71–80 of 199 posts
This is why AI development will be huge in the “Buy vs Build” space… Businesses (with a capable tech team)can build the 20% of the SaaS they need, and stop paying for the 80% every single month.
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It's crazy how well Joel Spolsky's works aged. Some of them ended up proving wrong (like he once predicted that making graphic cards would be a very thin margin business[0]), but most are still true today. Probably truer than when they were written. [0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v In his defense, by the time 'video chips' were totally different things from today's mighty 5080.
There's a few that have not, like his stance on rewrites. Apparently, if Joel's guru status had been properly respected, Netscape would be a powerhouse today, running on its Navigator codebase, because "The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed. There’s nothing wrong with it." https://www.joelonsoftwar…
In our real timeline, Netscape did rewrite. During the rewrite their market share halved. And they died a few years later. So yeah, the lesson here is if you're okay to let your company just die and rebuild a new one, it's perfectly fine to rewrite the whole codebase.
I like to call this approach MISS (MISS – Make It Stupid, Simple) or better: Make It Stupid Simple, To Experience Revenue = M.I.S.S.T.E.R. i.e. keep removing features until the idea fits in your head, the value can be explained concisely to a small group of people to whom it'll just 'click'. https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/miss-make-it-stupid-simple/
> Kagi didn't need to beat Google for everyone; they just needed to serve that specific slice of users perfectly. They focused on being the ideal 20% for people whose 20% Google was ignoring. Yes, this is actually a critical insight into how to find product-market fit
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Companies frequently moan about "re-training", but in my experience users of e.g. Word, or Excel don't need re-training, they need training. A large number of people how "Knows Word", can't use any of the feature beyond changing the font and font size, not even the "headings". For product like Microsoft Office (or whatever it's called these days) 20% is ludicrously high. I'd guess more in the 1% - 2% range. Especiall…
My state (Germany) recently switched away from Microsoft to open source solutions and public offices have week long delays due to employees not finding buttons they were used to. They expect a 1 to 1 copy of the Microsoft product. Training should be software independent. People need to be educated with computer basics, if they work in a field that requires the usage of computers. Having to go to some public office in…
Pretty similar article to some old Spolsky blogposts: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv... https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/12/09/simplicity/
It's crazy how well Joel Spolsky's works aged. Some of them ended up proving wrong (like he once predicted that making graphic cards would be a very thin margin business[0]), but most are still true today. Probably truer than when they were written. [0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v In his defense, by the time 'video chips' were totally different things from today's mighty 5080.
CNNs and LLMs became feasible and viable much later. People in the 1500s would also have bet on the automobile and the Wright brothers. Right after drinking coffee from their microwave.
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Users are complete human beings, and their interaction with your product is a tiny slice of their life. They use your product to solve problems that they have. If the 80% of your product that they aren't using doesn't relate to their problems, they won't use it, even if they know that it exists. For example, I've never used Microsoft Word's mail merge function, even though I've known it exists for probably twenty yea…
> their interaction with your product is a tiny slice of their life Low cognitive load should be a major goal, and that doesn't mean the app can't be feature rich. Make the app very fast, or at least hide latency from the user. No esoteric icons, instead default to plain text. If you have icons, no artificial delay between mouse-over and tooltip. No smooth scrolling. No excessive whitespace. No elements that move aro…
Very true. But then you start selling to Enterprise and everything changes. Because one missing "hygiene feature"* can tank the the whole deal. And every Enterprise has a different one. *like a toilet. It needs to be there. You use it 3 minutes per day. If it is not there, the house is uninhabitable.