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> Winners seem to be randomly chosen, almost! Winners are mostly chosen by effort put into marketing, not product quality.
by onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
> Winners seem to be randomly chosen, almost!
Winners are mostly chosen by effort put into marketing, not product quality.
- mattgreenrocks 2y agoHave definitely someone say, "well I tried Drizzle because the creators are good at shitposting on X." I do not understand that at all, but maybe my reality is just substantially less mediated by "the conversation" that I don't get it. (Drizzle is fine BTW)
- digging 2y agoI think that's actually not unusual or even wildly unreasonable shopping behavior in a market where: 1. Many if not most "customers" (JS devs) don't understand how to evaluate quality deeply (thus, quality signals aren't trustworthy, making evaluation more difficult and resulting in further acceptance of using unevaluated products) 2. There's an overwhelming number of choices, with deprecation, replacement, and eclipsing all being fairly common - potentially even year-to-year You kinda just have to try stuff out and work with what you've got.
- ZephyrBlu 2y agoWhat I translate that to is: "Drizzle is top of mind for me". If they tried Drizzle and it was shit, they would likely look for something else.
- thinkingtoilet 2y agoWinners are chosen because they tend to solve a problem easily for the average person. 99% of people don't care if it's written in rust or has the proper abstractions. It's, "I need to do X" and the winner does X easily. People here are very out of touch.
- nitwit005 2y agoIf no one hears about something, no one will use or buy it. It doesn't matter how well it does by any metric. Marketing will always matter.
- gmueckl 2y agoIt's a little worse than that. Given two products that seem to do the same job on paper, the one with glossier marketing will win even if it is an unreliable pile of crap in practice.
- axus 2y agoCounter-example: all the people that were using CentOS 6/7 instead of RHEL. Not that Red Hat did tons of marketing, but it was more than zero.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- gmueckl 2y agoMy utterly cynical take is that the way to win with software is to put as much money and effort into marketing and sales as possible and as little as possible into the actual product. Especially B2B seems to do this a lot in practice because that software is bought based on checklist items and demos by salespeople.
- wussboy 2y agoI don't think this is a cynical take. I think it is the rational take. Anyone not doing this is going to be outcompeted by those who are.
- thechao 2y agoI also like that we try to build 'ratings' sites that end up being coopted as yet another ad sales vector.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y agoYou're starting to realize why eng is a cost center. The goal of the business it to make money, not make a great product. They will make the product better if and only if it will lead to greater profits. If you can make more money hiring more sales and marketing people to sell a broken product than hiring more engineers to fix the product, you're going to hire more sales and marketing people.
- closeparen 2y agoSo don’t work at a company that sells a software product to other businesses. Work at a company that has a business of its own, which runs more efficiently when the software is better.
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y agoYou're still in a cost center.
- changoplatanero 2y agosometimes having a higher quality product makes the marketing easier
- dayvid 2y agoCost as well. Most people don't want to invest in a high quality product unless it's something that is clearly miles above the competition (e.g. Vitamix, Herman Miller or Leap Chair, etc.)
- malfist 2y agoOr someone paid someone $5 and got thousands of stars