3 ms·

As engineers, we all want to build the 10x product - the one that is so great that it cooks for you and does your dishes too. But most products don't reach 10x,

by anonu 4y ago

As engineers, we all want to build the 10x product - the one that is so great that it cooks for you and does your dishes too. But most products don't reach 10x, maybe theyre only 1.1x or 1.2x - meaning small incremental improvements over whatever else is out there. I think if you can use a new tool and get "10% more of whatever" out of it - then thats still good, but the user friction you will encounter will be too great, switching costs are too high. I think this is where marketing comes in. Most successful marketing wont tell you about all the nice features, they will instead give you a feeling that using the product you belong to some higher strata of society or humanity. That is what makes great marketing. You can say its BS - but think about how the coolest products you use in your daily life make you "feel"...

Jasper_ 4y ago
Maybe we shouldn't try and impose great switching costs on society for things that are, at-best, 1.2x improvement. Marketing also tends to downplay the externalities, costs, and downsides to a new technology, because their job is to get you to buy things. In practice, I don't even think most 1.2x products even reach that in the long run once all the negatives are accounted for.
rapind 4y ago
> As engineers, we all want to build the 10x product - the one that is so great that it cooks for you and does your dishes too What? No we don’t. Maybe some of us I’m sure, but I’d wager only a small minority want to build a 10x product as a priority. I suspect the category is far too wide to generalize about this, but for myself (programmer and entrepreneur) I enjoy the “craft” as cheesy as that sounds. The satisfaction from pouring effort into something you can be proud of. Awesome if it pays the bills (even better if I no longer need to care about bills), but 10x w/e isn’t even something I’m thinking of.
WalterBright 4y ago
What percent of products you buy you are sorry you bought?
wpietri 4y ago
I think bullshit is technically the correct term for that "make people feel superior" nonsense. Bullshit being "statements produced without particular concern for truth, to distinguish from a deliberate, manipulative lie intended to subvert the truth". What if we just trusted people to decide for themselves when the 10% improvement is good enough for them to switch? Rather than, say, manipulating them via cognitive flaws so that we can fill our own pockets.
- permo-w 4y ago
  in my opinion, unless the marketing prophecy fulfils itself, it's absolutely a deliberate manipulative lie
- anonu 4y ago
  Do you remember the early apple iPod TV commercials? https://youtu.be/NlHUz99l-eo https://youtu.be/NlHUz99l-eo The ones with the silhouettes of people dancing and the white cord on prominent display? There's not a single mention of what an ipod is or how much space it has or how you connect it to songs. These ads were about feelings... Not tech specs. That's what sells in the end. Were these ads a lie?
  - Banana699 4y ago
    >Were these ads a lie As the parent you're replying to notes, this ad was bullshit, not a lie. A lie cares about the truth. It has to, in fact, follow the truth up till a specific and very carefully chosen point, and a good liar learns to maintain and update an elaborate concurrent model of the world in their head, one thread for the actual world, and one thread per each independent lie they told. Bullshit doesn't give a shit, a bullshitter literally couldn't care less there is something out there beyond them that they have to match at least roughly in broad outlines. A lie is a well-aimed sniper rifle, bullshit is a spraying gatling gun. It's like the difference between being evil and being a psychopath, most evil people either believe that they are good and doing good (and devise elaborate reality filters to maintain that belief), or that they are good but are forced or tempted by things outside of their control into doing bad. Some might even believe they are fundamentally bad and those are either pursuing redemption (however half-heartedly) or believe that they are beyond redemption but hate themselves every second. No such inner live for the psychopaths, they just can't get their head around the idea of moral obligations, the notion of doing things even if they are not useful or favorable to you, because you would like others to do them for you if the situations are reversed. The Golden Rule is Quantum Mechanics to them. Evil people and liars are trying to win the game of being good and\or truthful despite breaking the rules, bullshitters and psychopaths can't even get themselves to understand\care about the game or its rules, let alone caring about winning or losing. This is one of the reasons I refuse to buy Apple on principle. Aside from the practical reason of a hilariously inflated pricing and an exploitative business model, the supreme disrespect to your intellect and moral worth is their marketing, to them your're not an adult to be told factual things about the product or even amusing lighthearted jokes about the product or shown sexy women holding the product or any advertising strategy that treat you as someone of an independent desire who must be convinced or tempted into buying the product. No, you're a child who should be coddled with stories whose point is that you're better and happier than others when you buy the product. Like a cult, "join the chosen people".
hinkley 4y ago
Hell, often we don't even achieve that. Many, many products are 1.2x for one demographic and .8x for another.
- mason55 4y ago
  And good marketing will help the 1.2x demographic discover that there's an improved solution while not worrying about the .8x demographic (or actively disqualifying them). This thread is doomed to failure because half of the people are imagining the perfect altruistic, benevolent, competent marketer, and the other half is imagining the scummy, scam artist, and the actual answer is the tautological "good marketing is good and bad marketing is bad."
  - hinkley 4y ago
    Well, except it's Good Marketing is Good and Bad Marketing is a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
  - corrral 4y ago
    I've more than once seen a new database company grow from nothing to a serious business by being 2-5x for one narrow set of users and 0.1x-0.5x for the rest, but being sold as 2-10x for everyone. Most of their market doesn't end up coming from the people for whom they're actually a decent choice, because capturing even a small amount of the larger market is more valuable than 100% of that tiny market segment. Trying to deprogram people who've fallen for the marketing can be really frustrating, if you're trying not to be saddled with subpar crap that's going to make your life harder. Mongo and Neo4j come to mind as examples of this.
    - redwood 4y ago
      Odd comparison considering graph databases are incredibly niche wheres you could argue document is basically just relational with embedding and with a different query syntax

by anonu 4y ago

Jasper_ 4y ago

Maybe we shouldn't try and impose great switching costs on society for things that are, at-best, 1.2x improvement. Marketing also tends to downplay the externalities, costs, and downsides to a new technology, because their job is to get you to buy things. In practice, I don't even think most 1.2x products even reach that in the long run once all the negatives are accounted for.

rapind 4y ago

> As engineers, we all want to build the 10x product - the one that is so great that it cooks for you and does your dishes too What? No we don’t. Maybe some of us I’m sure, but I’d wager only a small minority want to build a 10x product as a priority. I suspect the category is far too wide to generalize about this, but for myself (programmer and entrepreneur) I enjoy the “craft” as cheesy as that sounds. The satisfaction from pouring effort into something you can be proud of. Awesome if it pays the bills (even better if I no longer need to care about bills), but 10x w/e isn’t even something I’m thinking of.

WalterBright 4y ago

What percent of products you buy you are sorry you bought?

wpietri 4y ago

I think bullshit is technically the correct term for that "make people feel superior" nonsense. Bullshit being "statements produced without particular concern for truth, to distinguish from a deliberate, manipulative lie intended to subvert the truth". What if we just trusted people to decide for themselves when the 10% improvement is good enough for them to switch? Rather than, say, manipulating them via cognitive flaws so that we can fill our own pockets.

permo-w 4y ago
in my opinion, unless the marketing prophecy fulfils itself, it's absolutely a deliberate manipulative lie
anonu 4y ago
Do you remember the early apple iPod TV commercials? https://youtu.be/NlHUz99l-eo https://youtu.be/NlHUz99l-eo The ones with the silhouettes of people dancing and the white cord on prominent display? There's not a single mention of what an ipod is or how much space it has or how you connect it to songs. These ads were about feelings... Not tech specs. That's what sells in the end. Were these ads a lie?
- Banana699 4y ago
  >Were these ads a lie As the parent you're replying to notes, this ad was bullshit, not a lie. A lie cares about the truth. It has to, in fact, follow the truth up till a specific and very carefully chosen point, and a good liar learns to maintain and update an elaborate concurrent model of the world in their head, one thread for the actual world, and one thread per each independent lie they told. Bullshit doesn't give a shit, a bullshitter literally couldn't care less there is something out there beyond them that they have to match at least roughly in broad outlines. A lie is a well-aimed sniper rifle, bullshit is a spraying gatling gun. It's like the difference between being evil and being a psychopath, most evil people either believe that they are good and doing good (and devise elaborate reality filters to maintain that belief), or that they are good but are forced or tempted by things outside of their control into doing bad. Some might even believe they are fundamentally bad and those are either pursuing redemption (however half-heartedly) or believe that they are beyond redemption but hate themselves every second. No such inner live for the psychopaths, they just can't get their head around the idea of moral obligations, the notion of doing things even if they are not useful or favorable to you, because you would like others to do them for you if the situations are reversed. The Golden Rule is Quantum Mechanics to them. Evil people and liars are trying to win the game of being good and\or truthful despite breaking the rules, bullshitters and psychopaths can't even get themselves to understand\care about the game or its rules, let alone caring about winning or losing. This is one of the reasons I refuse to buy Apple on principle. Aside from the practical reason of a hilariously inflated pricing and an exploitative business model, the supreme disrespect to your intellect and moral worth is their marketing, to them your're not an adult to be told factual things about the product or even amusing lighthearted jokes about the product or shown sexy women holding the product or any advertising strategy that treat you as someone of an independent desire who must be convinced or tempted into buying the product. No, you're a child who should be coddled with stories whose point is that you're better and happier than others when you buy the product. Like a cult, "join the chosen people".

hinkley 4y ago

Hell, often we don't even achieve that. Many, many products are 1.2x for one demographic and .8x for another.

mason55 4y ago
And good marketing will help the 1.2x demographic discover that there's an improved solution while not worrying about the .8x demographic (or actively disqualifying them). This thread is doomed to failure because half of the people are imagining the perfect altruistic, benevolent, competent marketer, and the other half is imagining the scummy, scam artist, and the actual answer is the tautological "good marketing is good and bad marketing is bad."
- hinkley 4y ago
  Well, except it's Good Marketing is Good and Bad Marketing is a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
- corrral 4y ago
  I've more than once seen a new database company grow from nothing to a serious business by being 2-5x for one narrow set of users and 0.1x-0.5x for the rest, but being sold as 2-10x for everyone. Most of their market doesn't end up coming from the people for whom they're actually a decent choice, because capturing even a small amount of the larger market is more valuable than 100% of that tiny market segment. Trying to deprogram people who've fallen for the marketing can be really frustrating, if you're trying not to be saddled with subpar crap that's going to make your life harder. Mongo and Neo4j come to mind as examples of this.
  - redwood 4y ago
    Odd comparison considering graph databases are incredibly niche wheres you could argue document is basically just relational with embedding and with a different query syntax