I don't think we should chase simplicity/austerity in our products, but we should chase elegance. Ideally, features should compose so their utility multiplies instead of sums. The program should be fast and have a UI that's easy to learn. That kind of thing. There's a difference between being big and being bloated.
Users only care about 20% of your application
181–190 of 199 posts
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
As best I can tell we've never sold the same product twice. Product roadmap is "whatever the last person I spoke to asked for." And tech debt maintaining a grab bag of 5,000 almost-but-not-quite-entirely-production-grade "must have" features that the customers rarely if ever use despite claiming that not having it was a deal breaker, is, well, debty.
The best decision I ever made was moving from a company that acted on the whims of whomever the sales team spoke to last, to a company that had a strong product vision and was happy to say no to their customers on occasion. It's a lot less exhausting when you're not changing priorities every quarter. You also avoid the soul crushing experience of working really hard, crunching to get a feature out, only to realise yo…
Every quarter ? Sometimes I would settle for every week.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would have expected that consumer GPUs still have higher volume, but that Datacenter GPUs have much, much higher margin and therefore significantly higher revenue and profit. Is that not the case?
If Nvidia made SoC GPUs for mobile devides, then they'd might have higher volume, depending on market share. But gaming and workstation PCs that benefit from a high-performance discrete GPU are a pretty niche market these days, whether laptop or desktop.
It powers the nintendo switch.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I don't really mean it as a criticism -- my list is stuff that I think is incredibly painful to build, ends up taking >80% of dev time, is messy/spidery, and which I've spent a lot of my life explaining the necessity of to (typically junior) engineers. In short, this is the kind of stuff that I think fits the parent comment's categorization: it drives enterprise sales, engineers hate building it, and it never r…
On top of that, you have to get messaging right. Here’s an example from consumer: I’m looking for a TV. I buy after careful research, so there’s a 90+% chance I’ll end up with the TV I have in mind before walking into the store. One device we frequently use (Linux) doesn’t send the “switch to me” hdmi signal when we start using it, so the “switch input” button on the remote is crucial. The front runner has a One Butt…
Soo... What TV are describing? It sounds just like what I want.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is a lot simpler to count the opposite. Working with styles is relatively complicated (not hard, but distinct form pure wysiwyg picking font&size and hoc) and for most small documents doesn't have much of a benefit in the result. For larger documents or professional work it's relevant, but by then people are used to adhoc ways
Styles are also b0rken in interesting ways. Have you ever tried to change the default style to justified, and headings to left-aligned? How does that work out for you in tables? Table styles in general lack all kinds of support. Auto-numbering in headings can theoretically be customized, but good luck trying to change it without following a step-by-step guide that ends up with the default numbering. Using styles is s…
Yup. Yup yup yup. Years ago (so I'm open to the idea that it's got better in the last decade or so - but if we're talking about Office, I will doubt your assertion) I used styles religiously, because I was a younger man who took pride in doing things The Right Way. Eventually, however, the number of times styles screwed themselves (or so it seemed) up eventually exceeded my patience, or my time available, to debug them. Now, I do it ad hoc, and haven't had page three look significantly different than page twelve in years.
If you want me to do it The Right Way, make sure that's a happy path, or I'm going to stop doing it.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#18620%? I imagine most of us use 0.1% of Jira. And it's the same 0.1% for all users in the org. The app is massive, millions of lines of code and we're effectively using like 60 SQL statements that run within it. create issue, edit issue, move issue, update issue status, close sprint, repeat
Why don't you use something cheaper then?
Yes! I have asked the management that question at the last 4 companies I was at. The answer is always the same - its what everyone is used to.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
The parent comment seems to imply that roughly 1/5 of their user base each used a different 1/5 of the product. This implies that every feature was genuinely valuable in driving revenue - or at least customer acquisition!
That doesn’t mean feature paid itself off if you invest with idea that it will be useful for more than 1/5 of users and when feature brings single customer and is marginally useful for other customers. Then also you have ongoing costs of maintaining the feature that no one usually accounts for. Even if customer participated financially into creating the feature when they leave you are left with maintenance.
Yeah, there's definitely something to be said about building a large feature for a single customer. It didn't sound like that was the situation here.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#188I kinda miss the unix philosophy... one tool for one job. A PDF reader should read PDFs, there's no need for it to have its own (possibly paid) cloud service and an AI chat bot. I do get why some integrations are beneficial (eg. office software with text editing, spreadsheets and a database, so you can generate eg. letters with data from a database, etc... but every service needing its own cloud and adding a useless…
I think you have the wrong model for apps. Doing one thing is almost always having the full document CRUD loop. Once you have a pdf viewer users want rotating pages, then bookmarks, then highlights, then form filling, etc. That “just a pdf reader” is strictly worse than every pdf editor (which have to meet the minimum requirement of a pdf reader). Apple’s Automator and Preview combo for me are indispensible and perfe…
There is pdftk.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
The best decision I ever made was moving from a company that acted on the whims of whomever the sales team spoke to last, to a company that had a strong product vision and was happy to say no to their customers on occasion. It's a lot less exhausting when you're not changing priorities every quarter. You also avoid the soul crushing experience of working really hard, crunching to get a feature out, only to realise yo…
I don’t mind this as long as the sales team and management allow the correct amount of time to build it in a maintainable way. The reality is I only get paid because of those deals, and the post deal tech-debt sprint never happens. So the work has to get done and if sales doesn’t give time for it to be done properly then in 3-6 months velocity will drop and the sales pipeline will dry up. Any company that can’t under…
HN is largely a US ivory tower forum, lot of good discussions happen here - but many folks are coming from the costal endless “VC” money mindset where company revenue is not much a consideration because they just move on to the next high paying gig when the money dries up.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#190At one SaaS I worked at, I spent a day or two on a foolhardy initiative to analyze our users based on the subset of features they actively used (hoping to reign in the complexity of the product to a few core archetypes we could design for, ideally eliminating some of the more annoying features on the way). The results weren't any better than a weighted random choice. Beyond the login page (and even that had a few cus…
That’s why pushing back on features is important. It is super hard to remove them once they are in. Most of the time it goes way that sales people promise something you build it „because that’s going to be great huge customer” - but after a year or 2 years that huge company moves away because people who originally wanted features moved to other jobs or departments and you are left supporting something some other cust…
> It is super hard to remove them once they are in
Obligatory xkcd reference: