151–160 of 185 posts
Maybe the refactoring and/or innovation aversion I've seen in many software projects has to do mostly with this institutional knowledge the article talks about.
It doesn't matter how crappy a project is or how many defects the team agrees a project has... introducing a different solution is seen as prohibitively risky or costly, given the amount of time people has spent learning and putting in place workarounds.
MS Office, which to this day has features its competitors don't, isn't really a great example.
Indeed MS Office can be a pain the neck, but I haven't found a better product in the same market category (i.e. desktop WYSIWYG office suites)
Can anyone with startup experience talk about the effectiveness of the method that Simon Sinek promotes [1] as a way to break through a market filled with "shitty" products? [1]: https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_insp...
So if you want to go the marketing route, you're going to be spending a lot more on ads, pr, etc to get your entire message out there.
Despite what he says, Apple did not follow the path he says. Apple in its early days followed the sales-based approach. It wasnt until they were making money that they turned to a marketing-based approach. This is a very normal route for companies to take.
[Edit: now that you understand this is marketing vs sales.. you can find plenty of articles on this by pg, jessica livingston and others.]
I think perhaps the writer is using some cognitive dissonance to unfairly dismiss the market leaders as being "shitty". Any time I have used OpenTable (as a user) it has been a really great experience. It does exactly what you expect it to do, and it's always a very smooth experience. OpenTable has been around since 1998, so I imagine they are the market leader because they were the first to market and their product…
Look at any mid to large scale company and their internal ticketing systems, HR systems, travel booking systems, time tracking systems.
The last company I worked for, did not upgrade the employee laptop OS from Windows XP for over 10 years as their legacy ticketing system wasnt supported on the newer versions. Obviously this was a cost issue of the new ticketing platform but also the unknown cost of retraining the whole company. Additionally people and organizations get comfortable with the "evil you know".
Frankly as a new entrepreneur this is also incredibly hard to test in the market. Most early customer development will give you signals that they want it, but won't act when it comes time to switch.
This is why you see SaaS services succeeding by cracking few employees or small teams at a time. Think of Yammer, Slack etc.
They don't need the whole company or department to change. Just few employees or the team can use it and slowly infect the rest of the company. That would be the only way to overcome this problem (although not all products can do this).
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I should do this. Thanks for the idea! I've found that a lot of the time, when I'm on any sort of social media (including here on HN), I will open the reply box, type in a reply, read it, then discard it. I certainly have the need to get it out of my system, but I usually don't feel like sharing (I'm quite self-conscious most of the time). A small text file is an idea I should have thought of myself, but now the seed…
Fellow comment discarder here. You wouldn't guess by some of the long-winded replies I've made across various sites but that's a big part of it I think. I often write comments as if I'm having a conversation in my head so there's not a clear structure like you'd find in an essay or "proper" written piece. Then I start thinking of all the ways someone could miss the point and end up rambling. See? Almost doing it now.
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Indeed MS Office can be a pain the neck, but I haven't found a better product in the same market category (i.e. desktop WYSIWYG office suites)
That's not because MS Office is great. It's because it's really capital-intensive to build an office suite, and no VC is going to fund you to compete with MS.
If shitty products tend to thrive it's probably more often due to industry lifecycles, incumbent dominance, solidification of position via acquisitions etc, and the difficulties of innovating in large organisations
While we are all going off-topic, I'd like to see a "collapse thread" feature on HN. Quite often the comments page is dominated by a tangential discussion as seen here.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...
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For me, this is Twitter. I'm mostly a reader. Writing tweets was incredibly unsatisfying so far and I never got into any kind of habit with it. Sometimes, I have the urge to simply get some random thoughts out of my brain. Sounds like a perfect thing for Twitter, except with Twitter, I have the expectation that my stuff somehow gets noticed. So instead, I use JOURNAL.TXT for that. I write the thought down, it's out o…
Some years ago I came up with a system which I still use extensively. I added these lines to my .bashrc file: log(){ pushd ~/logs; echo >> $*; date >> $*; cat >> $*; } So whenever I have a piece of information that I'd like to keep - a thought on a project, a word from a foreign language I am learning, ideas for christmas gifts, some bash-fu and so on... - I fire up a terminal (mod+return, in my case) and enter log f…