I'm building things for internal users, and they are quite demanding. Many features don't get used often (as is obvious), but may be critical for serving different clients. The software is also open to external users, and they really stick to the basics.
Users only care about 20% of your application
81–90 of 199 posts
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
> today's mighty 5080 Consumer GPUs really are not where the money is. It’s only a tiny fraction of Nvidia’s revenue, and much lower margin. Datacenter GPUs are where the volume and margins are.
You’re not wrong, but Nvidia’s consumer cards also still have pretty massive profit margins all things considered. It’s just they have obscene profit margins in the data center cards that make the consumer cards look small by comparison.
Yeah but that's mostly because they dominate the benchmarks. And part of it is better hardware engineering but also part of it is coupling with optimized software bits that they pushed to devs very well.
It was very well done and strategic on their part but realistically without that they are not that much better than AMD and the margins would be much smaller if it had 1-to-1 compatibility as an x86 has.
Also, since improvements have been plateauing and entry level is becoming enough for more and more people the margins are going to diminish even more, high-end GPU is going to become even more niche overtime IMO.
So, I'd say he is not wrong in spirit, the timeline is just bigger than expected.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#83Very 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.
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 your time was given away free to land a deal. Sometimes a deal that fell through anyway.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#84Pretty 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.
He also pioneered 'velocity tracking' for SWE tasks. Seems like a major disservice in hind sight. But then again I don't think I can't blame him for Agile and Jira.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#85> I often destroyed our home computer when I was a kid. Armed with only 2GB of storage, I'd constantly hunt for files to delete to save space.
Many people have a similar experience, but it's amusing that statements like this can roughly indicate your age and the systems you were dealing with... Mine is 40 MB.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#86Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#87> I often destroyed our home computer when I was a kid. Armed with only 2GB of storage, I'd constantly hunt for files to delete to save space. Many people have a similar experience, but it's amusing that statements like this can roughly indicate your age and the systems you were dealing with... Mine is 40 MB.
This is true for folks from the wild and woolly days of... before 2005 (I think?).
But if you think about what's happening today, things have plateaued. Most people since at least 2005 probably have laptops, and generally those hover around 250GB, 500GB, 1TB of storage (with the bigger difference being top of the line/more expensive configurations, than with generational differences). More likely people now identify with 64GB, 128GB, 256GB for smartphones and tablets.
We will soon reach a point of mass market computation where the "mature" times are longer than the early years (1980 - 2005 = 25 years, 2005 - present day = 20 years and counting).
Large leaps, at least in storage, don't really happen (50MB to 1GB is > consequential, 500GB to 1TB is meh.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#88Yes but not all users care about the same 20%.
Tell me you didn't read the article without telling me you didn't read the article.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#89Earlier 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…
Even if you weed out the willy nilly stuff, you will bump into Enterprise users that are actually correct.
They will mention something you know you should have added but always wrote off as "bloat" or "not really really really needed". Those things start happening more and more the moment you are doing $100K plus deals.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#90Earlier 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…
I worked at a place that did it a third way: The CEO had a product vision that changed every month.