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To create a new category, name a new game
- tantalor 7y agoThis is probably better well known as a "paradigm shift". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift
- ska 7y agoI think paradigm shift, at least when accurately used, runs much deeper than this.
- tantalor 7y agoMaybe you need to completely reevaluate what you think a paradigm shift really is? Could be you've been thinking about it wrong the whole time.
- ska 7y agoPerhaps, but evidence doesn't seem to point that way :) I agree it's not an easy bright line distinction, but it's the sort of term that dilution makes far less useful.
- mysterydip 7y agoI wish this was easier to do as an employee: you see the writing on the wall, they pay you to be an expert in a field, but no one listens to your "we should be moving in this direction". You're met with one of my most annoying phrases: "this is how we've always done it." The opportunity passes by, now your company is playing catch-up and managers above you are asking how they missed it. If you say "I told you so," you get a reprimand instead of acknowledgement.
- BubRoss 7y agoThis is a logical fallacy known as appeal to tradition
- wolco 7y agoThis is part of company memory/history now and you can reference it in the future. We don't want to avoid doing x because we will end up like [the time we missed the boat].
- throwaway13337 7y agoIt really depends on the direction. A lot of times, devs want to move in a new direction of whatever the hip tech stack is this year. This would help their career by adding the tech to their resume but the business benefit is almost always net negative. Rather than arguing with a developer, they might just give a response that is outside of the developers' domain. The real reason is that it was a bad idea for the business.
- mysterydip 7y agoThat's a fair point. The perspective of developers is different from that of a manager with perhaps a longer term view or other knowledge than the people in the trenches.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- brlewis 7y agoDid you follow the advice of this article and describe why the old way won't continue to work? Did you point to winners who have already gone in the direction you want to move? Did you dissect the pros and cons, acknowledging what's true on their side and being specific about what's false? (Disclaimer: my current project is about doing that last one)
- LaundroMat 7y agoOnly this week I had a discussion about a client we worked with 2 years ago (large retailer). Their IT infrastructure was and is a mess and seriously hampers the development of their business. We spent a lot of time back them telling them about it and showing them the way forward. (Mind that our proposals were not all beneficial to us even). Their request today? "You were absolutely right two years ago. Nothing has changed in the mean time and things have become even more complex now. But could you develop X for us, knowing that you can't touch or change any of the architecture?" We did dissect the pros and cons, pointed to winners, showed the opportunities ahead etc etc. We were discussing everything at C-level too. But sometimes it just doesnt work.
- sushisource 7y agoIt makes for a good setup for the piece, but the whole "do or don't carboload before endurance racing" is still very much a subject of debate.
- thepete2 7y agoHis point is "train your body to burn fat instead of carboloading". I don't get it, why not do both?
- runamok 7y agoYeap basically you should do your long runs slowly and more or less fasted. It sucks and sometimes you crash but it helps train you to burn fat more efficiently. You still want to carbo load before your long (20+) race...
- wyattpeak 7y agoHe does acknowledge that later in the piece, although I don't know it matters one way or the other. The article is about pitching, not the truth of any particular claim.
- huntermeyer 7y agoHe mentions that in the last paragraphs. It's part of his point about orthodoxy and loyalty. People hold strong opinions on either side of that debate.
- _bxg1 7y agoI'm sorry, but I find this post insufferable. It just reeks of corporate buzzwording with a dash of disingenuous manipulation. Also, unrelated: I hate those "conversational" customer service bubbles. I don't know what I expect to happen when I click them, but I know that "Jennifer H", whose picture is shown next to it, is not sitting at a keyboard eagerly awaiting my questions. Maybe I expect a chatbot, maybe I expect outsourced customer-service-farms, but I don't click buttons when I don't know what they really do, especially when I know they're avoiding being up-front about it.
- dang 7y agoI hate buzzwordy articles (and chatbox popups) too, but this article is better than usual and I think the point is a good one. There are situations in which you can't win at the old game, but if you reframe what you're doing as a new game, you can turn yourself into an early defining player instead of a hapless latecomer. We see this in technical domains too. For example, I think Clojure succeeded this way. (We can argue about how much Clojure has succeeded, but it's a Lisp—we have to grade on a curve.) I don't think any attempt at improving on Common Lisp, no matter how technically solid, could have achieved that without "naming a new game", to use the article's vocabulary. Hot newness dominates improved oldness: every element of the set of hot newness beats every element of the set of improved oldness. Elixir/Erlang is another example. I say this article is one of the rarest things, a piece of marketing literature (like Crossing the Chasm and maybe the Innovator's Dilemma) that is useful to engineers.
- _bxg1 7y agoIt came across to me as "Just use this one weird trick and you can convince people of anything!" The runner example in particular seemed to emphasize the convincing over the content. I suppose it's possible to use the same technique benevolently, but the article didn't seem concerned with that question.
- brlewis 7y agoEngineers' emphasis on content over convincing is why we often fail to persuade. I think dang is right that this is a piece of marketing literature that's useful to engineers.
- Animats 7y agoHe writes "goodbye, ownership, hello usership" like that's a good thing. That's the business experience of outsourcing a service. You don't own that part of the business any more. You're just a user of some service that doesn't want to be bothered with your problems.
- TAForObvReasons 7y agoFor what it's worth, a large portion of the HN community is involved with SaaS business. SaaS epitomizes that concept
- austhrow743 7y agoHe's writing about the marketing of the business using that line to all their product. From their perspective it absolutely is a good thing.
- fenwick67 7y agoClassic con-man tactic. "This is the NEW thing, it's a game-changer, you can get in on the ground floor"
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago>Because once someone buys into your new game, it becomes their orthodoxy. They become fiercely loyal to it as an organizing principle for how they act in the world. >Until someone shows up with another story about an even newer game. That’s inevitable, of course, but hopefully it doesn’t happen until you’ve gotten very successful helping customers win at what will suddenly become an old game. All seems a bit postmodern (post-truth I think it's the current rendition of that) ... I'm more interested in what's objectively better. This sounds more like "we got well marketed to, drank the coolaid and now don't want to change (because we'd lose face, demonstrating our susceptibility to being conned ... which seems to me like the big problem in UK [and USA] politics at present).
- austhrow743 7y agoOnce you've created your objectively better thing you still have to go out and sell it. This is about how to do that.
- solarmist 7y agoPlus objectively better usually doesn't mean across the board. It's only objectively better in some particular aspect.
- bathtub365 7y ago“Goodbye, ownership. Hello, usership” is a great tagline for the insane, rent-seeking business models that are en vogue in Silicon Valley.
- abrichr 7y ago> “If AI can diagnose cancer better than doctors, why can’t AI understand [sales] reality better than a salesperson?” [citation needed]