8 ms·

If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good.

265 points by paul 17y ago

flogic 17y ago
Probably the best iPad article so far. I think the iPad's winning features are misjudged. That it's simple to use is pointless; YouTube clearly illustrates idiots can use computers and do stuff on the internet. However since it's "just a large iPhone", it's UI is designed around the fact your finger is far fatter than a mouse pointer. Also opening and closing laptops is a pain in the ass. Where the iPad is risky is that it has enough potential UI bandwidth that you want to use it like a normal computer but the OS may be too close to the iPhone model.
- gxs 17y ago
  I've personally always wanted a phone with a 5-6 inch screen. I really, really wouldn't mind carrying it and would use it all the time. As it is now, I use my phone's 3inch screen so often, just becaues I'm too lazy to pull out my laptop. I think previous articles have hit this one home pretty well - most users simply don't need a computer. I know that when all I want to do is check email quickly and catch up on reading (blogs, hn, etc.), I certainly don't.
scythe 17y ago
s/great/well-designed\ and\ properly-tested/; s/good/feature-complete/; (Am I getting this right? My perl is rusty.) It's hard to disagree with this guy. What's the point of a 5 megapixel camera if it can't focus properly?
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
boundlessdreamz 17y ago
so true. The original GMail launched with no "save" feature for drafts and it was a major inconvenience but my friends and I still loved it to death.
jdietrich 17y ago
Once again, Google and Apple get it, the rest of us don't. The revolution will not be televised. If you can solve a major problem I have, I don't care whether you try and solve all my other problems.
- InclinedPlane 17y ago
  Quite so, treating feature sets as a laundry list or a shopping list is a recipe for mediocrity. The most important features of every product are implicit: usability, performance, efficiency, aesthetics, robustness, etc. Every product has these aspects, if you ignore them then you will fail to deliver on them. The really slick companies, like Apple and Google, have these concepts baked into their DNA, which is why they seem to be able to take everyone else's lunch money whenever they damned well feel like it. It's better to try and succeed at making something simple, coherent, and excellent (like a well seasoned, perfectly cooked steak) than it is to try and fail at making something overly complicated (like a 12-course meal, which ends up as 7-courses, some of them missing key ingredients, burnt, or raw). You don't get points from the judges for degree of difficulty.
  - sailormoon 17y ago
    You don't get points from the judges for degree of difficulty. Well, in most cases you'd have a "judge" you actually do. But I think the point you were trying to make - that normal people don't care if you made a really good effort and the task was really hard, they just care about the final taste, is 100% correct.
    - joe_the_user 17y ago
      Well, the only time when ordinary people care that a task is hard is when it's difficulty been floridly demonstrated to them - when they've been wanting something for a long time and someone comes up with something that barely succeeds, you might get a pass. Apps with barely functional features that a group of users have been chafing for often succeed. But if you're trying to sell someone on something they didn't know they might want, if that something works in a clumsy and unreliable fashion, you probably convince the person the whole thing is a poor idea.
asmosoinio 17y ago
Good article and the core idea is so spot on that I did not mind it riding the iPad publicity wave... This made me chuckle: """For markets that have purchasing processes with long lists of feature requirements, you should probably just crank out as many features as possible and not waste time on simplicity or usability."""
- dabent 17y ago
  That quote pretty much sums up enterprise/government software consulting and sales. A committee will come up with a grocery list of features that must work, but don't need to work well. The longer the list, the more the consultants make, so they gladly help their clients lengthen the list for a fee.
  - wallflower 17y ago
    I've sat in some multiple-day long RFP sessions where there the sales guy "moderates" items like "14.2.2 Support integration with process engine...ok on to section 14.3" It's a scary mentality / even if 14.2.2 is not supported - they might lose the sale on too many N/A's so the sales guy will gloss over it (with the assumption, usually right, that the client doesn't really need that). And if they really do - litigation after the sale
    - dabent 17y ago
      Litigation, or often additional consulting fees to add the features.
  - joe_the_user 17y ago
    It can also describe something as simple as desktop publishing. I want something produces a certain print effect. I don't care how spiffy, reliable or pleasant your app is if it doesn't do what I need. Why did Indesign take so long to catch up with Pagemaker? Come to think of it, I think the feature-effect goes for just about program that is used as a tool. To succeed, a "serious tool" has to do everything the old tool did plus be nicer to use. You can see that in everything from drills to spreadsheets to programming language (inspire a stubborn conservativism in their users).
swombat 17y ago
I'd say that in the business product space, this concept still applies. However, the lack of features becomes a marketing problem to be solved (hopefully not by adding more features).
- bensummers 17y ago
  Fortunately for Apple, marketing isn't a problem because they're Apple. But you're right, like many others we've discovered that lack of features is a marketing problem. There's no clear answer. Demonstrating that we had something which was clearly better than the alternative for a specific problem has got us a long way. People will forgive an awful lot if you can make their day easier.
  - swombat 17y ago
    What we've done is outlined in this blog post: http://www.woobius.com/scribbles/posts/0017-construction-collaboration.html http://www.woobius.com/scribbles/posts/0017-construction-col... Basically, make the tool so easy to adopt that it gets adopted from below, by people who are actually using it, rather than needing to be imposed from above. This obviously doesn't apply to all tools and all industries.
ananthrk 17y ago
As usual, a very good article from Paul. BTW, what would be those three key features of iPad?
- netcan 17y ago
  web browsing, email, media (videos, photos), reading? I'm not sure in what order or even if those are right. I think the iPad gets a slight break though since others in its "category" have many more features and because it is in some ways and iphone/ipod successor, not a brand new product.
- subbu 17y ago
  Internet
- rimantas 17y ago
  1) Instant—in broad sense: instant on, rendering speed, responsiveness to manipulation. 2) Comfortable—allows more flexibility orientation and holding-wise than notebooks. IPS screen with 178 viewing angle helps a lot there too. 3) Interface. Combined with 1) it makes to happen the thing that David Carr noticed: "the gadget disappears" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ysq7mmGaWoU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ysq7mmGaWoU). When you get impression that you are directly manipulating web page, photos or e-book with your bare fingers without much effort why would you think about GHz, number of USB ports, etc.? One of my favorite quotes about design is "Good design is invisible".
  - loup-vaillant 17y ago
    0) Trusted Computing. More seriously, their design is so good that even their "Trusted Computing" scheme is invisible to most people. This is scary.
    - rimantas 17y ago
      Most people don't even know what "Trusted Computing" is, leave alone why would they should be scared by that. Frankly, I am a bit tired of "open is good, closed is bad" rubberstamping without putting much effort into thinking why is that and is it always the case. Reminds me "Four legs good, two legs bad" from the Animal Farm.
brlewis 17y ago
Those three well-executed features need to be done in the context of marketing/sales magic, otherwise the product won't take off. GMail by all rights should be the dominant email client today, or at least every other surviving email client should have copied the conversation view from GMail. FriendFeed should be bigger than Twitter. I'll admit that twitter got the "few things" part, but I don't think they won based on doing those few things well. EDIT: More discussion at http://friendfeed.com/paul/e75a7022/if-your-product-is-great-it-doesn-t-need-to-be-good http://friendfeed.com/paul/e75a7022/if-your-product-is-great...
- gokhan 17y ago
  FriendFeed is about discussion. It's back and forth. There are lot's of software/site/thing on the Internet doing this, in many forms. Twitter is about publishing. It's one way. It's a minified blog without comments. A mini-blog for everyone is a need, apparently. Only Twitter is doing it.
  - pbhjpbhj 17y ago
    >A mini-blog for everyone is a need, apparently. Only Twitter is doing it. Facebook hits that need too (and adds a lot of other things which obfuscate the public take up of your miniblogged "wisdom").
  - brlewis 17y ago
    Your assumption is that a product takes off because it meets a need. When you say, "a mini-blog for everyone is a need, apparently" you're reiterating that assumption, not supporting it.
  - jamesbritt 17y ago
    "It's a minified blog without comments." I keep hearing this, but it simply rings false for me. It feels nothing like blogging to me. It's apparently filling some need (or interest), but micro-blogging ain't it.
- AndrewDucker 17y ago
  "GMail by all rights should be the dominant email client today, or at least every other surviving email client should have copied the conversation view from GMail." Except that Conversation View is the only reason I avoid using the GMail web interface at all costs.
10ren 17y ago
Totally agree. But I think that even in hindsight, it's not always obvious which of even just 3 qualities was actually crucial for success. With google search, it was fast, uncluttered, had a patented pagerank algorithm and didn't sell search placements. Though "the algorithm" was seen as crucial, I've heard people argue that it wasn't (though it added a PR factor). I remember comparing it with other searches early on, and it wasn't that different - but it felt a lot better to use, probably because fast, clear, honest and cool. With gmail, it was 1 GB, fast, and used search and tags instead of hierarchical folders (btw what was new about conversations?) - but how can one tell what was crucial for its success? Perhaps the 1 GB was the main thing? (was there evidence showing how crucial each aspect was?)
- jdietrich 17y ago
  It's a focus on the core functions. With the iPad, Apple looked at what most people did with their computers most of the time - music, video, games, social networking - and concentrated on that, ignoring all the other stuff. The furore and the criticism has shown that this kind of thinking is rather uncommon amongst geeks, the endless "what about x" arguments, but most people don't care about x. The mass market is remarkably consistent in it's desires. Google were the first big player to just do search. They didn't aspire to be a directory or a gateway or a hub, just a search box on a page. All the other major search providers had (and most still have) a page cluttered with all sorts of crap. They were obsessed with adding features and increasing revenue at the cost of their core product. A page with nothing but search is a convincing marketing message about how confident Google are in their search technology. Gmail focussed on how people used email to communicate and organise their lives. Google realised that if you had emails going back and forth in a conversation, it made sense to put it on one page. They realised that having a memory limit was a convenience for the provider that inconvenienced the user. They realised that most people struggled to find and organise things in their inbox. I don't think any of this stuff is particularly difficult or radical, it just requires a monomaniacal focus on the user's needs. Most businesses think from the inside out and do what is convenient or logical for them, rather than thinking from the outside in and thinking about what the user wants. The conversation on HN seems to make this clear to me - we spend endless time discussing new technologies, new methods, about profit and marketing and the latest buzzword, but when was the last time you read a thread about users?
mtoledo 17y ago
37 signals already hits this same key for a long time in their 'getting real' book: 'make half a product, not a half ass product'.
- subbu 17y ago
  Actually this advice is pretty difficult to follow IMHO. We tend to give-in to the demands of clients/users and add complexity without even realizing it. So it needs continuous hammering.
sailormoon 17y ago
one thing I've noticed is that I spend more time browsing the web from my iPhone than from my laptop can't say I agree with that. The iPhone has a great browser - considering - but a laptop is orders of magnitude superior for my usage. I bet he didn't type that blog post on his iPhone, for example.
- megamark16 17y ago
  If I add up all of the 5 minute long "killing time while waiting to pick up my daughter" types of browsing sessions that I do on my phone (a Droid :-) I bet it would easily add up to the amount of time I spend with my netbook on my lap.
- teej 17y ago
  This may be entirely irrelevant, but the quality of my HN posts made on my iPhone are a degree of magnitude higher than those made on my laptop.
barrkel 17y ago
Gmail's killer features for me upon launch were (1) exclusivity of the address invites, (2) storage space, and ultimately (3) POP support so I didn't have to use the web client any more. I almost never use the GMail web interface.
- barrkel 17y ago
  Interesting that 2 people disagree so vehemently to downvote. My point is that the "killer features" aren't necessarily the same for different people.
  - dpritchett 17y ago
    One important thing to note in this "pick three features" strategy is that you can't please all of the people all of the time. There will always be people happy to chime in that they don't like some GMail feature or other but that doesn't take away from the product's successes. My dad chooses a generic USB MP3 player over the iPod but that doesn't say anything bad about the iPod.
    - barrkel 17y ago
      Indeed - and I never said I didn't like the GMail web interface, simply that I don't use it.
tungstenfurnace 17y ago
I think 'great is simple' applies to programming too. The reason I learned BASIC at school was because there were computers lying around which all had the same BASIC pre-installed on ROM. They switched on in less than a second. Nowadays, apart from a few web-based 'try it out' pages, learning a language usually requires installing it and several other packages and getting everything to work together and with your OS. This is hard, especially for beginners. In the meantime, you're using your computer for other important things. If I could buy a pad with the major languages and text editors pre-installed, or even just with one language and one editor, I would. It would be separate from my browsing pad. Which would be separate from my gaming pad. Etc. Hopefully pads will continue to get thinner and cheaper because they will be a lot of them lying around the house by 2020.
- bitwize 17y ago
  Nowadays, apart from a few web-based 'try it out' pages, learning a language usually requires installing it and several other packages and getting everything to work together and with your OS. Counterpoint: Linux and Python. Which makes the strong intersection between Mac-weenie-ism and Ruby-weenie-ism all the more idiosyncratic. Python is a much more Apple-y language: it works right out of the box; and the way you'd expect to do something is usually the way it is in fact done in Python.
briancooley 17y ago
The points about board games and the device being easily shared are nice observations. Using the device for board games would save on storage, solve the problem of missing pieces, and save time setting up, all while maintaining the immediacy of sitting around the table with a friend or three. Chess and Risk strike me as particularly well suited to be played on the iPad.
- smiler 17y ago
  You could even have iPad / iPhone combination for where the players required to keep their 'hand' hidden from the other players. Eg a HN favourite of Settlers of Catan comes to mind - the game board on the iPad, and each player has an iPhone with their resource / victory points cards and they all interface to the iPad to play... Of course, playing an actual board game with actual cards might be more fun :)
mattmaroon 17y ago
I'm not so sure that's what the focus of the iPad naysayers is. It's more "why do I want this?". Nobody questioned why everyone would want a tiny, pocketable device that held every song they would ever want. They questioned whether Apple's mp3 player would be the one people wanted (and, by the way, the first iPod was not, it took a few generations). Nobody questioned whether people would want a smartphone at all, they'd been popular for years, just where in the market the iPhone would end up. The iPad's a different animal because it's trying to sell people something they don't even know they want. It's more akin to the Apple TV than the iPod. Maybe they want something like this or maybe they don't, but it isn't the feature set that's worrisome, it's the fact that we all have a smartphone and a laptop, and do we really need something in between? Only time will tell.
- n8agrin 17y ago
  I agree with your premise. One thing I would add though, at least in my opinion, is that the iPad will likely be word of mouth experience. What I mean is that one of your friends will get an iPad, you'll use it and eventually you might see where it fits into your life. I see the Kindle falling into a similar category. I'm not arguing that the iPad is so revolutionary we cannot predict how it will be used, just that until people can get their hands on one it's hard for them to foresee how it will augment their life.
  - mattmaroon 17y ago
    I think it's even hard for Apple to see. They didn't get what the iPhone or iPod touch really were at first either. Their party line of "all apps should be webpages" turned out to be clearly wrong, and now they realize that those devices are mainly mobile app platforms. The iPod touch, which, though you rarely hear anything about it, has outsold the iPhone by 2:1 and is arguably the most successful product in their lineup currently and maybe of all time, is viewed by them now as the cheapest route to the App Store they thought was unnecessary when they launched. The iPad platform does ensure that if there's a market for the form factor, someone will find it. Assuming it doesn't get rejected by an App Store intern :)
rajatmehta1 17y ago
This article is very much in sync with what 37 signals preaches.In fact in their book also they suggested this thing, to work on features that are important and can make the product successful, and to cut the rest. In short the product is designed for something specific and it does that brilliantly so it doesnot need any add ons for marketing gimmicks.
Jeema 17y ago
I agree with the jist of this article. And Apple's strong point IMO has always been their IJFW technology (it just fing works), which seems to elude so many others who cram in 10,000 features and wonder why nobody uses their product which takes a Ph.D in computer science to decipher (especially open source projects in many cases steps off soapbox). The problem is, I actually think Apple is starting to abandon this approach for a more of a corporate driven 'I want you to lock you into this' model, which will NOT work. The whole Flash debacle is the prime example of this IMO: if I want to use a Flash application on a webpage, and I'm the average user who doesn't even know* what Flash is, it better just f*ing work. Otherwise this product will be going back to the store, and I as Joe Public average computer-illiterate internet user will be on to something else. End of story.

265 points by paul 17y ago

Probably the best iPad article so far. I think the iPad's winning features are misjudged. That it's simple to use is pointless; YouTube clearly illustrates idiots can use computers and do stuff on the internet. However since it's "just a large iPhone", it's UI is designed around the fact your finger is far fatter than a mouse pointer. Also opening and closing laptops is a pain in the ass. Where the iPad is risky is that it has enough potential UI bandwidth that you want to use it like a normal computer but the OS may be too close to the iPhone model.

gxs 17y ago
I've personally always wanted a phone with a 5-6 inch screen. I really, really wouldn't mind carrying it and would use it all the time. As it is now, I use my phone's 3inch screen so often, just becaues I'm too lazy to pull out my laptop. I think previous articles have hit this one home pretty well - most users simply don't need a computer. I know that when all I want to do is check email quickly and catch up on reading (blogs, hn, etc.), I certainly don't.

scythe 17y ago

s/great/well-designed\ and\ properly-tested/; s/good/feature-complete/; (Am I getting this right? My perl is rusty.) It's hard to disagree with this guy. What's the point of a 5 megapixel camera if it can't focus properly?

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

boundlessdreamz 17y ago

so true. The original GMail launched with no "save" feature for drafts and it was a major inconvenience but my friends and I still loved it to death.

jdietrich 17y ago

Once again, Google and Apple get it, the rest of us don't. The revolution will not be televised. If you can solve a major problem I have, I don't care whether you try and solve all my other problems.

InclinedPlane 17y ago
Quite so, treating feature sets as a laundry list or a shopping list is a recipe for mediocrity. The most important features of every product are implicit: usability, performance, efficiency, aesthetics, robustness, etc. Every product has these aspects, if you ignore them then you will fail to deliver on them. The really slick companies, like Apple and Google, have these concepts baked into their DNA, which is why they seem to be able to take everyone else's lunch money whenever they damned well feel like it. It's better to try and succeed at making something simple, coherent, and excellent (like a well seasoned, perfectly cooked steak) than it is to try and fail at making something overly complicated (like a 12-course meal, which ends up as 7-courses, some of them missing key ingredients, burnt, or raw). You don't get points from the judges for degree of difficulty.
- sailormoon 17y ago
  You don't get points from the judges for degree of difficulty. Well, in most cases you'd have a "judge" you actually do. But I think the point you were trying to make - that normal people don't care if you made a really good effort and the task was really hard, they just care about the final taste, is 100% correct.
  - joe_the_user 17y ago
    Well, the only time when ordinary people care that a task is hard is when it's difficulty been floridly demonstrated to them - when they've been wanting something for a long time and someone comes up with something that barely succeeds, you might get a pass. Apps with barely functional features that a group of users have been chafing for often succeed. But if you're trying to sell someone on something they didn't know they might want, if that something works in a clumsy and unreliable fashion, you probably convince the person the whole thing is a poor idea.

asmosoinio 17y ago

Good article and the core idea is so spot on that I did not mind it riding the iPad publicity wave... This made me chuckle: """For markets that have purchasing processes with long lists of feature requirements, you should probably just crank out as many features as possible and not waste time on simplicity or usability."""

dabent 17y ago
That quote pretty much sums up enterprise/government software consulting and sales. A committee will come up with a grocery list of features that must work, but don't need to work well. The longer the list, the more the consultants make, so they gladly help their clients lengthen the list for a fee.
- wallflower 17y ago
  I've sat in some multiple-day long RFP sessions where there the sales guy "moderates" items like "14.2.2 Support integration with process engine...ok on to section 14.3" It's a scary mentality / even if 14.2.2 is not supported - they might lose the sale on too many N/A's so the sales guy will gloss over it (with the assumption, usually right, that the client doesn't really need that). And if they really do - litigation after the sale
  - dabent 17y ago
    Litigation, or often additional consulting fees to add the features.
- joe_the_user 17y ago
  It can also describe something as simple as desktop publishing. I want something produces a certain print effect. I don't care how spiffy, reliable or pleasant your app is if it doesn't do what I need. Why did Indesign take so long to catch up with Pagemaker? Come to think of it, I think the feature-effect goes for just about program that is used as a tool. To succeed, a "serious tool" has to do everything the old tool did plus be nicer to use. You can see that in everything from drills to spreadsheets to programming language (inspire a stubborn conservativism in their users).

swombat 17y ago

I'd say that in the business product space, this concept still applies. However, the lack of features becomes a marketing problem to be solved (hopefully not by adding more features).

bensummers 17y ago
Fortunately for Apple, marketing isn't a problem because they're Apple. But you're right, like many others we've discovered that lack of features is a marketing problem. There's no clear answer. Demonstrating that we had something which was clearly better than the alternative for a specific problem has got us a long way. People will forgive an awful lot if you can make their day easier.
- swombat 17y ago
  What we've done is outlined in this blog post: http://www.woobius.com/scribbles/posts/0017-construction-collaboration.html http://www.woobius.com/scribbles/posts/0017-construction-col... Basically, make the tool so easy to adopt that it gets adopted from below, by people who are actually using it, rather than needing to be imposed from above. This obviously doesn't apply to all tools and all industries.

ananthrk 17y ago

As usual, a very good article from Paul. BTW, what would be those three key features of iPad?

netcan 17y ago
web browsing, email, media (videos, photos), reading? I'm not sure in what order or even if those are right. I think the iPad gets a slight break though since others in its "category" have many more features and because it is in some ways and iphone/ipod successor, not a brand new product.
subbu 17y ago
Internet
rimantas 17y ago
1) Instant—in broad sense: instant on, rendering speed, responsiveness to manipulation. 2) Comfortable—allows more flexibility orientation and holding-wise than notebooks. IPS screen with 178 viewing angle helps a lot there too. 3) Interface. Combined with 1) it makes to happen the thing that David Carr noticed: "the gadget disappears" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ysq7mmGaWoU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ysq7mmGaWoU). When you get impression that you are directly manipulating web page, photos or e-book with your bare fingers without much effort why would you think about GHz, number of USB ports, etc.? One of my favorite quotes about design is "Good design is invisible".
- loup-vaillant 17y ago
  0) Trusted Computing. More seriously, their design is so good that even their "Trusted Computing" scheme is invisible to most people. This is scary.
  - rimantas 17y ago
    Most people don't even know what "Trusted Computing" is, leave alone why would they should be scared by that. Frankly, I am a bit tired of "open is good, closed is bad" rubberstamping without putting much effort into thinking why is that and is it always the case. Reminds me "Four legs good, two legs bad" from the Animal Farm.

brlewis 17y ago

Those three well-executed features need to be done in the context of marketing/sales magic, otherwise the product won't take off. GMail by all rights should be the dominant email client today, or at least every other surviving email client should have copied the conversation view from GMail. FriendFeed should be bigger than Twitter. I'll admit that twitter got the "few things" part, but I don't think they won based on doing those few things well. EDIT: More discussion at http://friendfeed.com/paul/e75a7022/if-your-product-is-great-it-doesn-t-need-to-be-good http://friendfeed.com/paul/e75a7022/if-your-product-is-great...

gokhan 17y ago
FriendFeed is about discussion. It's back and forth. There are lot's of software/site/thing on the Internet doing this, in many forms. Twitter is about publishing. It's one way. It's a minified blog without comments. A mini-blog for everyone is a need, apparently. Only Twitter is doing it.
- pbhjpbhj 17y ago
  >A mini-blog for everyone is a need, apparently. Only Twitter is doing it. Facebook hits that need too (and adds a lot of other things which obfuscate the public take up of your miniblogged "wisdom").
- brlewis 17y ago
  Your assumption is that a product takes off because it meets a need. When you say, "a mini-blog for everyone is a need, apparently" you're reiterating that assumption, not supporting it.
- jamesbritt 17y ago
  "It's a minified blog without comments." I keep hearing this, but it simply rings false for me. It feels nothing like blogging to me. It's apparently filling some need (or interest), but micro-blogging ain't it.
AndrewDucker 17y ago
"GMail by all rights should be the dominant email client today, or at least every other surviving email client should have copied the conversation view from GMail." Except that Conversation View is the only reason I avoid using the GMail web interface at all costs.

10ren 17y ago

Totally agree. But I think that even in hindsight, it's not always obvious which of even just 3 qualities was actually crucial for success. With google search, it was fast, uncluttered, had a patented pagerank algorithm and didn't sell search placements. Though "the algorithm" was seen as crucial, I've heard people argue that it wasn't (though it added a PR factor). I remember comparing it with other searches early on, and it wasn't that different - but it felt a lot better to use, probably because fast, clear, honest and cool. With gmail, it was 1 GB, fast, and used search and tags instead of hierarchical folders (btw what was new about conversations?) - but how can one tell what was crucial for its success? Perhaps the 1 GB was the main thing? (was there evidence showing how crucial each aspect was?)

jdietrich 17y ago
It's a focus on the core functions. With the iPad, Apple looked at what most people did with their computers most of the time - music, video, games, social networking - and concentrated on that, ignoring all the other stuff. The furore and the criticism has shown that this kind of thinking is rather uncommon amongst geeks, the endless "what about x" arguments, but most people don't care about x. The mass market is remarkably consistent in it's desires. Google were the first big player to just do search. They didn't aspire to be a directory or a gateway or a hub, just a search box on a page. All the other major search providers had (and most still have) a page cluttered with all sorts of crap. They were obsessed with adding features and increasing revenue at the cost of their core product. A page with nothing but search is a convincing marketing message about how confident Google are in their search technology. Gmail focussed on how people used email to communicate and organise their lives. Google realised that if you had emails going back and forth in a conversation, it made sense to put it on one page. They realised that having a memory limit was a convenience for the provider that inconvenienced the user. They realised that most people struggled to find and organise things in their inbox. I don't think any of this stuff is particularly difficult or radical, it just requires a monomaniacal focus on the user's needs. Most businesses think from the inside out and do what is convenient or logical for them, rather than thinking from the outside in and thinking about what the user wants. The conversation on HN seems to make this clear to me - we spend endless time discussing new technologies, new methods, about profit and marketing and the latest buzzword, but when was the last time you read a thread about users?

mtoledo 17y ago

37 signals already hits this same key for a long time in their 'getting real' book: 'make half a product, not a half ass product'.

subbu 17y ago
Actually this advice is pretty difficult to follow IMHO. We tend to give-in to the demands of clients/users and add complexity without even realizing it. So it needs continuous hammering.

sailormoon 17y ago

one thing I've noticed is that I spend more time browsing the web from my iPhone than from my laptop can't say I agree with that. The iPhone has a great browser - considering - but a laptop is orders of magnitude superior for my usage. I bet he didn't type that blog post on his iPhone, for example.

megamark16 17y ago
If I add up all of the 5 minute long "killing time while waiting to pick up my daughter" types of browsing sessions that I do on my phone (a Droid :-) I bet it would easily add up to the amount of time I spend with my netbook on my lap.
teej 17y ago
This may be entirely irrelevant, but the quality of my HN posts made on my iPhone are a degree of magnitude higher than those made on my laptop.

barrkel 17y ago

Gmail's killer features for me upon launch were (1) exclusivity of the address invites, (2) storage space, and ultimately (3) POP support so I didn't have to use the web client any more. I almost never use the GMail web interface.

barrkel 17y ago
Interesting that 2 people disagree so vehemently to downvote. My point is that the "killer features" aren't necessarily the same for different people.
- dpritchett 17y ago
  One important thing to note in this "pick three features" strategy is that you can't please all of the people all of the time. There will always be people happy to chime in that they don't like some GMail feature or other but that doesn't take away from the product's successes. My dad chooses a generic USB MP3 player over the iPod but that doesn't say anything bad about the iPod.
  - barrkel 17y ago
    Indeed - and I never said I didn't like the GMail web interface, simply that I don't use it.

tungstenfurnace 17y ago

I think 'great is simple' applies to programming too. The reason I learned BASIC at school was because there were computers lying around which all had the same BASIC pre-installed on ROM. They switched on in less than a second. Nowadays, apart from a few web-based 'try it out' pages, learning a language usually requires installing it and several other packages and getting everything to work together and with your OS. This is hard, especially for beginners. In the meantime, you're using your computer for other important things. If I could buy a pad with the major languages and text editors pre-installed, or even just with one language and one editor, I would. It would be separate from my browsing pad. Which would be separate from my gaming pad. Etc. Hopefully pads will continue to get thinner and cheaper because they will be a lot of them lying around the house by 2020.

bitwize 17y ago
Nowadays, apart from a few web-based 'try it out' pages, learning a language usually requires installing it and several other packages and getting everything to work together and with your OS. Counterpoint: Linux and Python. Which makes the strong intersection between Mac-weenie-ism and Ruby-weenie-ism all the more idiosyncratic. Python is a much more Apple-y language: it works right out of the box; and the way you'd expect to do something is usually the way it is in fact done in Python.

briancooley 17y ago

The points about board games and the device being easily shared are nice observations. Using the device for board games would save on storage, solve the problem of missing pieces, and save time setting up, all while maintaining the immediacy of sitting around the table with a friend or three. Chess and Risk strike me as particularly well suited to be played on the iPad.

smiler 17y ago
You could even have iPad / iPhone combination for where the players required to keep their 'hand' hidden from the other players. Eg a HN favourite of Settlers of Catan comes to mind - the game board on the iPad, and each player has an iPhone with their resource / victory points cards and they all interface to the iPad to play... Of course, playing an actual board game with actual cards might be more fun :)

mattmaroon 17y ago

I'm not so sure that's what the focus of the iPad naysayers is. It's more "why do I want this?". Nobody questioned why everyone would want a tiny, pocketable device that held every song they would ever want. They questioned whether Apple's mp3 player would be the one people wanted (and, by the way, the first iPod was not, it took a few generations). Nobody questioned whether people would want a smartphone at all, they'd been popular for years, just where in the market the iPhone would end up. The iPad's a different animal because it's trying to sell people something they don't even know they want. It's more akin to the Apple TV than the iPod. Maybe they want something like this or maybe they don't, but it isn't the feature set that's worrisome, it's the fact that we all have a smartphone and a laptop, and do we really need something in between? Only time will tell.

n8agrin 17y ago
I agree with your premise. One thing I would add though, at least in my opinion, is that the iPad will likely be word of mouth experience. What I mean is that one of your friends will get an iPad, you'll use it and eventually you might see where it fits into your life. I see the Kindle falling into a similar category. I'm not arguing that the iPad is so revolutionary we cannot predict how it will be used, just that until people can get their hands on one it's hard for them to foresee how it will augment their life.
- mattmaroon 17y ago
  I think it's even hard for Apple to see. They didn't get what the iPhone or iPod touch really were at first either. Their party line of "all apps should be webpages" turned out to be clearly wrong, and now they realize that those devices are mainly mobile app platforms. The iPod touch, which, though you rarely hear anything about it, has outsold the iPhone by 2:1 and is arguably the most successful product in their lineup currently and maybe of all time, is viewed by them now as the cheapest route to the App Store they thought was unnecessary when they launched. The iPad platform does ensure that if there's a market for the form factor, someone will find it. Assuming it doesn't get rejected by an App Store intern :)

rajatmehta1 17y ago

This article is very much in sync with what 37 signals preaches.In fact in their book also they suggested this thing, to work on features that are important and can make the product successful, and to cut the rest. In short the product is designed for something specific and it does that brilliantly so it doesnot need any add ons for marketing gimmicks.

Jeema 17y ago

I agree with the jist of this article. And Apple's strong point IMO has always been their IJFW technology (it just fing works), which seems to elude so many others who cram in 10,000 features and wonder why nobody uses their product which takes a Ph.D in computer science to decipher (especially open source projects in many cases steps off soapbox). The problem is, I actually think Apple is starting to abandon this approach for a more of a corporate driven 'I want you to lock you into this' model, which will NOT work. The whole Flash debacle is the prime example of this IMO: if I want to use a Flash application on a webpage, and I'm the average user who doesn't even know* what Flash is, it better just f*ing work. Otherwise this product will be going back to the store, and I as Joe Public average computer-illiterate internet user will be on to something else. End of story.