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I'm starting to get the feeling that there's a big jealousy factor developing here. The formula is simple: find something that's getting traction and getting ta
by paul 18y ago
I'm starting to get the feeling that there's a big jealousy factor developing here. The formula is simple: find something that's getting traction and getting talked about, and then bash it. This bashing is very appealing to people whose own efforts are less successful (or more likely have never started), because it reassures them that the other people's efforts and success aren't "real" or legitimate. The same thing can be seen in the comments on TechCrunch (along with the jealousy of failed competitors).
- ashu 18y agoI think the "never have started" is probably the crux of the matter. People who don't actually build things tend to look at the world from a very different perspective. The focus is more on "how is this thing different from anything else I have seen" and not on "is this thing actually useful to a non-trivial set of people out there". When they focus on the first part, it is very easy to bash almost all things out there. Google? That's just search. Gmail? That's just webmail. IPhone? Just a smartphone - doesn't even have 3G and GPS!
- nostrademons 18y agoI think it's more a distinction between "people who have problems" and "people who don't have problems". When you don't have a problem, you're in browse mode - open to new ideas, but only if they're substantially different from everything you've ever seen and trigger some flicker of recognition, some reason to think it's a good idea. When you do have a problem, you're actively looking for something to solve it, and get really excited about the solution. So if you happen to have the particular problem that Xobni solves, it's great, but if you don't, it's just ho-hum.
- ph0rque 18y agoTo confirm your explanation, I never could understand the appeal of jottit until I attended a meeting where I was able to put up a site of what was being discussed before the end of the meeting using jottit.
- jdroid 18y agoIt's lame to pretend the reactions of potential clients aren't important. Even if there is a jealousy factor, a good founder would take it into account and act accordingly. "But isn't xobni just an outlook plugin?" Clearly people have that idea in their head. Now what is xobni going to do about it?
- brlewis 18y agohttp://www.xobni.com/ http://www.xobni.com/ "Drowning in Email? Find Email & Attachments Instantly" "Xobni is the Outlook plug-in that helps you organize your flooded inbox" It looks to me like they're focused on reaching people who have a problem to solve, and aren't concerned about being viewed as "just an outlook plugin."
- nostrademons 18y agoMany of the people who're objecting - at least on these TechCrunch and FeedBurner stories - would never have bought it anyway. It's better to concentrate on the folks who will buy it (I assume they're out there, though I'm not one of them...) and make something that they'll use, love, and tell people about. http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/01/what-ive-learned-from-sales-part-i.html http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/01/what-ive-learned-from-sa...
- brlewis 18y agoI do see that happening with friendfeed. It must be hard sometimes to find useful feedback when there's all this noise from random bashing.
- paul 18y agoActually, the vast majority of the feedback is very positive. What I've noticed that is that a lot of the stories getting voted up here are just bashing something popular, such as Twitter, or Facebook.