Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive
1–10 of 185 posts
Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive
#2MS 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.
Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive
#3 s/OpenTable/Microsoft Word/g;
s/Microsoft Word/Microsoft Windows/g;Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive
#4This article makes a good point. Any switch to a new product has to exceed the cost / benefit ratio of the old one, and familiarity of staff in high turnover industries certainly factors in to that CBR. So, you don't need to make a product that's just "better" to compete in these industries, it needs to be _spectacularly_ better in order to convince business owners to invest the time in educating existing and new hires. An important point.
Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive
#5Can you not just clone the shitty product so existing training is still useful? Do software companies enforce copyrights on things like the location of buttons and the names of menu items?
Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive
#6MS 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.
Doing complex modelling in Excel is not a good idea. There is no way to do proper software engineering, so bugs are common and hard to find. For examples, see
Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive
#7MS 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.
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 spacing issue, why my chapter numbering was all messed up (the "solution" was to reformat each chapter heading with the same format it already had).
It has terrible default orphan/widow control, and editing anything graphical is a royal pain in the ass: the slightest wrong touch can throw your diagram into disarray. Those that "know" how to use it I've noticed seem to have near-infinite patience and knowledge of where all of Word's "land mines" are and how to avoid them.
People use it because it bundles in every obscure feature under the sun, so it's effectively the lowest common denominator when it comes to meeting an organizations' needs. And for those who already know how to use it, I suspect the sunk cost fallacy keeps them there.
Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive
#8This is a really, really, important point. How many times have you gotten an app or a tool, used it a few times, and then not ever used it again? If you are an early adopter type you probably have many times. Whether it is todo lists or pizza delivery, if you don't do it enough to ingrain the habit it doesn't stick. And once your head is filled with the cognitive load of day to day stuff you revert to your habits (which are not 'the new thing').
My favorite example is for this is Evernote, which I know a lot of people tried and never got anywhere with. If you don't have the habit of just sticking stuff in Evernote, stuff won't be there when you are looking for it, and your habit of using it will never develop because there is no "reward" for using it. And few people have the stamina to force themselves to use something long enough for the habit to kick in.
That is why businesses, apps, and others need to have some mechanism that helps remind you for at least a month to repeatedly use the product, in order to train your subconscious in its availability. And it is why customer acquisition is so hard.
Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive
#9MS 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.
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…
In defense of Word: The vast majority of people don't realize just how massive Word is in terms of it's feature set and it's complexity, Word is a fully furnished publishing program and most people treat it like a rich text editor.
I still have and use it irregularly for a few things, but if you just need to edit text with formatting, use TextEdit. Using Word to type up a memo is like using a jet engine to cook a TV dinner.
Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive
#10Can you not just clone the shitty product so existing training is still useful? Do software companies enforce copyrights on things like the location of buttons and the names of menu items?
Why change to the clone?
Established product has staying power, network effects, etc... The new guy, with just a copy is offering what exactly?
Risk = dollars.
If it's a clone with a bunch of new features, those new features all come with a cost of change.