3 ms·

This is a classic engineer response. It's not about who does it first, it's about who does it right. We didn't have the technology to implement this properly 5

This is a classic engineer response. It's not about who does it first, it's about who does it right. We didn't have the technology to implement this properly 5 years ago. I've never seen the Ovi Maps tool you mention, but I'm willing to bet that it wasn't polished enough to make it natural for users. Now, I'm not entirely convinced that Google Instant is polished enough either- anecdotally, I've already seen some confusion. But saying "it's all marketing" willfully ignores the lesson we've all been taught by Apple: a revolutionary feature that isn't intuitively usable is no revolutionary feature at all.

DavidMcLaughlin 16y ago
Actually, to me it seems like the real lesson most companies are picking up from Apple is to grossly overstate every little thing they do in the name of hype and buzz. I mean, revolutionary feature? Seriously? My whole point is this revolution happened five years ago and people learnt their lesson and moved on. I'm sure a lot of developers will be asked to put this back in, but on the plus side if you're not dealing with Google scale it's a trivial thing to implement.
- jessriedel 16y ago
  I think you guys are talking past each other. Your claim is that, if Google Instant is successful, it will be because of marketing/hype/some-other-non-technical-reason. His claim is that it will be because Google made the feature (which everyone agrees existed in a basic form 5 years ago) accessible to the average user. I don't think you guys are going to be able to settle this debate without some data about real life users.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- cmurphycode 16y ago
  There's always a chicken-before-the-egg argument with companies like Apple. Do people love using their products because of their marketing, or is their marketing effective because people love using their products? I think it's naive to say the former. Apple posted 3 billion dollars in profit last quarter. If all Nokia had to do to post those numbers was grossly overstate every feature in their phones (which should be easy, there are so many), they'd probably be doing it. The thing that really bugs me about this is that personally, as a DIY techie, I actually like the power-user oriented nature of the Nokia phones a lot more than the iPhone (at least, at first, when the iPhone was hopelessly feature-barren). I probably would've really liked your real time search! But I'm not arguing about what I want from a product. I'm arguing about what the majority of people want.

DavidMcLaughlin 16y ago

Actually, to me it seems like the real lesson most companies are picking up from Apple is to grossly overstate every little thing they do in the name of hype and buzz. I mean, revolutionary feature? Seriously? My whole point is this revolution happened five years ago and people learnt their lesson and moved on. I'm sure a lot of developers will be asked to put this back in, but on the plus side if you're not dealing with Google scale it's a trivial thing to implement.

jessriedel 16y ago
I think you guys are talking past each other. Your claim is that, if Google Instant is successful, it will be because of marketing/hype/some-other-non-technical-reason. His claim is that it will be because Google made the feature (which everyone agrees existed in a basic form 5 years ago) accessible to the average user. I don't think you guys are going to be able to settle this debate without some data about real life users.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
cmurphycode 16y ago
There's always a chicken-before-the-egg argument with companies like Apple. Do people love using their products because of their marketing, or is their marketing effective because people love using their products? I think it's naive to say the former. Apple posted 3 billion dollars in profit last quarter. If all Nokia had to do to post those numbers was grossly overstate every feature in their phones (which should be easy, there are so many), they'd probably be doing it. The thing that really bugs me about this is that personally, as a DIY techie, I actually like the power-user oriented nature of the Nokia phones a lot more than the iPhone (at least, at first, when the iPhone was hopelessly feature-barren). I probably would've really liked your real time search! But I'm not arguing about what I want from a product. I'm arguing about what the majority of people want.