6 ms·

The Milo Criterion

95 points by rheide 15y ago

stupid 15y ago
The calf grew into a cow at about the rate that Milo grew into a man. Calves grow for a year or so. A rather freakish man apparently, since grown cows can weigh over 1000 lb. Also freakish since he had the maturation rate of a cow, or had a knack for breeding cows with the maturation rate of a man. The point is, the calf grew old along with the boy. No, it didn't. I have been pondering this story for a couple of years... Have you really been pondering this story for a couple years? Maybe not that closely. Your metaphor is broken. Milo lifted lots of different calves.
- rocktronica 15y ago
  That's not the point and you know it. http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/pedants.html http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/pedants.html
- rheide 15y ago
  It might not be a perfect metaphor but it does introduce the concept nicely. I have no reason to doubt his claim that he's pondered it for a couple of years.
- lucasjung 15y ago
  It's a Greek myth, so how much realism do you really expect? For what it's worth, the way I've always heard it was that the boy and the calf did grow up together. Seriously: your only problem with the story is that the cow and the boy grew up at about the same rate? Really?
  - hugh3 15y ago
    Milo of Croton was a real guy, so it's not a "Greek Myth" in the usual sense. Almost certainly most of the exaggerated stories told about him are apocryphal, though. Legends say he carried his own bronze statue to its place at Olympia, and once carried a four-year-old bull on his shoulders before slaughtering, roasting, and devouring it in one day.
- anthonyb 15y ago
  Wow, what an amazing reading comprehension fail. Here's the text from the article: The story goes that Milo, a famous wrestler in ancient Greece, gained his immense strength by lifting a newborn calf one day when he was a boy, and then lifting it every day as it grew. In a few years, he was able to lift the grown cow.
spiralganglion 15y ago
I was rather let down by this. The author does a fantastic job of establishing that, through metaphorical thinking, he has hit upon some good wisdom for marketing and development of new products. Good, good. That this wisdom invalidates Lean Startup theory, MVP, etcetera. Ok, controversial, but I can dig it. He alludes to the process he went through to nurture this wisdom, and how it has been subconsciously applied by many, to great success. Getting inspirational, I love it. Then he says that he won't be sharing what he's come up with. The end. Excuse me? Sure, given the premise, I can do my own musing on the subject and come to my own conclusions. But I don't have the same degree of experience as this author. I don't blog about "refactored perception", I don't think about these sorts of things very often (I work in a very different industry), so I would love the insight of someone who does. I'm interested in seeing the arc of his thinking, going from the initial abstract musing with calves and cows, to a fascinating new approach to practical process. That sounds like a great arc to see, even if I won't be following it myself. In hindsight, this just feels a bit like Article Bait or Concept Bait (as opposed to link bait). It promises a "refactored perception", and delivers a "redacted prescription". ADDENDUM: Yes, it's a great read. I really enjoyed reading it. It'll give me some good things to think about. But the ending is a complete cop-out, only conceding the tiniest hint that he might follow up on this in the future. I agree, better to not have the last section at all. Better still, to say that he will indeed write more if people show interest. I would love to read more about this.
- unignorant 15y ago
  I had the same reaction. I can't help but suspect that something meta is going on, "slow marketing" and all...
- v21 15y ago
  Yeah, I too felt a bit swizzed at the end. But if it wasn't for that last paragraph teasing more, it would have felt fairly substantial. Although I don't think you get to say things like "[The Milo Criterion] is the dominant dynamic for successful products." without a hell of a lot more evidence.
- lloeki 15y ago
  One thing that emphasizes the effect (as is the case with most blogs recently) is that the scroll bar shows a lengthy page but the content only makes a small part at the top. End result: Unbeknownst to me, the page is comment-filled, so I was happily reading and scrolling down expecting content that up till now was really enjoyable, and was suddenly struck by The End. What a let down. I really like the Ars Technica approach of initially hiding the comments. It really helps not raising expectations length-wise.
jacques_chester 15y ago
Is it just me, or was the point of this meandering ditty that "You should introduce adaptations at the same rate that people want to adapt"? I mean, that's not very helpful. I can figure that out myself. Even the analogy of Milo is broken, given what we know about strength gains (Olympic weightlifting is my hobby). In particular, strength gains are non-linear. Any developmental curve is the consequence not of some given simple multiplicative factor but of a complex set of feedback loops that govern adaptation. And so it is with technological advancement. I'd be amazed to see a single number governing adaptation to novelty (which is what we're discussing here). If anything it's going to depend on who is adapting, what they've seen in the past, what they're adapting to and so on. If it seems like a smooth, linear process, that's because we're looking at it from an overly compressed time frame. Lots of phenomena look smooth if you squish them up.
- sgentle 15y ago
  I think that would be a fair way to summarise it, but be careful not to reduce something to obviousness and then say it's too simple. The interesting point for me is that much of startup marketing wisdom seems to say "make things people want", whereas there's another school that says "make people want things" - aka the Blue Ocean strategy and kin. How is it that both of these things can exist? Why did Google succeed by beating the dead search horse? Why did Twitter succeed at selling SMS-meets-chat-meets-blog-meets-I'm-on-acid? Likely everyone with an eye to marketing has some sense of a rubber band connecting the ambition to the zeitgeist. You can pull the market with you a little, but go too far and you lose it. It is, in fact, quite a popular idea that Twitter and Google just happened to be in the right place at the right time. But "right place at the right time" is a bit hand-wavy and qualitative. Perhaps it would be better to find a more structured way of thinking about it. That, to me, is the point of this article - not so much Greek calves or the order of growth curves. What if the success of the lean startup movement isn't that it lets you develop faster, but rather that it forces you to develop slower. That is, that by bringing customers and product closer, it prevents you from stretching the rubber band too far. If so, perhaps you could yield better results by reallocating effort from product iterations into determining and exploiting those limits. I suspect where Venkat is going is that instead of asking "what do people want?" on one side and "how can we make them want it more?" on the other, you could treat marketing and development as being simultaneous complementary processes; much as a good video game will always present content at the limit of your skill, you could position your product at the limit of customer tolerance for change. My guess: this was all inspired by Facebook's hilarious mismanagement of that limit. However, I'm in agreement with the other commenters: major weak sauce that this wasn't examined further. Since when did Ribbon Farm leave the apple cart wheels-down? Conflict-averse indeed!

95 points by rheide 15y ago

The calf grew into a cow at about the rate that Milo grew into a man. Calves grow for a year or so. A rather freakish man apparently, since grown cows can weigh over 1000 lb. Also freakish since he had the maturation rate of a cow, or had a knack for breeding cows with the maturation rate of a man. The point is, the calf grew old along with the boy. No, it didn't. I have been pondering this story for a couple of years... Have you really been pondering this story for a couple years? Maybe not that closely. Your metaphor is broken. Milo lifted lots of different calves.

rocktronica 15y ago
That's not the point and you know it. http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/pedants.html http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/pedants.html
rheide 15y ago
It might not be a perfect metaphor but it does introduce the concept nicely. I have no reason to doubt his claim that he's pondered it for a couple of years.
lucasjung 15y ago
It's a Greek myth, so how much realism do you really expect? For what it's worth, the way I've always heard it was that the boy and the calf did grow up together. Seriously: your only problem with the story is that the cow and the boy grew up at about the same rate? Really?
- hugh3 15y ago
  Milo of Croton was a real guy, so it's not a "Greek Myth" in the usual sense. Almost certainly most of the exaggerated stories told about him are apocryphal, though. Legends say he carried his own bronze statue to its place at Olympia, and once carried a four-year-old bull on his shoulders before slaughtering, roasting, and devouring it in one day.
anthonyb 15y ago
Wow, what an amazing reading comprehension fail. Here's the text from the article: The story goes that Milo, a famous wrestler in ancient Greece, gained his immense strength by lifting a newborn calf one day when he was a boy, and then lifting it every day as it grew. In a few years, he was able to lift the grown cow.

spiralganglion 15y ago

I was rather let down by this. The author does a fantastic job of establishing that, through metaphorical thinking, he has hit upon some good wisdom for marketing and development of new products. Good, good. That this wisdom invalidates Lean Startup theory, MVP, etcetera. Ok, controversial, but I can dig it. He alludes to the process he went through to nurture this wisdom, and how it has been subconsciously applied by many, to great success. Getting inspirational, I love it. Then he says that he won't be sharing what he's come up with. The end. Excuse me? Sure, given the premise, I can do my own musing on the subject and come to my own conclusions. But I don't have the same degree of experience as this author. I don't blog about "refactored perception", I don't think about these sorts of things very often (I work in a very different industry), so I would love the insight of someone who does. I'm interested in seeing the arc of his thinking, going from the initial abstract musing with calves and cows, to a fascinating new approach to practical process. That sounds like a great arc to see, even if I won't be following it myself. In hindsight, this just feels a bit like Article Bait or Concept Bait (as opposed to link bait). It promises a "refactored perception", and delivers a "redacted prescription". ADDENDUM: Yes, it's a great read. I really enjoyed reading it. It'll give me some good things to think about. But the ending is a complete cop-out, only conceding the tiniest hint that he might follow up on this in the future. I agree, better to not have the last section at all. Better still, to say that he will indeed write more if people show interest. I would love to read more about this.

unignorant 15y ago
I had the same reaction. I can't help but suspect that something meta is going on, "slow marketing" and all...
v21 15y ago
Yeah, I too felt a bit swizzed at the end. But if it wasn't for that last paragraph teasing more, it would have felt fairly substantial. Although I don't think you get to say things like "[The Milo Criterion] is the dominant dynamic for successful products." without a hell of a lot more evidence.
lloeki 15y ago
One thing that emphasizes the effect (as is the case with most blogs recently) is that the scroll bar shows a lengthy page but the content only makes a small part at the top. End result: Unbeknownst to me, the page is comment-filled, so I was happily reading and scrolling down expecting content that up till now was really enjoyable, and was suddenly struck by The End. What a let down. I really like the Ars Technica approach of initially hiding the comments. It really helps not raising expectations length-wise.

jacques_chester 15y ago

Is it just me, or was the point of this meandering ditty that "You should introduce adaptations at the same rate that people want to adapt"? I mean, that's not very helpful. I can figure that out myself. Even the analogy of Milo is broken, given what we know about strength gains (Olympic weightlifting is my hobby). In particular, strength gains are non-linear. Any developmental curve is the consequence not of some given simple multiplicative factor but of a complex set of feedback loops that govern adaptation. And so it is with technological advancement. I'd be amazed to see a single number governing adaptation to novelty (which is what we're discussing here). If anything it's going to depend on who is adapting, what they've seen in the past, what they're adapting to and so on. If it seems like a smooth, linear process, that's because we're looking at it from an overly compressed time frame. Lots of phenomena look smooth if you squish them up.

sgentle 15y ago
I think that would be a fair way to summarise it, but be careful not to reduce something to obviousness and then say it's too simple. The interesting point for me is that much of startup marketing wisdom seems to say "make things people want", whereas there's another school that says "make people want things" - aka the Blue Ocean strategy and kin. How is it that both of these things can exist? Why did Google succeed by beating the dead search horse? Why did Twitter succeed at selling SMS-meets-chat-meets-blog-meets-I'm-on-acid? Likely everyone with an eye to marketing has some sense of a rubber band connecting the ambition to the zeitgeist. You can pull the market with you a little, but go too far and you lose it. It is, in fact, quite a popular idea that Twitter and Google just happened to be in the right place at the right time. But "right place at the right time" is a bit hand-wavy and qualitative. Perhaps it would be better to find a more structured way of thinking about it. That, to me, is the point of this article - not so much Greek calves or the order of growth curves. What if the success of the lean startup movement isn't that it lets you develop faster, but rather that it forces you to develop slower. That is, that by bringing customers and product closer, it prevents you from stretching the rubber band too far. If so, perhaps you could yield better results by reallocating effort from product iterations into determining and exploiting those limits. I suspect where Venkat is going is that instead of asking "what do people want?" on one side and "how can we make them want it more?" on the other, you could treat marketing and development as being simultaneous complementary processes; much as a good video game will always present content at the limit of your skill, you could position your product at the limit of customer tolerance for change. My guess: this was all inspired by Facebook's hilarious mismanagement of that limit. However, I'm in agreement with the other commenters: major weak sauce that this wasn't examined further. Since when did Ribbon Farm leave the apple cart wheels-down? Conflict-averse indeed!