4 ms·

His spiel starting at 14 minutes in about how seemingly every tech product these days is a partially-baked, unfinished, barely even usable, yet full-priced prod

His spiel starting at 14 minutes in about how seemingly every tech product these days is a partially-baked, unfinished, barely even usable, yet full-priced product with a vague promise of "it'll receive updates and be better" rings very true, and is frustrating as hell. Marques specifically mentions it happening in video games, cars (Tesla self-driving), smartphones, and these AI things as particular offenders. I've also seen it with SaaS. Even a lot of the things being released by the big cloud providers at their yearly conferences are mostly in some half-baked state. We've taken the concept of a "minimum viable product" and turned it into "minimum hype-able product". It sucks.

__loam 2y ago
I think the mindset is like, we've done a bunch of development, let's sell it to deliver some value now rather than wait for it to be perfect. It makes sense from that agile manifesto perspective but I miss the days of buying something like a game boy advance cartridge that ships once and mostly just works.
- esafak 2y ago
  That only works if you are doing something unique enough to ignore its imperfections, otherwise people will use a full-featured competitor. The alternative to the Rabbit is your phone, I suppose.
- shostack 2y ago
  The problem is with the lack of transparency and expectation setting. If you sell something with lots of hype and then deliver half of it, you've failed.
- bane 2y ago
  The product owner in a company should be defining success for the development goals in agile, not beta tested on the paying public.
  - tazu 2y ago
    I agree. I wonder if the AI-aspect muddled things, like engineers saying "we just need more data for <x feature>, let's push for a cheap product and iterate fast"...
- charlie0 2y ago
  I'm seeing this play out at my workplace. Going down the wrong path just because we couldn't add an extra week to think things through and go down the right path from the beginning.
  - __loam 2y ago
    Time to think is unfortunately a luxury.
    - charlie0 2y ago
      The trap here is thinking that starting fast is also the way to reach the goal the fastest. That doesn't always work and is especially true the more complex a project is.
saltsaman 2y ago
It's his core philosophy: "Never. Ever. Buy a tech product based on the promise of future software updates." https://x.com/MKBHD/status/1383616274693951494 https://x.com/MKBHD/status/1383616274693951494
- miragecraft 2y ago
  Similarly, promise of future plugins from “the community”.
- windexh8er 2y ago
  It's unfortunate that the only reason this problem exists is because people buy into the marketing. But the amazingly ironic part about this is that MKBHD / Marques Brownlee has hocked this type of garbage (aka sponsorships) for years, propping up a lot of this bad behavior along the way. Personalities like him are "celebrities" from a lot of consumer's perspectives, and they trust what he says verbatim. From an objective stance his reviews are lackluster: they contain very little data and no fundamental framework that underscore his "reviews". He's a YouTuber with an opinion that is being influenced by sponsor marketing money. Yet his well crafted productions are pretty and easy to consume, which sells and Google puts it front and center. To say that he has a "core philosophy" is laughable. The entertainment I would watch is if people like him had to disclose all earned income along with these videos. I'd gather a lot of his loyal following would start putting those dollars to sense with respect to how his videos are positioned: call-out, hype generating, brand supremacy, etc...
  - m463 2y ago
    You're not the target market. I've seen interesting products, and either been curious or ready to buy. Unfortunately, the only available information to me is the marketing. Seriously, look on amazon. You can see pictures of the product, read the description, and read the reviews. this leads to 2/3 of the information being by the marketing team, and quite possibly much of the final 1/3, the reviews. Being able to view a video of the product by someone (anyone!) on youtube gives you a chance of critical information you need for a decision. Who cares if he's lackluster. If he even in passing gives you an idea of what the product might actually be like, you've been helped. By the way, even consumer reports, formerly the gold standard in unbiased reviews is part of the gravy train. When they switched from the magazine to online, they acted like a funnel to purchases. sigh.
cjk2 2y ago
I laughed at the big cloud providers comment because my job these days is filing support tickets with AWS when their ancillary services don’t work properly for some reason. While I don’t think maturity has improved or got worse really, considering the general state of things 20 years ago, it should have by now. As someone who likes to solve a problem rather than create two new ones, I will always go for a mature solution these days.
Hock88sdx 2y ago
Solarcity, FSD and Cybertruck helped propelled Elon to world richest billionaire. Hype is good!
hysan 2y ago
I love this rant of his. This trend towards selling unfinished products at full price is corporations exploiting yet another lever to squeeze more money out of people. And that lever is to treat customers not as customers but as investors. Whenever you purchase an unfinished product on the promise of a more complete product in the future, you are taking on the risk that that future product will not be delivered. You are being used as leverage and even worse, you receive no share of profit for any future success because you’ve already paid full price. You are an interest free loan that does not need to be paid back! I wish that more influential people would call this practice out for what it is and try to stop people from being exploited in this manner.

__loam 2y ago

I think the mindset is like, we've done a bunch of development, let's sell it to deliver some value now rather than wait for it to be perfect. It makes sense from that agile manifesto perspective but I miss the days of buying something like a game boy advance cartridge that ships once and mostly just works.

esafak 2y ago
That only works if you are doing something unique enough to ignore its imperfections, otherwise people will use a full-featured competitor. The alternative to the Rabbit is your phone, I suppose.
shostack 2y ago
The problem is with the lack of transparency and expectation setting. If you sell something with lots of hype and then deliver half of it, you've failed.
bane 2y ago
The product owner in a company should be defining success for the development goals in agile, not beta tested on the paying public.
- tazu 2y ago
  I agree. I wonder if the AI-aspect muddled things, like engineers saying "we just need more data for <x feature>, let's push for a cheap product and iterate fast"...
charlie0 2y ago
I'm seeing this play out at my workplace. Going down the wrong path just because we couldn't add an extra week to think things through and go down the right path from the beginning.
- __loam 2y ago
  Time to think is unfortunately a luxury.
  - charlie0 2y ago
    The trap here is thinking that starting fast is also the way to reach the goal the fastest. That doesn't always work and is especially true the more complex a project is.

saltsaman 2y ago

It's his core philosophy: "Never. Ever. Buy a tech product based on the promise of future software updates." https://x.com/MKBHD/status/1383616274693951494 https://x.com/MKBHD/status/1383616274693951494

miragecraft 2y ago
Similarly, promise of future plugins from “the community”.
windexh8er 2y ago
It's unfortunate that the only reason this problem exists is because people buy into the marketing. But the amazingly ironic part about this is that MKBHD / Marques Brownlee has hocked this type of garbage (aka sponsorships) for years, propping up a lot of this bad behavior along the way. Personalities like him are "celebrities" from a lot of consumer's perspectives, and they trust what he says verbatim. From an objective stance his reviews are lackluster: they contain very little data and no fundamental framework that underscore his "reviews". He's a YouTuber with an opinion that is being influenced by sponsor marketing money. Yet his well crafted productions are pretty and easy to consume, which sells and Google puts it front and center. To say that he has a "core philosophy" is laughable. The entertainment I would watch is if people like him had to disclose all earned income along with these videos. I'd gather a lot of his loyal following would start putting those dollars to sense with respect to how his videos are positioned: call-out, hype generating, brand supremacy, etc...
- m463 2y ago
  You're not the target market. I've seen interesting products, and either been curious or ready to buy. Unfortunately, the only available information to me is the marketing. Seriously, look on amazon. You can see pictures of the product, read the description, and read the reviews. this leads to 2/3 of the information being by the marketing team, and quite possibly much of the final 1/3, the reviews. Being able to view a video of the product by someone (anyone!) on youtube gives you a chance of critical information you need for a decision. Who cares if he's lackluster. If he even in passing gives you an idea of what the product might actually be like, you've been helped. By the way, even consumer reports, formerly the gold standard in unbiased reviews is part of the gravy train. When they switched from the magazine to online, they acted like a funnel to purchases. sigh.

cjk2 2y ago

I laughed at the big cloud providers comment because my job these days is filing support tickets with AWS when their ancillary services don’t work properly for some reason. While I don’t think maturity has improved or got worse really, considering the general state of things 20 years ago, it should have by now. As someone who likes to solve a problem rather than create two new ones, I will always go for a mature solution these days.

Hock88sdx 2y ago

Solarcity, FSD and Cybertruck helped propelled Elon to world richest billionaire. Hype is good!

hysan 2y ago

I love this rant of his. This trend towards selling unfinished products at full price is corporations exploiting yet another lever to squeeze more money out of people. And that lever is to treat customers not as customers but as investors. Whenever you purchase an unfinished product on the promise of a more complete product in the future, you are taking on the risk that that future product will not be delivered. You are being used as leverage and even worse, you receive no share of profit for any future success because you’ve already paid full price. You are an interest free loan that does not need to be paid back! I wish that more influential people would call this practice out for what it is and try to stop people from being exploited in this manner.