Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#171

Post by stevesearer » Sat, Jan 30, 2016, 5:17 AM UTC

WA wrote: post #60

Tyr42 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, I have a blog, but I have no stats and no comment box, and I'm pretty sure my most frequent reader is myself. But it really does help to write down all the things, even if the only audience is future-you.

future-you , I like this. I recently stumbled upon futureme.org It's a service you can use to send yourself an email in, say, 5 years. Around christmas, I wrote myself an email* to read in 10 years. There's something quite intriguing about making a bunch of predictions. [*]: That email actually only contains a sentence: "Hey, here's something you need to read today. Search your journal for $RANDOM_UNIQUE_STRING and y…

My personal blog gets very little traffic but I love going back and reading my old posts from 10 years ago. To me it is a very similar behavior to looking back at old photos I have taken.

Posts don't have to be well-written to mean something in the future in the same way that mediocre photos can carry quite a bit of feeling and emotion when you look at them after some years.

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#172

Post by ThomPete » Sat, Jan 30, 2016, 6:21 AM UTC

cpncrunch wrote: post #170

ThomPete wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes this has nothing to do with the customer. This has to do with the waiters, hostesses etc who know how to use the system and to get them to us another system would take time to learn.

So what issues are there on the restaurant side?

Its not issues its just what people are used to?

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#173

Post by detaro » Sat, Jan 30, 2016, 7:14 AM UTC

FussyZeus wrote: post #150

detaro wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To stay with wacky imagery, using Word to do high-quality publishing work is like carving wood with a spoon. It's kinda possible, but takes unnecessarily long, you'll break your tool a few times and the end result doesn't look all that great. (It's actually used in many publishing workflows, but for the early stages, where all you want is a rich text editor with the ability to do diffs. Typography and layout is done…

I've seen numerous examples to the contrary, I'm willing to grant it isn't the best publishing tool out there (far from it) but if you get someone who's properly trained, you can get some very good looking documents out of it. Also very useful for smaller mass mailers and the like, where you don't have the budget for a full feature publishing suite (or the need).

You are right, I was thinking more in a direction of books, magazines and other more complex works. "high-quality" should probably read "high-complexity" or something

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#174

Post by ziszis » Sat, Jan 30, 2016, 2:17 PM UTC

Every new product needs to overcome the formula "product value >> adoption cost".

You can simplify and call OpenTable shitty, but they met this threshold with their customers. Their customer looked at their product and said, it's new and different, but it is worth it.

If you can't displace an existing solution you haven't got it right.

If the value is significantly greater and it is only about UI familiarity there are many ways around it. One way is to emulate the UI of the product you are displacing. This famously happened in the Word vs. WordPerfect wars.

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#175

Post by tiatia » Sat, Jan 30, 2016, 4:56 PM UTC

melvinmt wrote: post #125

zer0th wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> So either the file already exists and I thus add to it or a new file is created instantly. If you want the same thing but want to do it in an app instead of manually in the terminal you should check out Notational Velocity ( http://notational.net ).

Looks interesting.

But only MacOS? No Linux?

Encrypted database? I once tried a password keeper. I think it was called xpassword or something like that. After having a corrupted database twice within days, I pass.

I you want privacy your HDD should be encrypted anyway.

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#176

Post by makecheck » Sat, Jan 30, 2016, 9:15 PM UTC

Bad software survives because major investments by large organizations were made in tools that had closed (and even platform-specific) file formats. At the time, maybe no one fully understood the gravity of the investment they were making. Since the data is hard to interpret consistently, competition is practically impossible.

Regulation of software is overdue. I can think of a few rules off the bat that would make a huge difference in spurring the development of quality software:

1. New software files such as documents must be stored in a format that can be read without ambiguity by modern machines, adhering to all regulations.

2. Executable specifications for all interpretations of file formats must be provided publicly, since broadly-available cross-platform execution environments (e.g. Python) are now widely available. In other words, you're not allowed to obfuscate what your file format does by publishing a 500 page document to explain how a single spreadsheet row is interpreted; you must instead provide, for example, a short Python script to illustrate the exact behavior, that anyone on any system can inspect and run.

3. Auditors must be able to correlate your software's interpretation of files with your executable specifications. Any discrepancies require the software to be updated, for as far back as issues have been found.

4. Software is prohibited from re-saving any file in an older format that does not adhere to regulated behavior. Users are not permitted to avoid this type of auto-upgrade, any more than they are permitted to continue wiring their houses with last century's electrical codes.

5. Software may not depend on the behavior of machines or methods that are impractical to obtain (e.g. "what Windows 95 used to do here"). If existing formats have such restrictions, they must upgrade according to the step above.

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#177

Post by melvinmt » Sat, Jan 30, 2016, 9:32 PM UTC

tiatia wrote: post #175

melvinmt wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So either the file already exists and I thus add to it or a new file is created instantly. If you want the same thing but want to do it in an app instead of manually in the terminal you should check out Notational Velocity ( http://notational.net ).

Looks interesting. But only MacOS? No Linux? Encrypted database? I once tried a password keeper. I think it was called xpassword or something like that. After having a corrupted database twice within days, I pass. I you want privacy your HDD should be encrypted anyway.

Encryption is optional. Online syncing (w/ Simplenote) is optional.

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#178

Post by rrrx3 » Sun, Jan 31, 2016, 1:06 AM UTC

makecheck wrote: post #176

Bad software survives because major investments by large organizations were made in tools that had closed (and even platform-specific) file formats. At the time, maybe no one fully understood the gravity of the investment they were making. Since the data is hard to interpret consistently, competition is practically impossible. Regulation of software is overdue. I can think of a few rules off the bat that would make a…

I love the thrust of your argument, but I think we all know how pragmatically, this will never happen any time soon. Could you imagine a "Bureau of Software Fidelity" or somesuch? We can't even get the post office to deliver mail regularly in some parts of the country, and that's been their primary function for over 100 years.

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#179

Post by Dr_tldr » Sun, Jan 31, 2016, 2:46 AM UTC

emodendroket wrote: post #134

Dr_tldr wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So would you say that your description and expectation of how people use Word matches Microsoft's marketing materials for it?

Who cares? I thought we were talking about the quality of the tool and not the marketing.

Nope, read all the comments above to understand why you're drawing a false distinction and missing the point here.

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#180

Post by oxplot » Sun, Jan 31, 2016, 11:09 AM UTC

rgbrenner wrote: post #153

oxplot wrote: post #32

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...

What Simon says is actually marketing 101.. they teach this in undergrad intro marketing (without all the bs about 'greatness', etc). The problem with it when it comes to startups/small businesses, is that it's expensive. If you want to go that route, you need to get out the entire message - A + B + C. Whereas, the sales-based approach he's criticizing, you only need to get out C and part of B. So if you want to go t…

Are you sure about it being marketing 101 and not 901? I can clearly see 100% of ads I've seen over the past month from established or younger companies doing exactly what Simon is criticizing.