I still prefer Ant to Maven because with Ant it does what I tell it to do and nothing more.
Maven is too slow and I cannot change it.
Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
21–30 of 156 posts
Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
#22If 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.
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 button), want different fonts, want the order of items in a table swapped, etc.
They tend to get whatever they want, whether or not what they spec out leads to a messy pile.
Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
#23> I will design it for the average user rather than the power user. But do power users or average users drive purchasing and ensure market share? I was at a company that tried to switch to Google Cloud over Office 365. Know what saved MSFT? The Excel and Word power users. Average users had no opinion, but the power users all wanted Office.
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.
Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
#24I 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…
Same, and with each new article the X or Y reasons get that little bit more abstract. Eventually I'm sure we'll see articles that say "They failed because they didn't _care_" or "They succeeded becasuse they _listened_" and that's as much depth as we'll get from them.
Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
#25> 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,…
Being opinionated is okay if your product is interoperable with others. Then people have the choice between your product and its potential replacements so having choices within your product is not as important. I guess Go is okay because we can afford multiple library ecosystems and programs written in different languages can interoperate.
Unfortunately for-profit companies really don't like giving their customers the choice to switch to a competitor.
Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
#26> I will design it for the average user rather than the power user. But do power users or average users drive purchasing and ensure market share? I was at a company that tried to switch to Google Cloud over Office 365. Know what saved MSFT? The Excel and Word power users. Average users had no opinion, but the power users all wanted Office.
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 then, junior partners have apologized and said they've tried to convince the firm to switch.
Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
#27> I will design it for the average user rather than the power user. But do power users or average users drive purchasing and ensure market share? I was at a company that tried to switch to Google Cloud over Office 365. Know what saved MSFT? The Excel and Word power users. Average users had no opinion, but the power users all wanted Office.
Anecdotal and a complete digression from your point - I consider myself a poweruser of excel/word/etc and I loathe the online variants in O365. There's quite a few features missing in both that require me to use the offline variant that are both supported in GSuite. Table of Contents generator in Word is probably the biggest one I hate that is missing, and the clipboard nonsense isn't great either, but last time I used it in gsuite it wasn't a problem.
Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
#28> I will design it for the average user rather than the power user. But do power users or average users drive purchasing and ensure market share? I was at a company that tried to switch to Google Cloud over Office 365. Know what saved MSFT? The Excel and Word power users. Average users had no opinion, but the power users all wanted Office.
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.
Do you have any examples of what is superior in O365? As my other reply states I've found it to be the opposite - GSuite supports _more_ than MS does online.
Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
This goes some way to explaining why municipal and government software is such an unusable pile of crap for the most part.
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.
Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
#30Instead of "opinionated", perhaps this word is a better fit: Paternalistic (adjective) (of people in authority) making decisions for other people rather than letting them take responsibility for their own lives Source: Cambridge Dictionary
> rather than letting them take responsibility for their own lives It would seem to me people sometimes don't want to bother figuring out what's the best way of doing X, therefore I feel it is still valuable for someone to do the research and productize his know-how on "the best way of doing X".
There's nothing wrong with having good defaults, just with not being able to override them. "Opinionated" usually means latter.