's trivial to identify it - it's the beacon that's at the same place all the time, which happens to be your house.

Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated

#142

Post by loudtieblahblah »

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 feel like, supporting them or not with their store, it was always a no-brainer to not purchase smart, cloud connected doorbells and wire-tape speakers and litter my house with them.

I kinda hate my Roku even having a microphone button and my kid figuring out how to use it.

We're crossing lines that shouldn't be crossed, ripe for corporate/state abuse and we already have history and experience about the usage of tech being grown to continually spy on people one nudge at a time, that we shouldn't be fooled by this stuff.

but here we are, plenty of smart, educated, technical people who know that history, salivating at MOAR GADGETS THAT DO STUFFS.

Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated

#143

Post by loudtieblahblah »

throwawayboise wrote: post #132
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.

this. the sheer volume of times i have to paste text into a notepad or a URL bar or just any space that will lose the formatting, just to re-copy/paste it into some (usually MS) product that wants to preserve it is way higher than it should be.

Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated

#144

Post by cuddlybacon »

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 think you make a good point here:

* Copying formatting works well and is desired when it is done within an app but it is janky and undesired when the apps are different.

I furiously hates copying/pasting of formatting. After reflecting, the problems all exist when I'm pasting from one app to another.

I just think out of the apps I use, the ones where paste with formatting is the default (eg it's what CMD+V does) are the ones where I'm usually pasting from somewhere else.

Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated

#145

Post by akiselev »

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…

> What this article is about, and what most people mean when they say you should be more opinionated is that you should not be to generic, that you should focus on your core use-case and from a companies POV that is always a good idea IMHO. At least as long as you core use-case is the use-case people by your software for.

Nowadays I think the problem isn't a lack of opinions but people's opinions chasing messy (it not outright useless) data and feedback without a vision for what the product is. They become so obsessed about whether they could [implement this feature/expand to more markets/get more big clients/earn more revenue] according to X data ("because SCIENCE!") that they never stop to think whether they should.

IMO that's how opinionated people help build great products: by stopping cargo culting, scope creep, and desperate measures of all kinds that are backed by bad data. That doesn't mean that they know exactly what their team should be working on next sprint, but they do care enough to shut down attempts from other departments that would degrade the product, even if that means passing up short term gains that look good on paper due to customer feedback or usage data.

Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated

#146

Post by cuddlybacon »

thejosh wrote: post #52
gwbas1c wrote: post #45

About a year ago I wrote a Mac application to strip formatting out of copy-pasted text. (Note: I was mostly interested in getting an application in the store as a learning exercise.) In general, copying formatted text is a mess on Mac. (I haven't tried an equivalent Windows app, although I'm primarily a Windows developer.) The problem is that many of the data structures for formatted text don't preserve context. IE,…

Isn’t that ctrl+shift+v? It is for Linux and I think windows too?

On Mac, the apps I happened to check use cmd+shift+alt+v.

I checked MS Teams, Outlook, Mail.app, and Safari.

Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated

#147

Post by hellomyguys »

fnord77 wrote: post #94
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…

yes, lots of philosophy and little actual science (testing hypotheses etc)

Well I would argue the monolithic look on apps is a to some degree a byproduct of testing. It makes sense that most apps' buttons, layouts, design patterns look the same and are considered "easiest" to use by A/B testing standards. You don't have to learn anything new to use those designs.

Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated

#148

Post by mhluongo »

will4274 wrote: post #138
mhluongo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because it's a pain in the ass for us, their clients, to interface with their office software.

Note that this particular firm serves a ton of tech startups. I don't expect a firm that does, say, real estate financing hears many complaints from their clientele.

Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated

#149

Post by cbsmith »

dathinab wrote: post #102
cbsmith wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"forcing" isn't the right word though. They do have an opt-out. Making it an opt-out vs. an opt-in is very much "the former".

Given that most people won't even know what is happening without their consent it's not that different from forcing. Opt-out is NOT consent, consent requires you do know about it, at least somewhat understand it and then "say yes". Opt-out it's more like forcing with a way to defend yourself.

I didn't say that opt-out is consent... and no opt-out is opt-out, and forcing is forcing.

Can you imagine how silly it would sound to talk about all the "forcing" that MacOS and Windows do that you can change by going in to settings and changing it? Indeed, Apple has famously made tons of decisions for their users about what the reasonable defaults might be, and is praised for this; no one calls it forcing.

I get it. I don't like the defaults either. That doesn't mean you can just slap on whatever word has negative connotations and say that's what is happening.

Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated

#150

Post by jon-wood »

pdpi wrote: post #72
cma wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So both are opt out. Which one is worse?

The one that lets my neighbour look up kiddy porn over my connection.

I get the anger about Sidewalk, but this is absolutely not a thing you can do with it.

Sidewalk isn’t a wifi network that people can just connect to, it’s a LoRa radio. A low bandwidth, long range protocol. Devices connecting need to be pre-registered with Amazon, and can only communicate via an endpoint in AWS.

Even if someone somehow created a device for arbitrary web browsing via Sidewall, and put up with the incredibly slow connection speed, combined with strict limits on how much bandwidth can be consumed, all they get is a VPN immediately traceable to their AWS account.

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