15 ms·

Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

237 points by deapu 11y ago

geori 11y ago
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.
- someone7x 11y ago
  I've known a handful of people that have become full-time programmers after achieving proficiency in Excel. It's a product that many people enjoy using and mastering.
- adrianN 11y ago
  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 http://www.eusprig.org/horror-stories.htm http://www.eusprig.org/horror-stories.htm
  - CPLX 11y ago
    A complex model in Excel is software engineering. The degree to which it is "proper" of course, is situational.
  - crispyambulance 11y ago
    So? Many great projects start out as excel spreadsheets: someone has a problem, solves it with excel, then goes on to solve other problems with that spreadsheet. People use it and become dependent on it, but over time the thing becomes intractable. At that point in time, the functionality of the spreadsheet gets implemented by actual developers into some "engineered application." If you are suggesting to NOT start with excel, then propose another solution-- but good luck getting anyone to use it. The key thing is, no one wants to engage "software engineers $$$" to solve a problem that lands on their desk which they handle by themselves.
    - osullivj 11y ago
      And once some devs turn it into an "engineered application" the change cycle jumps from minutes or hours to days, weeks or even months.
      - TheLogothete 11y ago
        Shh! Your logic and practical experience is not welcomed. We like to scream with self-righteousness from our software engineering high horses here. Software engineers know best and everybody else is wrong because he doesn't know any better, since he has a limited perspective.
      - cm2187 11y ago
        or years. I often have the fantasy to write "Powered by COBOL" below the logo of my company.
  - eterm 11y ago
    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 lego, you might suggest that they find an architect and do some proper house building, but without lego they would never have tried. And chances are they're not building a cathedral.
    - elcapitan 11y ago
      There's actually an interesting gap between 'building some model in Excel' and 'moving on into a programming model where code and data are separated'. Like generating model code in some normal programming language from a spreadsheet.
      - eterm 11y ago
        Does VBA fill that gap? I once worked on a system where one of the more important parts of the business was a system of VBA modules in an access file. One of my more important contributions as a fresh graduate entering the workplace was to get people to copy the file from the network share to a local drive before running. Run-times went from "leave overnight" to ~15 minutes.
        tamana 11y ago
        Right, but why VBA? Because VBA is the only language with first class support in Excel, not because VBA is good at all. If not fon its "privilege", you'd use something like Python or JavaScript (yah it sucks, but not as bad a VB) or a purpose-built sane language, not something Joel Spolsky dashed off a spec for one Tuesday afternoon.
    - adrianN 11y ago
      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".
  - cm2187 11y ago
    The proper software equivalent is https://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/search-results?query=&search_type=last3years&cves=on https://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/search-results?query=&sea...
- colanderman 11y ago
  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.
  - FussyZeus 11y ago
    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.
    - marcosdumay 11y ago
      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.
      - FussyZeus 11y ago
        That's akin to saying "this screwdriver sucks as a hammer." You're using it wrong.
- jrcii 11y ago
  Excel is not perfect but it is best in class. I've built and maintained a time-series statistics research database for one of the largest trade associations in the world for over 10 years which heavily integrates with Excel. In so doing I've become intimately familiar with its quarks and shortcomings but ultimately it always provides a path to accomplish your goals, including high-performance automation https://msdn.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/office/bb687829.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/office/bb687829.asp...
  - psykovsky 11y ago
    you seem to be talking about php...
    - thrownear 11y ago
      Php is the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the title.
      - gelasio 11y ago
        iOS and OS X were the first things that came to my mind.
  - CompelTechnic 11y ago
    As a mechanical engineer, excel has been a wonderful tool. Engineers in our department get to have a smooth transition into programming competency in VBA, which has found itself extremely useful in many mechanical engineering analyses. My coworkers are given the ability to crawl (simple equations in spreadsheets) then walk (user-defined functions) then run (automatic iterative solutions in UDF's, applying test data to create UDF models of machine performance). Not something a lot of mechanical folks would ever find themselves doing unless an already well-used tool has a good progression toward more complex and demanding use cases.
- thedevil 11y ago
  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).
  - CyberDildonics 11y ago
    What makes you say that?
    - psykovsky 11y ago
      he never used openoffice or libreoffice...
    - thedevil 11y ago
      It was very well made. It's easy to use and yet but also has great features and shortcuts for power users. There's lots of genius little features not available elsewhere, like grouping columns or formulas over columns or rows (e.g. sum(A:A)). I often abused it with 50mb spreadsheets (a bad practice fyi) and it could often take it. The version I used rarely crashed. For most software I use, I see lots of things that need improvement. With Excel, I can only think of a few. (If anyone from Microsoft is reading this, please add matchifs, it's desperately needed).
      - cm2187 11y ago
        Let's start a list: Opening a csv triggers a full recalc even if your calcs are on manual. That's absurd given that csv files by definition have no formulas Come on Microsoft. 18 years without updating the scripting abilities. Can't we have a .net version of VBA?? And NO JAVASCRIPT. The fx button still opens a tiny old non resizable windows with a broken search feature, which is impractical if you have hundreds of UDF. High levels of nesting in the UI making it really slow to repeat certain actions (try drawing something). I still miss Excel 2003's customizable UI. They could provide at least a function to pull end of day FX rates. Integration with powerpoint pretty much non existant. A huge amount of users prepare decks based on a model in Excel. The process to link them is unstable / stone age. We should be able to transform a sheet into an excel formula, so that a non programmer can apply a complex logic to lots of data without a script. Xlsm files get corrupted regularly when excel is running low on memory. Adopt apple's idea of a sheet being a canvas on which you can drag tables or charts instead of having this antique model of a single grid which becomes annoying as soon as you have two tables on the same tab. I am sure I can pull more if popular demand!
- fumar 11y ago
  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 company. If I create a unique data set in R, but would like to share it to everyone and have them play - its not going to spread very far. If I do the same in Excel, everyone can take a look and manipulate the data. I like to think of Office is a practical solution for most business with a wide range of users who are "generalists."
  - someguydave 11y ago
    > 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 personal effort" Sure, Excel can be a useful spreadsheet tool, but Word is a clumsy and difficult publishing tool. Many alternatives from LaTeX to LibreOffice to InDesign tend to be more portable and reliable but require the user to assume a degree of risk for learning something new and different. That seems to be enough to keep the majority of users away.
    - mikestew 11y ago
      Absolutely; no one uses Office because they can "quickly pick up any of its applications". People use Office because they already "picked up" its applications. LibreOffice? Lemmee see here, I'm a bookkeeper/lab research assistant/factory supervisor that just wants to get my shit done and go home. There's this FOSS thing that mostly works but sometimes doesn't, or this Microsoft thing that I already know how to use and "works" perfectly (because it for sure can read its own format), and I don't give two poops about "Freedom!". I'm going to send a requisition to the boss for another Excel license. For a lot of people, they don't want to learn alternatives ('cuz that's on my time, since they boss ain't training me), and the cost of the license isn't coming out of their pocket. Of course they use Office. That's not an unreasonable choice.
- qihqi 11y ago
  The shittiest aspect of Office is the price.
  - scholia 11y ago
    Let's say someone who earns $50,000 a year uses Office for 5 hours a day while making a living. It's also a purchased copy so it lasts at least 6 years. What's that worth? How does it compare with the cost of, say, one Starbucks a day? If you employ somebody on that salary for 6 years (so add extra employment costs including taxes, insurance, office space and perks), what percentage do you save by not paying Office's shitty price?
    - tamana 11y ago
      Vim, for example, makes me 10$/yr at least, but doesn't cost anywhere near that. It's better prices than Office.
      - scholia 11y ago
        Sure, but it's not a replacement for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook or any of the other Office programs. The real question is, if vim cost $100, would you pay or would you use a product you didn't like as much, that wasn't as efficient, or as productive? How much would you pay for a Supervim that earned you an extra $5k/yr?
  - rayiner 11y ago
    God forbid someone exchange money for software instead of offering it for free and making money through ulterior motives.
- riquito 11y ago
  > 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.
- sandworm101 11y ago
  Too bad Excel isn't really a standalone product. Office and windows are necessary dependencies. Given that, it is a shitty product. If they broke it out, allowed me to run it on an OS I actually want to use, away from MS's gremlins, then I certainly would buy/install/use. But as of today it comes with far too much baggage.
  - rchaud 11y ago
    It has been available on Mac OS since 1989 and there is a browser-based version that is freely usable with a Microsoft account. I think you should check your facts.
    - sandworm101 11y ago
      Yes. Neither is the Linux-compatable version I need/want. I use spreadsheets for sensitive information. Something reliant on browsers, with all their headaches, doesn't fit my security model nor that of my clients.
      - npizzolato 11y ago
        That's not what you were complaining about earlier. Shifting the goalposts is always fun.
- Kiro 11y ago
  Yeah, the MS Office comment ruined an otherwise good article.
- collyw 11y ago
  Its a shitty database, and a shitty data entry solution, which is what it was used for in my last workplace. But people know how to use it and will use it for all sorts of things that its not particularly good for.
ised 11y ago
s/OpenTable/Microsoft Word/g; s/Microsoft Word/Microsoft Windows/g;
empressplay 11y ago
This 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.
Nutmog 11y ago
Can 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?
- ddingus 11y ago
  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.
- eterm 11y ago
  A clone of a crappy product is at best a crappy clone. What makes bad products bad is precisely the stuff you're trying to copy. Any clone just inherits the bad parts then inevitably adds other bad parts behind the scenes or misses random features. (Hello Open Office).
- brazzledazzle 11y ago
  Sometimes that institutional knowledge is knowing how to work around bugs or deal with a crappy UI efficiently. Sometimes that is where a worker's own perception of where their greatest value lies so they'll gladly resist or sabotage anything that may be better (on top of a general resistance to change).
- rwhitman 11y ago
  Patents are probably the most powerful tool for entrenched players here. Adobe patented several GUI conventions including their most common shortcut key commands in Photoshop, so that competitors would always have a slight learning curve for new users. Occasionally more aggressive companies will come after a cloned product with a lawsuit, for instance Facebook sued a number of early competitors for various intellectual property and trademark reasons. Doesn't hold up in court publicly but I imagine there have been a lot of backroom settlements made this way over the years.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
This 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.
- WA 11y ago
  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 of the system and the urge fades. And there's clearly no expectation for my thoughts to go anywhere. It's written for an audience of one.
  - Marcus316 11y ago
    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 is planted. I almost didn't post this reply, either.
hcrisp 11y ago
"Broken gets fixed; crappy lasts forever" http://dandreamsofcoding.com/2013/05/06/broke-gets-fixed-crappy-is-forever/ http://dandreamsofcoding.com/2013/05/06/broke-gets-fixed-cra...
mentos 11y ago
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 facebook core and attract them through the empty space between to you.
- drdeca 11y ago
  ... 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?
  - gherkin0 11y ago
    My guess is he just wasn't thinking about that, so he made an error.
- zeveb 11y ago
  > Imagine facebook is a spherical magnet with ten thousand small lead balls clung to it. It'd be pretty impressive to get lead to exhibit magnetism…
- soylentcola 11y ago
  Pretty good analogy but magnetic fields don't discriminate whereas one enduring reason for Facebook's success is that a large portion of that critical mass is particularly adverse to change. I guess if you wanted to get ridiculous with the analogy, you could make the "balls" of different materials, some of which are very strongly attracted to the magnet and others which take a lot less force to pull away.
- zepolen 11y ago
  I found a better analogy to be a fire. Think of products/startups as fires, they start small, can't use large logs straight away, need constant attention, you could use a lot of petrol (financing) to get it started faster, but it could also just fizzle out immediately if the large logs don't catch fire as well. Once they get going, you don't have to watch it so closely, you can just add a log here and there, maybe remove some ash. The goal of the fire is to get people to gather around it. The warmth in this case matters a lot, but also the people gathering around the fire. In fact some people might pick another fire because it has people who are interested in the same things as them. Sometimes a fire gathers TOO many people, and it gets crowded. The maker of the fire didn't make sure it grew large enought to provide warmth to many people - and so people on the outside get cold and go to another fire. Most of the time though, if someone is by a fire that provides enough warmth for him and he likes the people around it, there is little compelling reason to go to another one.
dahart 11y ago
I've just learned this lesson the hard way. I had my own terminology for it, so it's helpful and educational to learn words and phrases that others will understand and use. But absolutely, I'm exactly the type of person the article is talking about, I have experience and an amazing team, and our "improvements" have more or less failed spectacularly. We learned that design ideas that are "better" than the status quo often confuse and alienate customers, because they're already used to something, and everyone else does it that way. A de facto standard is a powerful force, and shouldn't be ignored or shunned. I have to do something different! so I'm thinking the solution is to do only one "improvement" differently at a time, and to do it very slowly and deliberately, and with a lot of two-way communication along the way. That's a theory, who has evidence for or against?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- skewart 11y ago
  Without knowing anything about your product or market it's really hard to say, but my gut reaction is to be skeptical that the incremental improvement strategy would work out better. Is there anything other than a "better" design that differentiates your product? Or, if not, can you acquire your customers differently, at a point where they aren't already habituated to doing things the bad old way? Ultimately I would say your best bet is to get back to basics and spend a ton of time listening to customers and watching them use your product, and your competitors' products. You might have changed the wrong things about the design? Or maybe there's some other pain point they actually have, but no one even thinks it's possible to do things differently because they're so used to the status quo. I would also be very mindful of incentives of various people, including both the users and the purchasers. Users in workplaces don't necessarily want something that is faster or more efficient to use (in a business setting they might have job secuirty, pay, andceven self-worth tied to knowing how to use a very complicated system). Buyers who aren't users very often buy based on specs more than design or ease of use (easier to rationally explain decision to higher ups). Consumers often buy/engage for how things make them feel, or for satisfying one of a few very basic desires (which they might not want to admit). Not sure how applicable, or new, this is go you. These are just thoughts that come to mind.
deleted 11y ago
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hawleyal 11y ago
Designers often describe the terms convention and intuition as contributing to good user experience. Convention is the "institutional knowledge" described in the article. Intuition is how easy something is to use without prior experience or convention. For instance, a car steering wheel is not intuitive but is rather conventional. If you make a car without a steering wheel, it may be better, but it won't be as popular. Regardless, I don't think the article accurately represents other forces in adoption and popularity outside of convention and intuition. There are many things such as chance, social trends, commercial backing, et al.
- Outdoorsman 11y ago
  Ctrl F quickly revealed that you're the first poster to mention "convention" ("institutional knowledge" decoded) and emphasize its importance... By definition, half the human population is below average in intelligence (half above)...average people typically go with the flow...the above average often question the flow...the gifted are constantly aware of the flow, but are often complacent if they're not in a position to force-feed change... Resistance to change is a powerful force, especially when your business (owner), or job (employee) may be at stake in the form of risk-taking that will lead to uncertain outcomes...
oxplot 11y ago
Can anyone with startup experience talk about the effectiveness of the method that Simon Sinek promotes [1] as a way to break through a market filled with "shitty" products? [1]: https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_insp...
- rgbrenner 11y ago
  What Simon says is actually marketing 101.. they teach this in undergrad intro marketing (without all the bs about 'greatness', etc). The problem with it when it comes to startups/small businesses, is that it's expensive. If you want to go that route, you need to get out the entire message - A + B + C. Whereas, the sales-based approach he's criticizing, you only need to get out C and part of B. So if you want to go the marketing route, you're going to be spending a lot more on ads, pr, etc to get your entire message out there. Despite what he says, Apple did not follow the path he says. Apple in its early days followed the sales-based approach. It wasnt until they were making money that they turned to a marketing-based approach. This is a very normal route for companies to take. [Edit: now that you understand this is marketing vs sales.. you can find plenty of articles on this by pg, jessica livingston and others.]
  - oxplot 11y ago
    Are you sure about it being marketing 101 and not 901? I can clearly see 100% of ads I've seen over the past month from established or younger companies doing exactly what Simon is criticizing.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
blcArmadillo 11y ago
Perhaps a litte off topic but does anyone here hate open table, if so can you share why? I've always found making a reservation a very plesant experience. To see all the availble times and make a reservation only takes a couple clicks.
- zzalpha 11y ago
  The article is from the point of view of the restaurant, claiming the backend tooling sucks, which wouldn't surprise me. Optimizing the front end consumer experience while neglecting the back office is not uncommon.
  - blcArmadillo 11y ago
    Ok, this makes sense now. I read "restaurant customers" as the customers of the restaurant (i.e. people wanting to reserve a table) not the restaurants themselves. Makes sense now. Thanks.
- nhebb 11y ago
  From the article: "While I am happy to share data with those that request it, I will summarize by saying that most restaurant customers that use OpenTable abhor it (for a few different reasons)." His company, TableHero, is a competitor, so "most" may be an exaggeration. He's probably identified a few weaknesses in Open Table to capitalize on.
crimsonalucard 11y ago
Also explains why shitty code thrives.
doggfood 11y ago
dude, it's called first mover advantage
- jessaustin 11y ago
  Seems like this should have triggered the dupe warning?
doggfood 11y ago
dude, its called first mover advantage
jvoorhis 11y ago
While we are all going off-topic, I'd like to see a "collapse thread" feature on HN. Quite often the comments page is dominated by a tangential discussion as seen here.
- amlgsmsn 11y ago
  I agree, the author picked a really bad example(Office) to make his otherwise good point. Office certainly isn't a shitty product compared to its competition. You can use browser extensions like hckrnews or 'Hacker news enhancement suite' to collapse comments. http://hckrnews.com/about.html#extensions http://hckrnews.com/about.html#extensions http://hckrnews.com/about.html#extensions http://hckrnews.com/about.html#extensions
  - pcurve 11y ago
    I love you.
- bolasanibk 11y ago
  Not exactly what you wanted, but this chrome extension does this. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhancement-s/bappiabcodbpphnojdiaddhnilfnjmpm https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...
cpncrunch 11y ago
I think perhaps the writer is using some cognitive dissonance to unfairly dismiss the market leaders as being "shitty". Any time I have used OpenTable (as a user) it has been a really great experience. It does exactly what you expect it to do, and it's always a very smooth experience. OpenTable has been around since 1998, so I imagine they are the market leader because they were the first to market and their product works well. You can never please everyone, but just because a product doesn't have your pet feature doesn't mean it is "shitty".
- vitd 11y ago
  My experiences with it are that it is extremely shitty. I often go to it to see if there are any tables at my desired time, and if there are, I manually call the place and book the reservation directly. Whenever I go to it, it tries to push a bunch of unrelated crap to me. No, I don't want to get daily emails about this restaurant I'm eating at once while on vacation. (Does anyone want that?) The UI is horrible and confusing. I avoid it if possible, and only grudgingly use it when I don't have another choice (near wifi, but no cell signal, for example).
  - cpncrunch 11y ago
    >No, I don't want to get daily emails about this restaurant I'm eating at once while on vacation I'm a spam nazi...if anyone spams me, I'll remember. I see I still have the opentable@mydomain.com active, which means they haven't spammed me yet. I just had another look at their site, and I don't see any UI issues myself. You find the restaurant, choose date, and it shows you the times available. You then just confirm the details and click COMPLETE RESERVATION. Nothing too skanky about that. There are boxes you can tick in the confirmation page to subscribe to updates, but they are unticked by default (at least in Canada, where it is now illegal to sign people up automatically).
- shekyboy 11y ago
  Think the writer is referring to the restaurant facing side of the software and not the user app/website. Those are much nicer.
davidw 11y ago
Because 'economics'. Switching costs, network effects, etc... Here's my favorite book on the subject: http://amzn.to/1JMtX0X http://amzn.to/1JMtX0X And yes, that's an affiliate link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10982630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10982630 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switching_barriers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switching_barriers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
- aback 11y ago
  Also craigslist.org. That site looks like 1995 called and wants its web page back. It's a triumph of non-engineering. But that network effect. Man oh man.
  - skyyler 11y ago
    What features would make craigslist better? I like it not in spite of its bareness but because of it.
    - tmaly 11y ago
      I would add some minimal responsive css so its easier to click on the form elements on a mobile phone
tmaly 11y ago
the book Hooked does a good job talking about what makes a product habit forming. I almost think its all hindsight in the examples they use. Positioning something in your mind is so difficult in this day and age with so much information overload.
emodendroket 11y ago
MS Office, which to this day has features its competitors don't, isn't really a great example.
- occamrazor 11y ago
  Indeed MS Office can be a pain the neck, but I haven't found a better product in the same market category (i.e. desktop WYSIWYG office suites)
  - dreamcompiler 11y ago
    That's not because MS Office is great. It's because it's really capital-intensive to build an office suite, and no VC is going to fund you to compete with MS.
    - emodendroket 11y ago
      There are competitors today and there were others in the past.
thetruthseeker1 11y ago
It reminds me of the GoT dialogue " Chaos is a ladder, my friend" : What I mean is the products that are 'shitty' and are thriving is because probably each one of them were created to solve a problem where absolutely nothing like that product existed before and the original product founders were sharp enough to notice a market and business opportunity. This shitty product was so good when it came out, it changed the way ppl did business and led to its mass adoption with little marketing. The other better products that came later on, however usable they are, are probably providing marginal ( as per the product users) value over the previous product hence lower adoption rate and requires huge marketing $. That is why if you notice a new market/business opportunity it is most lucrative path.
uremog 11y ago
While yes, I do use OpenTable for places at which I am already an existing customer, it's not that simple. I'm usually not willing to visit a restaurant that I might not get into. OT is the most painless way to make the reservation, and I far prefer this over calling. Without a restaurant being accessible on OT, I would not be going there nearly as often.
emmanueloga_ 11y ago
This resonates with me with regard to software projects. Maybe the refactoring and/or innovation aversion I've seen in many software projects has to do mostly with this institutional knowledge the article talks about. It doesn't matter how crappy a project is or how many defects the team agrees a project has... introducing a different solution is seen as prohibitively risky or costly, given the amount of time people has spent learning and putting in place workarounds.
shekyboy 11y ago
This is a great article. So true at all the levels. Look at any mid to large scale company and their internal ticketing systems, HR systems, travel booking systems, time tracking systems. The last company I worked for, did not upgrade the employee laptop OS from Windows XP for over 10 years as their legacy ticketing system wasnt supported on the newer versions. Obviously this was a cost issue of the new ticketing platform but also the unknown cost of retraining the whole company. Additionally people and organizations get comfortable with the "evil you know". Frankly as a new entrepreneur this is also incredibly hard to test in the market. Most early customer development will give you signals that they want it, but won't act when it comes time to switch. This is why you see SaaS services succeeding by cracking few employees or small teams at a time. Think of Yammer, Slack etc. They don't need the whole company or department to change. Just few employees or the team can use it and slowly infect the rest of the company. That would be the only way to overcome this problem (although not all products can do this).
anjc 11y ago
This article seems a little tech-centric. Products don't tend to flourish based purely on technical merit, and there could be many reasons why that product has thrived other than network effects, e.g. aggressive pricing strategies, good sales team, good marketing, brand awareness from customers, switching costs for the restaurant, the health of the food service industry, or perhaps it doesn't bring in enough customers for it to be a priority for restaurateurs, etc etc. If shitty products tend to thrive it's probably more often due to industry lifecycles, incumbent dominance, solidification of position via acquisitions etc, and the difficulties of innovating in large organisations
petke 11y ago
This goes equally well for all these new languages popping up. Even if it is better at everything it does that is not enough. Legacy code and developer community consists of huge amounts of institutional knowledge. Its asking a lot of anyone to make the change. I think about the only new languages that have a chance are domain specific languages in a brand new domain.
ziszis 11y ago
Every new product needs to overcome the formula "product value >> adoption cost". You can simplify and call OpenTable shitty, but they met this threshold with their customers. Their customer looked at their product and said, it's new and different, but it is worth it. If you can't displace an existing solution you haven't got it right. If the value is significantly greater and it is only about UI familiarity there are many ways around it. One way is to emulate the UI of the product you are displacing. This famously happened in the Word vs. WordPerfect wars.
makecheck 11y ago
Bad software survives because major investments by large organizations were made in tools that had closed (and even platform-specific) file formats. At the time, maybe no one fully understood the gravity of the investment they were making. Since the data is hard to interpret consistently, competition is practically impossible. Regulation of software is overdue. I can think of a few rules off the bat that would make a huge difference in spurring the development of quality software: 1. New software files such as documents must be stored in a format that can be read without ambiguity by modern machines, adhering to all regulations. 2. Executable specifications for all interpretations of file formats must be provided publicly, since broadly-available cross-platform execution environments (e.g. Python) are now widely available. In other words, you're not allowed to obfuscate what your file format does by publishing a 500 page document to explain how a single spreadsheet row is interpreted; you must instead provide, for example, a short Python script to illustrate the exact behavior, that anyone on any system can inspect and run. 3. Auditors must be able to correlate your software's interpretation of files with your executable specifications. Any discrepancies require the software to be updated, for as far back as issues have been found. 4. Software is prohibited from re-saving any file in an older format that does not adhere to regulated behavior. Users are not permitted to avoid this type of auto-upgrade, any more than they are permitted to continue wiring their houses with last century's electrical codes. 5. Software may not depend on the behavior of machines or methods that are impractical to obtain (e.g. "what Windows 95 used to do here"). If existing formats have such restrictions, they must upgrade according to the step above.
- rrrx3 11y ago
  I love the thrust of your argument, but I think we all know how pragmatically, this will never happen any time soon. Could you imagine a "Bureau of Software Fidelity" or somesuch? We can't even get the post office to deliver mail regularly in some parts of the country, and that's been their primary function for over 100 years.

237 points by deapu 11y ago

geori 11y ago

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.

someone7x 11y ago
I've known a handful of people that have become full-time programmers after achieving proficiency in Excel. It's a product that many people enjoy using and mastering.
adrianN 11y ago
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 http://www.eusprig.org/horror-stories.htm http://www.eusprig.org/horror-stories.htm
- CPLX 11y ago
  A complex model in Excel is software engineering. The degree to which it is "proper" of course, is situational.
- crispyambulance 11y ago
  So? Many great projects start out as excel spreadsheets: someone has a problem, solves it with excel, then goes on to solve other problems with that spreadsheet. People use it and become dependent on it, but over time the thing becomes intractable. At that point in time, the functionality of the spreadsheet gets implemented by actual developers into some "engineered application." If you are suggesting to NOT start with excel, then propose another solution-- but good luck getting anyone to use it. The key thing is, no one wants to engage "software engineers $$$" to solve a problem that lands on their desk which they handle by themselves.
  - osullivj 11y ago
    And once some devs turn it into an "engineered application" the change cycle jumps from minutes or hours to days, weeks or even months.
    - TheLogothete 11y ago
      Shh! Your logic and practical experience is not welcomed. We like to scream with self-righteousness from our software engineering high horses here. Software engineers know best and everybody else is wrong because he doesn't know any better, since he has a limited perspective.
    - cm2187 11y ago
      or years. I often have the fantasy to write "Powered by COBOL" below the logo of my company.
- eterm 11y ago
  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 lego, you might suggest that they find an architect and do some proper house building, but without lego they would never have tried. And chances are they're not building a cathedral.
  - elcapitan 11y ago
    There's actually an interesting gap between 'building some model in Excel' and 'moving on into a programming model where code and data are separated'. Like generating model code in some normal programming language from a spreadsheet.
    - eterm 11y ago
      Does VBA fill that gap? I once worked on a system where one of the more important parts of the business was a system of VBA modules in an access file. One of my more important contributions as a fresh graduate entering the workplace was to get people to copy the file from the network share to a local drive before running. Run-times went from "leave overnight" to ~15 minutes.
      - tamana 11y ago
        Right, but why VBA? Because VBA is the only language with first class support in Excel, not because VBA is good at all. If not fon its "privilege", you'd use something like Python or JavaScript (yah it sucks, but not as bad a VB) or a purpose-built sane language, not something Joel Spolsky dashed off a spec for one Tuesday afternoon.
  - adrianN 11y ago
    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".
- cm2187 11y ago
  The proper software equivalent is https://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/search-results?query=&search_type=last3years&cves=on https://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/search-results?query=&sea...
colanderman 11y ago
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.
- FussyZeus 11y ago
  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.
  - marcosdumay 11y ago
    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.
    - FussyZeus 11y ago
      That's akin to saying "this screwdriver sucks as a hammer." You're using it wrong.
jrcii 11y ago
Excel is not perfect but it is best in class. I've built and maintained a time-series statistics research database for one of the largest trade associations in the world for over 10 years which heavily integrates with Excel. In so doing I've become intimately familiar with its quarks and shortcomings but ultimately it always provides a path to accomplish your goals, including high-performance automation https://msdn.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/office/bb687829.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/office/bb687829.asp...
- psykovsky 11y ago
  you seem to be talking about php...
  - thrownear 11y ago
    Php is the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the title.
    - gelasio 11y ago
      iOS and OS X were the first things that came to my mind.
- CompelTechnic 11y ago
  As a mechanical engineer, excel has been a wonderful tool. Engineers in our department get to have a smooth transition into programming competency in VBA, which has found itself extremely useful in many mechanical engineering analyses. My coworkers are given the ability to crawl (simple equations in spreadsheets) then walk (user-defined functions) then run (automatic iterative solutions in UDF's, applying test data to create UDF models of machine performance). Not something a lot of mechanical folks would ever find themselves doing unless an already well-used tool has a good progression toward more complex and demanding use cases.
thedevil 11y ago
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).
- CyberDildonics 11y ago
  What makes you say that?
  - psykovsky 11y ago
    he never used openoffice or libreoffice...
  - thedevil 11y ago
    It was very well made. It's easy to use and yet but also has great features and shortcuts for power users. There's lots of genius little features not available elsewhere, like grouping columns or formulas over columns or rows (e.g. sum(A:A)). I often abused it with 50mb spreadsheets (a bad practice fyi) and it could often take it. The version I used rarely crashed. For most software I use, I see lots of things that need improvement. With Excel, I can only think of a few. (If anyone from Microsoft is reading this, please add matchifs, it's desperately needed).
    - cm2187 11y ago
      Let's start a list: Opening a csv triggers a full recalc even if your calcs are on manual. That's absurd given that csv files by definition have no formulas Come on Microsoft. 18 years without updating the scripting abilities. Can't we have a .net version of VBA?? And NO JAVASCRIPT. The fx button still opens a tiny old non resizable windows with a broken search feature, which is impractical if you have hundreds of UDF. High levels of nesting in the UI making it really slow to repeat certain actions (try drawing something). I still miss Excel 2003's customizable UI. They could provide at least a function to pull end of day FX rates. Integration with powerpoint pretty much non existant. A huge amount of users prepare decks based on a model in Excel. The process to link them is unstable / stone age. We should be able to transform a sheet into an excel formula, so that a non programmer can apply a complex logic to lots of data without a script. Xlsm files get corrupted regularly when excel is running low on memory. Adopt apple's idea of a sheet being a canvas on which you can drag tables or charts instead of having this antique model of a single grid which becomes annoying as soon as you have two tables on the same tab. I am sure I can pull more if popular demand!
fumar 11y ago
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 company. If I create a unique data set in R, but would like to share it to everyone and have them play - its not going to spread very far. If I do the same in Excel, everyone can take a look and manipulate the data. I like to think of Office is a practical solution for most business with a wide range of users who are "generalists."
- someguydave 11y ago
  > 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 personal effort" Sure, Excel can be a useful spreadsheet tool, but Word is a clumsy and difficult publishing tool. Many alternatives from LaTeX to LibreOffice to InDesign tend to be more portable and reliable but require the user to assume a degree of risk for learning something new and different. That seems to be enough to keep the majority of users away.
  - mikestew 11y ago
    Absolutely; no one uses Office because they can "quickly pick up any of its applications". People use Office because they already "picked up" its applications. LibreOffice? Lemmee see here, I'm a bookkeeper/lab research assistant/factory supervisor that just wants to get my shit done and go home. There's this FOSS thing that mostly works but sometimes doesn't, or this Microsoft thing that I already know how to use and "works" perfectly (because it for sure can read its own format), and I don't give two poops about "Freedom!". I'm going to send a requisition to the boss for another Excel license. For a lot of people, they don't want to learn alternatives ('cuz that's on my time, since they boss ain't training me), and the cost of the license isn't coming out of their pocket. Of course they use Office. That's not an unreasonable choice.
qihqi 11y ago
The shittiest aspect of Office is the price.
- scholia 11y ago
  Let's say someone who earns $50,000 a year uses Office for 5 hours a day while making a living. It's also a purchased copy so it lasts at least 6 years. What's that worth? How does it compare with the cost of, say, one Starbucks a day? If you employ somebody on that salary for 6 years (so add extra employment costs including taxes, insurance, office space and perks), what percentage do you save by not paying Office's shitty price?
  - tamana 11y ago
    Vim, for example, makes me 10$/yr at least, but doesn't cost anywhere near that. It's better prices than Office.
    - scholia 11y ago
      Sure, but it's not a replacement for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook or any of the other Office programs. The real question is, if vim cost $100, would you pay or would you use a product you didn't like as much, that wasn't as efficient, or as productive? How much would you pay for a Supervim that earned you an extra $5k/yr?
- rayiner 11y ago
  God forbid someone exchange money for software instead of offering it for free and making money through ulterior motives.
riquito 11y ago
> 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.
sandworm101 11y ago
Too bad Excel isn't really a standalone product. Office and windows are necessary dependencies. Given that, it is a shitty product. If they broke it out, allowed me to run it on an OS I actually want to use, away from MS's gremlins, then I certainly would buy/install/use. But as of today it comes with far too much baggage.
- rchaud 11y ago
  It has been available on Mac OS since 1989 and there is a browser-based version that is freely usable with a Microsoft account. I think you should check your facts.
  - sandworm101 11y ago
    Yes. Neither is the Linux-compatable version I need/want. I use spreadsheets for sensitive information. Something reliant on browsers, with all their headaches, doesn't fit my security model nor that of my clients.
    - npizzolato 11y ago
      That's not what you were complaining about earlier. Shifting the goalposts is always fun.
Kiro 11y ago
Yeah, the MS Office comment ruined an otherwise good article.
collyw 11y ago
Its a shitty database, and a shitty data entry solution, which is what it was used for in my last workplace. But people know how to use it and will use it for all sorts of things that its not particularly good for.

ised 11y ago

s/OpenTable/Microsoft Word/g; s/Microsoft Word/Microsoft Windows/g;

empressplay 11y ago

This 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.

Nutmog 11y ago

Can 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?

ddingus 11y ago
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.
eterm 11y ago
A clone of a crappy product is at best a crappy clone. What makes bad products bad is precisely the stuff you're trying to copy. Any clone just inherits the bad parts then inevitably adds other bad parts behind the scenes or misses random features. (Hello Open Office).
brazzledazzle 11y ago
Sometimes that institutional knowledge is knowing how to work around bugs or deal with a crappy UI efficiently. Sometimes that is where a worker's own perception of where their greatest value lies so they'll gladly resist or sabotage anything that may be better (on top of a general resistance to change).
rwhitman 11y ago
Patents are probably the most powerful tool for entrenched players here. Adobe patented several GUI conventions including their most common shortcut key commands in Photoshop, so that competitors would always have a slight learning curve for new users. Occasionally more aggressive companies will come after a cloned product with a lawsuit, for instance Facebook sued a number of early competitors for various intellectual property and trademark reasons. Doesn't hold up in court publicly but I imagine there have been a lot of backroom settlements made this way over the years.

ChuckMcM 11y ago

This 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.

WA 11y ago
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 of the system and the urge fades. And there's clearly no expectation for my thoughts to go anywhere. It's written for an audience of one.
- Marcus316 11y ago
  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 is planted. I almost didn't post this reply, either.

hcrisp 11y ago

"Broken gets fixed; crappy lasts forever" http://dandreamsofcoding.com/2013/05/06/broke-gets-fixed-crappy-is-forever/ http://dandreamsofcoding.com/2013/05/06/broke-gets-fixed-cra...

mentos 11y ago

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 facebook core and attract them through the empty space between to you.

drdeca 11y ago
... 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?
- gherkin0 11y ago
  My guess is he just wasn't thinking about that, so he made an error.
zeveb 11y ago
> Imagine facebook is a spherical magnet with ten thousand small lead balls clung to it. It'd be pretty impressive to get lead to exhibit magnetism…
soylentcola 11y ago
Pretty good analogy but magnetic fields don't discriminate whereas one enduring reason for Facebook's success is that a large portion of that critical mass is particularly adverse to change. I guess if you wanted to get ridiculous with the analogy, you could make the "balls" of different materials, some of which are very strongly attracted to the magnet and others which take a lot less force to pull away.
zepolen 11y ago
I found a better analogy to be a fire. Think of products/startups as fires, they start small, can't use large logs straight away, need constant attention, you could use a lot of petrol (financing) to get it started faster, but it could also just fizzle out immediately if the large logs don't catch fire as well. Once they get going, you don't have to watch it so closely, you can just add a log here and there, maybe remove some ash. The goal of the fire is to get people to gather around it. The warmth in this case matters a lot, but also the people gathering around the fire. In fact some people might pick another fire because it has people who are interested in the same things as them. Sometimes a fire gathers TOO many people, and it gets crowded. The maker of the fire didn't make sure it grew large enought to provide warmth to many people - and so people on the outside get cold and go to another fire. Most of the time though, if someone is by a fire that provides enough warmth for him and he likes the people around it, there is little compelling reason to go to another one.

dahart 11y ago

I've just learned this lesson the hard way. I had my own terminology for it, so it's helpful and educational to learn words and phrases that others will understand and use. But absolutely, I'm exactly the type of person the article is talking about, I have experience and an amazing team, and our "improvements" have more or less failed spectacularly. We learned that design ideas that are "better" than the status quo often confuse and alienate customers, because they're already used to something, and everyone else does it that way. A de facto standard is a powerful force, and shouldn't be ignored or shunned. I have to do something different! so I'm thinking the solution is to do only one "improvement" differently at a time, and to do it very slowly and deliberately, and with a lot of two-way communication along the way. That's a theory, who has evidence for or against?

deleted 11y ago
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skewart 11y ago
Without knowing anything about your product or market it's really hard to say, but my gut reaction is to be skeptical that the incremental improvement strategy would work out better. Is there anything other than a "better" design that differentiates your product? Or, if not, can you acquire your customers differently, at a point where they aren't already habituated to doing things the bad old way? Ultimately I would say your best bet is to get back to basics and spend a ton of time listening to customers and watching them use your product, and your competitors' products. You might have changed the wrong things about the design? Or maybe there's some other pain point they actually have, but no one even thinks it's possible to do things differently because they're so used to the status quo. I would also be very mindful of incentives of various people, including both the users and the purchasers. Users in workplaces don't necessarily want something that is faster or more efficient to use (in a business setting they might have job secuirty, pay, andceven self-worth tied to knowing how to use a very complicated system). Buyers who aren't users very often buy based on specs more than design or ease of use (easier to rationally explain decision to higher ups). Consumers often buy/engage for how things make them feel, or for satisfying one of a few very basic desires (which they might not want to admit). Not sure how applicable, or new, this is go you. These are just thoughts that come to mind.

deleted 11y ago

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hawleyal 11y ago

Designers often describe the terms convention and intuition as contributing to good user experience. Convention is the "institutional knowledge" described in the article. Intuition is how easy something is to use without prior experience or convention. For instance, a car steering wheel is not intuitive but is rather conventional. If you make a car without a steering wheel, it may be better, but it won't be as popular. Regardless, I don't think the article accurately represents other forces in adoption and popularity outside of convention and intuition. There are many things such as chance, social trends, commercial backing, et al.

Outdoorsman 11y ago
Ctrl F quickly revealed that you're the first poster to mention "convention" ("institutional knowledge" decoded) and emphasize its importance... By definition, half the human population is below average in intelligence (half above)...average people typically go with the flow...the above average often question the flow...the gifted are constantly aware of the flow, but are often complacent if they're not in a position to force-feed change... Resistance to change is a powerful force, especially when your business (owner), or job (employee) may be at stake in the form of risk-taking that will lead to uncertain outcomes...

oxplot 11y ago

Can anyone with startup experience talk about the effectiveness of the method that Simon Sinek promotes [1] as a way to break through a market filled with "shitty" products? [1]: https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_insp...

rgbrenner 11y ago
What Simon says is actually marketing 101.. they teach this in undergrad intro marketing (without all the bs about 'greatness', etc). The problem with it when it comes to startups/small businesses, is that it's expensive. If you want to go that route, you need to get out the entire message - A + B + C. Whereas, the sales-based approach he's criticizing, you only need to get out C and part of B. So if you want to go the marketing route, you're going to be spending a lot more on ads, pr, etc to get your entire message out there. Despite what he says, Apple did not follow the path he says. Apple in its early days followed the sales-based approach. It wasnt until they were making money that they turned to a marketing-based approach. This is a very normal route for companies to take. [Edit: now that you understand this is marketing vs sales.. you can find plenty of articles on this by pg, jessica livingston and others.]
- oxplot 11y ago
  Are you sure about it being marketing 101 and not 901? I can clearly see 100% of ads I've seen over the past month from established or younger companies doing exactly what Simon is criticizing.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]

blcArmadillo 11y ago

Perhaps a litte off topic but does anyone here hate open table, if so can you share why? I've always found making a reservation a very plesant experience. To see all the availble times and make a reservation only takes a couple clicks.

zzalpha 11y ago
The article is from the point of view of the restaurant, claiming the backend tooling sucks, which wouldn't surprise me. Optimizing the front end consumer experience while neglecting the back office is not uncommon.
- blcArmadillo 11y ago
  Ok, this makes sense now. I read "restaurant customers" as the customers of the restaurant (i.e. people wanting to reserve a table) not the restaurants themselves. Makes sense now. Thanks.
nhebb 11y ago
From the article: "While I am happy to share data with those that request it, I will summarize by saying that most restaurant customers that use OpenTable abhor it (for a few different reasons)." His company, TableHero, is a competitor, so "most" may be an exaggeration. He's probably identified a few weaknesses in Open Table to capitalize on.

crimsonalucard 11y ago

Also explains why shitty code thrives.

doggfood 11y ago

dude, it's called first mover advantage

jessaustin 11y ago
Seems like this should have triggered the dupe warning?

doggfood 11y ago

dude, its called first mover advantage

jvoorhis 11y ago

While we are all going off-topic, I'd like to see a "collapse thread" feature on HN. Quite often the comments page is dominated by a tangential discussion as seen here.

amlgsmsn 11y ago
I agree, the author picked a really bad example(Office) to make his otherwise good point. Office certainly isn't a shitty product compared to its competition. You can use browser extensions like hckrnews or 'Hacker news enhancement suite' to collapse comments. http://hckrnews.com/about.html#extensions http://hckrnews.com/about.html#extensions http://hckrnews.com/about.html#extensions http://hckrnews.com/about.html#extensions
- pcurve 11y ago
  I love you.
bolasanibk 11y ago
Not exactly what you wanted, but this chrome extension does this. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhancement-s/bappiabcodbpphnojdiaddhnilfnjmpm https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...

cpncrunch 11y ago

I think perhaps the writer is using some cognitive dissonance to unfairly dismiss the market leaders as being "shitty". Any time I have used OpenTable (as a user) it has been a really great experience. It does exactly what you expect it to do, and it's always a very smooth experience. OpenTable has been around since 1998, so I imagine they are the market leader because they were the first to market and their product works well. You can never please everyone, but just because a product doesn't have your pet feature doesn't mean it is "shitty".

vitd 11y ago
My experiences with it are that it is extremely shitty. I often go to it to see if there are any tables at my desired time, and if there are, I manually call the place and book the reservation directly. Whenever I go to it, it tries to push a bunch of unrelated crap to me. No, I don't want to get daily emails about this restaurant I'm eating at once while on vacation. (Does anyone want that?) The UI is horrible and confusing. I avoid it if possible, and only grudgingly use it when I don't have another choice (near wifi, but no cell signal, for example).
- cpncrunch 11y ago
  >No, I don't want to get daily emails about this restaurant I'm eating at once while on vacation I'm a spam nazi...if anyone spams me, I'll remember. I see I still have the opentable@mydomain.com active, which means they haven't spammed me yet. I just had another look at their site, and I don't see any UI issues myself. You find the restaurant, choose date, and it shows you the times available. You then just confirm the details and click COMPLETE RESERVATION. Nothing too skanky about that. There are boxes you can tick in the confirmation page to subscribe to updates, but they are unticked by default (at least in Canada, where it is now illegal to sign people up automatically).
shekyboy 11y ago
Think the writer is referring to the restaurant facing side of the software and not the user app/website. Those are much nicer.

davidw 11y ago

Because 'economics'. Switching costs, network effects, etc... Here's my favorite book on the subject: http://amzn.to/1JMtX0X http://amzn.to/1JMtX0X And yes, that's an affiliate link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10982630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10982630 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switching_barriers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switching_barriers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

aback 11y ago
Also craigslist.org. That site looks like 1995 called and wants its web page back. It's a triumph of non-engineering. But that network effect. Man oh man.
- skyyler 11y ago
  What features would make craigslist better? I like it not in spite of its bareness but because of it.
  - tmaly 11y ago
    I would add some minimal responsive css so its easier to click on the form elements on a mobile phone

tmaly 11y ago

the book Hooked does a good job talking about what makes a product habit forming. I almost think its all hindsight in the examples they use. Positioning something in your mind is so difficult in this day and age with so much information overload.

emodendroket 11y ago

MS Office, which to this day has features its competitors don't, isn't really a great example.

occamrazor 11y ago
Indeed MS Office can be a pain the neck, but I haven't found a better product in the same market category (i.e. desktop WYSIWYG office suites)
- dreamcompiler 11y ago
  That's not because MS Office is great. It's because it's really capital-intensive to build an office suite, and no VC is going to fund you to compete with MS.
  - emodendroket 11y ago
    There are competitors today and there were others in the past.

thetruthseeker1 11y ago

It reminds me of the GoT dialogue " Chaos is a ladder, my friend" : What I mean is the products that are 'shitty' and are thriving is because probably each one of them were created to solve a problem where absolutely nothing like that product existed before and the original product founders were sharp enough to notice a market and business opportunity. This shitty product was so good when it came out, it changed the way ppl did business and led to its mass adoption with little marketing. The other better products that came later on, however usable they are, are probably providing marginal ( as per the product users) value over the previous product hence lower adoption rate and requires huge marketing $. That is why if you notice a new market/business opportunity it is most lucrative path.

uremog 11y ago

While yes, I do use OpenTable for places at which I am already an existing customer, it's not that simple. I'm usually not willing to visit a restaurant that I might not get into. OT is the most painless way to make the reservation, and I far prefer this over calling. Without a restaurant being accessible on OT, I would not be going there nearly as often.

emmanueloga_ 11y ago

This resonates with me with regard to software projects. Maybe the refactoring and/or innovation aversion I've seen in many software projects has to do mostly with this institutional knowledge the article talks about. It doesn't matter how crappy a project is or how many defects the team agrees a project has... introducing a different solution is seen as prohibitively risky or costly, given the amount of time people has spent learning and putting in place workarounds.

shekyboy 11y ago

This is a great article. So true at all the levels. Look at any mid to large scale company and their internal ticketing systems, HR systems, travel booking systems, time tracking systems. The last company I worked for, did not upgrade the employee laptop OS from Windows XP for over 10 years as their legacy ticketing system wasnt supported on the newer versions. Obviously this was a cost issue of the new ticketing platform but also the unknown cost of retraining the whole company. Additionally people and organizations get comfortable with the "evil you know". Frankly as a new entrepreneur this is also incredibly hard to test in the market. Most early customer development will give you signals that they want it, but won't act when it comes time to switch. This is why you see SaaS services succeeding by cracking few employees or small teams at a time. Think of Yammer, Slack etc. They don't need the whole company or department to change. Just few employees or the team can use it and slowly infect the rest of the company. That would be the only way to overcome this problem (although not all products can do this).

anjc 11y ago

This article seems a little tech-centric. Products don't tend to flourish based purely on technical merit, and there could be many reasons why that product has thrived other than network effects, e.g. aggressive pricing strategies, good sales team, good marketing, brand awareness from customers, switching costs for the restaurant, the health of the food service industry, or perhaps it doesn't bring in enough customers for it to be a priority for restaurateurs, etc etc. If shitty products tend to thrive it's probably more often due to industry lifecycles, incumbent dominance, solidification of position via acquisitions etc, and the difficulties of innovating in large organisations

petke 11y ago

This goes equally well for all these new languages popping up. Even if it is better at everything it does that is not enough. Legacy code and developer community consists of huge amounts of institutional knowledge. Its asking a lot of anyone to make the change. I think about the only new languages that have a chance are domain specific languages in a brand new domain.

ziszis 11y ago

Every new product needs to overcome the formula "product value >> adoption cost". You can simplify and call OpenTable shitty, but they met this threshold with their customers. Their customer looked at their product and said, it's new and different, but it is worth it. If you can't displace an existing solution you haven't got it right. If the value is significantly greater and it is only about UI familiarity there are many ways around it. One way is to emulate the UI of the product you are displacing. This famously happened in the Word vs. WordPerfect wars.

makecheck 11y ago

Bad software survives because major investments by large organizations were made in tools that had closed (and even platform-specific) file formats. At the time, maybe no one fully understood the gravity of the investment they were making. Since the data is hard to interpret consistently, competition is practically impossible. Regulation of software is overdue. I can think of a few rules off the bat that would make a huge difference in spurring the development of quality software: 1. New software files such as documents must be stored in a format that can be read without ambiguity by modern machines, adhering to all regulations. 2. Executable specifications for all interpretations of file formats must be provided publicly, since broadly-available cross-platform execution environments (e.g. Python) are now widely available. In other words, you're not allowed to obfuscate what your file format does by publishing a 500 page document to explain how a single spreadsheet row is interpreted; you must instead provide, for example, a short Python script to illustrate the exact behavior, that anyone on any system can inspect and run. 3. Auditors must be able to correlate your software's interpretation of files with your executable specifications. Any discrepancies require the software to be updated, for as far back as issues have been found. 4. Software is prohibited from re-saving any file in an older format that does not adhere to regulated behavior. Users are not permitted to avoid this type of auto-upgrade, any more than they are permitted to continue wiring their houses with last century's electrical codes. 5. Software may not depend on the behavior of machines or methods that are impractical to obtain (e.g. "what Windows 95 used to do here"). If existing formats have such restrictions, they must upgrade according to the step above.

rrrx3 11y ago
I love the thrust of your argument, but I think we all know how pragmatically, this will never happen any time soon. Could you imagine a "Bureau of Software Fidelity" or somesuch? We can't even get the post office to deliver mail regularly in some parts of the country, and that's been their primary function for over 100 years.