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Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

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Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#51

Post by soylentcola »

Marcus316 wrote: post #20
WA wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#52

Post by zeveb »

popmystack wrote: post #16
colanderman wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Word certainly is, at least on OS X. Within an hour of my first time using it in a decade last week, I caused it to beachball for five minutes straight by clicking a single button (select all text of a given style). It then took me over an hour to figure out why my TOC entries had no spacing between their numbers and titles (hint: it wasn't the spacing setting), and another hour to figure out why, after I "fixed" the…

I wouldn't call Word's features obscure. They may not be relevant to you, but it is an extremely powerful publishing tool.

For real publishing, I think TeX is still the state-of-the-art. It still produces the best-looking documents put on paper (granted, one needs to give it a decent font to do so…).

Pity that it's so difficult to do, say, bilingual books with one language on one side and the other on the other, with page elements lined up neatly. For that, Word is probably the easiest — but it looks terrible.

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#53

Post by Shorel »

thedevil wrote: post #29
geori wrote: post #2

MS Office (specifically Excel) is not a shitty product. There's a reason why it has a larger monopoly with finance types Wall Street than Google does with search. Power users can quickly build powerful financial models with it.

In a past life, I made (very expensive) spreadsheets for a living. And though I don't like most Microsoft products, I'm pretty sure that Excel was built by God himself (or at least He was the lead dev or the PM).

I think the PM was Joel Spolsky.

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#54

Post by drdeca »

mentos wrote: post #14

Imagine facebook is a spherical magnet with ten thousand small lead balls clung to it. If you're trying to create a better magnet it can't just be the same as facebook's. Putting the same magnet near facebook's will only collect a small handful of peripheral users. If you want to capture the critical mass you have to energize a magnet with an attractive force so great that it will begin to vibrate users close to the…

... why lead though? I don't think lead generally sticks to magnets?

I mean unless you meant lead for some particular reason, that doesn't really matter and this comment just becomes useless nitpicking (and by becomes I mean always was), but I'm trying to justify making this comment to myself, and I come up with the justification that I really don't understand why you picked lead.

Is it because of the density?

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#55

Post by iofj »

adrianN wrote: post #19
eterm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except "proper software engineering" would mean whatever is being built simply never gets built. In many cases it's better to get somewhere quickly with excel then work out if "proper software engineering" is required than never get off the ground because engineering something is too difficult. Think of excel like lego. Someone can quickly build something out of lego. Now if someone tried to build a cathedral from le…

Just like I wouldn't want to live in a house built from LEGO, I'm somewhat wary of Excel models as the basis for investment strategies in major banks. The problem with the quick and hacky solution is that it's never replaced, because that would cost money, and the current solution "looks like it works".

However the excel solution has a lot of things going for it :

1) applications/reports built by the people designing and understanding the underlying needs and inner workings of whatever they're offering. Whilst very good programmers can match this (given enough - that's a lot - time), average programmers won't even try.

2) excel sheets require nowhere near the manpower required for your alternative. That factors into a cost-benefit analysis that may not favor real development.

3) Speed of development. Markets change. Investments change. Sometimes literally in minutes. Anything involving more than 1-2 people who are intimately involved in the strategy itself cannot possibly keep up.

4) Excel is in fact a pure functional programming language [1]. Unless you deeply understand excel I wouldn't be so quick to call it stupid. There are entire classes of bugs that simply can't exist in excel spreadsheets that are regularly found in programs.

[1] http://ndc-london.com/talk/pure-functional-programming-in-ex...

These sheets are pretty good. You can really get nice app ideas from some of them: http://www.exinfm.com/free_spreadsheets.html

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#56

Post by someguydave »

someguydave wrote: post #50
fumar wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft Office (by the way 2016 is a pretty solid software suite) is not thriving because of institutional knowledge. Office is great because users in most business settings can quickly pick up any of its applications (learn how to use it) and apply the same learnings to the rest of the suite, personal knowledge with a small learning curve. Also, tools like Excel are malleable and useable for most users in a compan…

> Office is great because users in most business settings can quickly pick up any of its applications My experience is that 'users in business settings' absolutely refuse to consider any alternatives, mainly because of two 'fear factors': 1.) "Everyone else in my industry uses Microsoft Office products so I must as well" 2.) (Usually unstated explicitly) "Learning an alternative is going to cost me time and money and…

To the downvoters: I apologize for expressing an opinion that differs from yours.

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#57

Post by mikeash »

FussyZeus wrote: post #28
marcosdumay wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be incredibly powerful (for what use case?) and everything. But it's an incredibly bad rich text editor. Word can't keep a list straight.

That's akin to saying "this screwdriver sucks as a hammer." You're using it wrong.

When you go to the hardware store and ask for something to pound nails, they give it to you. When you ask people what they use to pound nails, they say they use this. When you're hired to pound nails, they often insist that you pound nails with this. 99.9% of the people who use this on a regular basis use it exclusively to pound nails.

Given that context, it makes little sense to say, that's unfair, it's really a screwdriver.

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#58

Post by riquito »

geori wrote: post #2

MS Office (specifically Excel) is not a shitty product. There's a reason why it has a larger monopoly with finance types Wall Street than Google does with search. Power users can quickly build powerful financial models with it.

> There's a reason why it has a larger monopoly ...

It IS good, for sure, but let's not forget about everything done by Microsoft to ensure that nobody else could edit reliably their files while locking the world with .doc, .ppt, .xls. The competitors never stood a chance.

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#59

Post by gherkin0 »

drdeca wrote: post #54
mentos wrote: post #14

Imagine facebook is a spherical magnet with ten thousand small lead balls clung to it. If you're trying to create a better magnet it can't just be the same as facebook's. Putting the same magnet near facebook's will only collect a small handful of peripheral users. If you want to capture the critical mass you have to energize a magnet with an attractive force so great that it will begin to vibrate users close to the…

... why lead though? I don't think lead generally sticks to magnets? I mean unless you meant lead for some particular reason, that doesn't really matter and this comment just becomes useless nitpicking (and by becomes I mean always was), but I'm trying to justify making this comment to myself, and I come up with the justification that I really don't understand why you picked lead. Is it because of the density?

My guess is he just wasn't thinking about that, so he made an error.

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#60

Post by WA »

Tyr42 wrote: post #45
WA wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually about to do this. I have a bunch of first posts so far. But with a blog, the expectation is very similar: If I put in the effort to write (elaborate) blog posts, I expect some kind of return (views, maybe even comments). I don't want to put private thoughts in my blog. And not all thoughts are thought through. I want to use this blog as a recycling container for comments and ideas I post in communities.…

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 you'll find an entry written 10 years ago for you by your former self."

Do you put in any effort to make it readable for others? I imagine this is a significant part of blogging.

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