26 ms·

The dumbest and most obvious of realizations finally dawned on me after trying to build a software startup that was based on quality differentiation. We were su

by dahart 1y ago

The dumbest and most obvious of realizations finally dawned on me after trying to build a software startup that was based on quality differentiation. We were sure that a better product would win people over and lead to viral success. It didn’t. Things grew, but so slowly that we ran out of money after a few years before reaching break even. What I realized is that lower costs, and therefore lower quality, are a competitive advantage in a competitive market. Duh. I’m sure I knew and said that in college and for years before my own startup attempt, but this time I really felt it in my bones. It suddenly made me realize exactly why everything in the market is mediocre, and why high quality things always get worse when they get more popular. Pressure to reduce costs grows with the scale of a product. Duh. People want cheap, so if you sell something people want, someone will make it for less by cutting “costs” (quality). Duh. What companies do is pay the minimum they need in order to stay alive & profitable. I don’t mean it never happens, sometimes people get excited and spend for short bursts, young companies often try to make high quality stuff, but eventually there will be an inevitable slide toward minimal spending. There’s probably another name for this, it’s not quite the Market for Lemons idea. I don’t think this leads to market collapse, I think it just leads to stable mediocrity everywhere, and that’s what we have.

thijson 1y ago
I kind of see this in action when I'm comparing products on Amazon. When comparing two products on Amazon that are substantially the same, the cheaper one will have way more reviews. I guess this implies that it has captured the majority of the market.
- thijson 1y ago
  Luxury items however seem to buck this trend, but this is all about conspicuous consumption.
- rpnx 1y ago
  I think this honestly has more to do with moslty Chinese sellers engaging in review fraud, which is a rampant problem. I'm not saying non-Chinese sellers don't engage in review fraud, but I have noticed a trend that around 98% of fake or fraudulently advertised products are of Chinese origin. If it was just because it was cheap, we'd also see similar fraud from Mexican or Vietnamese sellers, but I don't really see that.
  - olejorgenb 1y ago
    You have to have bought the item om Amazon to review right? So these reviewers buy and return, or how does it work?
    - svachalek 1y ago
      There are various ways to do the trick, sometimes they ship out rocks to create a paper trail, sometimes they take a cheap/light product and then replace the listing with something more expensive and carry over all the reviews (which is just stupid that Amazon allows but apparently they do)
    - monkeyelite 1y ago
      If you think about it there is basically no scalable way for Amazon to ensure a seller is providing the same product over time - and to all customers. Random sampling can make sure a product matching the description arrives. But someone familiar with it would have to carefully compare over time. And that process doesn’t scale. One thing Walmart does right is having “buyers” in charge of each department in the store. For example fishing - and they know all the gear and try it out. And they can walk into any store and audit and know if something is wrong. I’m sure Amazon has responsible parties on paper - but the size and rate at which the catalog changes makes this a lower level of accountability.
rom16384 1y ago
I had the same realization but with car mechanics. If you drive a beater you want to spend the least possible on maintenance. On the other hand, if the car mechanic cares about cars and their craftsmanship they want to get everything to tip-top shape at high cost. Some other mechanics are trying to scam you and get the most amount of money for the least amount of work. And most people looking for car mechanics want to pay the least amount possible, and don't quite understand if a repair should be expensive or not. This creates a downward pressure on price at the expense of quality and penalizes the mechanics that care about quality.
- AtlasBarfed 1y ago
  Luckily for mechanics, the shortage of actual blue collar Hands-On labor is so small, that good mechanics actually can charge more. The issue is that you have to be able to distinguish a good mechanic from a bad mechanic cuz they all get to charge a lot because of the shortage. Same thing for plumbing, electrical, HVAC, etc etc etc But I understand your point.
  - Multicomp 1y ago
    Here in Atlanta Georgia, we have a ToyoTechs business. They perform maintenance on only Toyota-family automobiles. They have 2 locations, one for large trucks, one for cars, hybrids, and SUV-looking cars. Both are always filled up with customers. Some of whom drive hundreds of miles out of state to bring their vehicles exclusively there, whether the beater is a customized off-roader or a simple econobox with sentimental value. Why? Because they are on a different incentive structure: non-comissioned payments for employees. They buy OEM parts, give a good warranty, charge fair prices, and they are always busy. If this computer fad goes away, I'm going to open my own Toyota-only auto shop, trying to emulate them. They have 30 years of lead time on my hypothetical business, but the point stands: when people discover that high quality in this market, they stick to it closely.
    - worik 1y ago
      People understand cars. Abstract data structures, not so much. There are laws about what goes into a car, strict regulation. Software, not so much. Until my boss can be prosecuted for selling untested bug ridden bad software that is what I am instructed to produce
naasking 1y ago
> What I realized is that lower costs, and therefore lower quality, This implication is the big question mark. It's often true but it's not at all clear that it's necessarily true. Choosing better languages, frameworks, tools and so on can all help with lowering costs without necessarily lowering quality. I don't think we're anywhere near the bottom of the cost barrel either. I think the problem is focusing on improving the quality of the end products directly when the quality of the end product for a given cost is downstream of the quality of our tools. We need much better tools. For instance, why are our languages still obsessed with manipulating pointers and references as a primary mode of operation, just so we can program yet another linked list? Why can't you declare something as a "Set with O(1) insert" and the language or its runtime chooses an implementation? Why isn't direct relational programming more common? I'm not talking programming in verbose SQL, but something more modern with type inference and proper composition, more like LINQ, eg. why can't I do: let usEmployees = from x in Employees where x.Country == "US"; func byFemale(Query<Employees> q) => from x in q where x.Sex == "Female"; let femaleUsEmployees = byFemale(usEmployees); These abstract over implementation details that we're constantly fiddling with in our end programs, often for little real benefit. Studies have repeatedly shown that humans can write less than 20 lines of correct code per day, so each of those lines should be as expressive and powerful as possible to drive down costs without sacrificing quality.
- rjbwork 1y ago
  I consider functional thinking and ability to use list comprehensions/LINQ/lodash/etc. to be fundamental skills in today's software world. The what, not the how!
  - naasking 1y ago
    Agreed, but it doesn't go far enough IMO. Why not add language/runtime support for durable list comprehensions, and also atomically updatable ones so they can be concurrently shared, etc. Bring the database into the language in a way that's just as easily to use and query as any other value.
    - 1y ago
regularfry 1y ago
There's an analogy with evolution. In that case, what survives might be the fittest, but it's not the fittest possible. It's the least fit that can possibly win. Anything else represents an energy expenditure that something else can avoid, and thus outcompete.
mtalantikite 1y ago
My wife has a perfume business. She makes really high quality extrait de parfums [1] with expensive materials and great formulations. But the market is flooded with eau de parfums -- which are far more diluted than a extrait -- using cheaper ingredients, selling for about the same price. We've had so many conversations about whether she should dilute everything like the other companies do, but you lose so much of the beauty of the fragrance when you do that. She really doesn't want to go the route of mediocrity, but that does seem to be what the market demands. [1] https://studiotanais.com/ https://studiotanais.com/
- ayewo 1y ago
  > But the market is flooded with eau de parfums -- which are far more diluted than a extrait -- using cheaper ingredients, selling for about the same price. Has she tried raising prices? To signal that her product is highly quality and thus more expensive than her competition?
  - arolihas 1y ago
    looks like they are trying native advertising first
    - mtalantikite 1y ago
      That's actually been new for her, maybe the past two or so months after 10 years in business, and it seems to be working better than any other type of advertising she's done in the past.
  - mtalantikite 1y ago
    She has, these prices are actually lower than they were before, as most customers don't seem to care about things like concentration. Likely it's just that most aren't that informed about the differences. They'll pay more because it's Chanel or because a European perfumer made it, not because the quality is higher.
    - 1y ago
rpnx 1y ago
I actually disagree. I think that people will pay more for higher quality software, but only if they know the software is higher quality. It's great to say your software is higher quality, but the question I have is whether or not is is higher quality with the same or similar features, and second, whether the better quality is known to the customers. It's the same way that I will pay hundreds of dollars for Jetbrains tools each year even though ostensibly VS Code has most of the same features, but the quality of the implementation greatly differs. If a new company made their IDE better than jetbrains though, it'd be hard to get me to fork over money. Free trials and so on can help spread awareness.
- dsr_ 1y ago
  The Lemon Market exists specifically when customers cannot tell, prior to receipt and usage, whether they are buying high quality or low quality.
  - disgruntledphd2 1y ago
    Wow, that's actually a good argument for some kind of trial or freemium setup. Interesting.
    - codethief 1y ago
      That must be why WinRAR became so popular. :-)
  - esafak 1y ago
    That does not describe the current subscription-based software market, then, because we do try it, and we can always stop paying, transaction costs aside.
    - dsr_ 1y ago
      The transaction costs are generally significant.
    - rstuart4133 1y ago
mieubrisse 1y ago
I had the exact same experience trying to build a startup. The thing that always puzzled me was Apple: they've grown into one of the most profitable companies in the world on the basis of high-quality stuff. How did they pull it off?
- dsr_ 1y ago
  Not on Macintosh. On iPod, iPhone and iPad. All of those were marketed as just-barely-affordable consumer luxury goods. The physical design and the marketing were more important than the specs.
- ivm 1y ago
  "Market comes first, marketing second, aesthetic third, and functionality a distant fourth" ― Rob Walling in "Start Small, Stay Small" Apple's aesthetic is more important than the quality (which has been deteriorating lately)
- mike_hearn 1y ago
  They focused heavily on the quality of things you can see, i.e. slick visuals, high build quality, even fancy cardboard boxes. Their software quality itself is about average for the tech industry. It's not bad, but not amazing either. It's sufficient for the task and better than their primary competitor (Windows). But, their UI quality is much higher, and that's what people can check quickly with their own eyes and fingers in a shop.
  - alt227 1y ago
    This is one of the best descriptions I have seen of Apple, very well put
- esafak 1y ago
  By being a luxury consumer company. There is no luxury (quality) enterprise software. There is lock-in-extortion enterprise software.
- mrguyorama 1y ago
  Apple's supposed high quality is mostly marketing. They have constant, frequent, hardware design issues that they just don't even acknowledge and somehow people still treat their hardware as "high quality" They once shipped a phone that lost signal if you held it with your hand. Their solution, after insisting that people hold their phone differently, was cheap plastic cases. They shipped a new keyboard that would fail after singular grains of dust got into it, in order to save a millimeter of thickness on a product that was already quite thin. In order to repair or replace the keyboard, you have to replace half of the whole machine, for half the price of a brand new laptop. Apple does not spend real effort on hardware quality.
turol 1y ago
> There’s probably another name for this Race to the bottom
anigbrowl 1y ago
There’s probably another name for this Capitalism? Marx's core belief was that capitalists would always lean towards paying the absolute lowest price they could for labor and raw materials that would allow them to stay in production. If there's more profit in manufacturing mediocrity at scale than quality at a smaller scale, mediocrity it is. Not all commerce is capitalistic. If a commercial venture is dedicated to quality, or maximizing value for its customers, or the wellbeing of its employees, then it's not solely driven by the goal of maximizing capital. This is easier for a private than a public company, in part because of a misplaced belief that maximizing shareholder return is the only legally valid business objective. I think it's the corporate equivalent of diabetes.
- didibus 1y ago
  In the 50s and 60s, capitalism used to refer to stakeholder capitalism. It was dedicated to maximize value for stakeholders, such as customers, employees, society, etc. But that shifted later, with Milton Friedman, who pushed the idea of shareholder capitalism in the 70s. Where companies switched to thinking the only goal is to maximize shareholder value. In his theory, government would provide regulation and policies to address stakeholder's needs, and companies therefore needed focus on shareholders. In practice, lobbying, propaganda and corruption made it so governments dropped the ball and also sided to maximize shareholder value, along with companies.
nothercastle 1y ago
But do you think you could have started with a bug laden mess? Or is it just the natural progression down the quality and price curve that comes with scale
esafak 1y ago
It depends on who is paying versus using the product. If the buyer is the user, they tend value quality more so than otherwise. Do you drive the cheapest car, eat the cheapest food, wear the cheapest clothes, etc.?
abetusk 1y ago
This is a really succinct analysis, thanks. I'm thinking out loud but it seems like there's some other factors at play. There's a lower threshold of quality that needs to happen (the thing needs to work) so there's at least two big factors, functionality and cost. In the extreme, all other things being equal, if two products were presented at the exact same cost but one was of superior quality, the expectation is that the better quality item would win. There's always the "good, fast, cheap" triangle but with Moore's law (or Wright's law), cheap things get cheaper, things iterate faster and good things get better. Maybe there's an argument that when something provides an order of magnitude quality difference at nominal price difference, that's when disruption happens? So, if the environment remains stable, then mediocrity wins as the price of superior quality can't justify the added expense. If the environment is growing (exponentially) then, at any given snapshot, mediocrity might win but will eventually be usurped by quality when the price to produce it drops below a critical threshold.
brundolf 1y ago
Exactly. People on HN get angry and confused about low software quality, compute wastefulness, etc, but what's happening is not a moral crisis: the market has simply chosen the trade-off it wants, and industry has adapted to it If you want to be rewarded for working on quality, you have to find a niche where quality has high economic value. If you want to put effort into quality regardless, that's a very noble thing and many of us take pleasure in doing so, but we shouldn't act surprised when we aren't economically rewarded for it
qaq 1y ago
I see another dynamic "customer value" features get prioritized and eventually product reaches a point of crushing tech debt. It results in "customer value" features delivery velocity grinding to a halt. Obviously subject to other forces but it is not infrequent for someone to come in and disrupt the incumbents at this point.
bruce511 1y ago
You're on the right track, but missing an important aspect. In most cases the company making the inferior product didn't spend less. But they did spend differently. As in, they spent a lot on marketing. You were focused on quality, and hoped for viral word of mouth marketing. Your competitors spent the same as you, but half their budget went to marketing. Since people buy what they know, they won. Back in the day MS made Windows 95. IBM made OS/2. MS spend a billion $ on marketing Windows 95. That's a billion back when a billion was a lot. Just for the launch. Techies think that Quality leads to sales. If does not. Marketing leads to sales. There literally is no secret to business success other than internalizing that fact.
- nostrademons 1y ago
  Quality can lead to sales - this was the premise behind the original Google (they never spent a dime on advertising their own product until the Parisian Love commercial [1] came out in 2009, a decade after founding), and a few other tech-heavy startups like Netscape or Stripe. Microsoft certainly didn't spend a billion $ marketing Altair Basic. The key point to understand is the only effort that matters is that which makes the sale. Business is a series of transactions, and each individual transaction is binary: it either happens or it doesn't. Sometimes, you can make the sale by having a product which is so much better than alternatives that it's a complete no-brainer to use it, and then makes people so excited that they tell all their friends. Sometimes you make the sale by reaching out seven times to a prospect that's initially cold but warms up in the face of your persistence. Sometimes, you make the sale by associating your product with other experiences that your customers want to have, like showing a pretty woman drinking your beer on a beach. Sometimes, you make the sale by offering your product 80% off to people who will switch from competitors and then jacking up the price once they've become dependent on it. You should know which category your product fits into, and how and why customers will buy it, because that's the only way you can make smart decisions about how to allocate your resources. Investing in engineering quality is pointless if there is no headroom to deliver experiences that will make a customer say "Wow, I need to have that." But if you are sitting on one of those gold mines, capitalizing on it effectively is orders of magnitude more efficient than trying to market a product that doesn't really work. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU
sdeframond 1y ago
"Quality is free"[1], luxury isn't. Also, one should not confuse the quality of the final product and the quality of the process. [1] https://archive.org/details/qualityisfree00cros https://archive.org/details/qualityisfree00cros
hinkley 1y ago
If you’re trying to sell a product to the masses, you either need to make it cheap or a fad. You cannot make a cheap product with high margins and get away with it. Motorola tried with the RAZR. They had about five or six good quarters from it and then within three years of initial launch were hemorrhaging over a billion dollars a year. You have to make premium products if you want high margins. And premium means you’re going for 10% market share, not dominant market share. And if you guess wrong and a recession happens, you might be fucked.
caseyy 1y ago
> I don’t think this leads to market collapse You must have read that the Market for Lemons is a type of market failure or collapse. Market failure (in macroeconomics) does not yet mean collapse. It describes a failure to allocate resources in the market such that the overall welfare of the market participants decreases. With this decrease may come a reduction in trade volume. When the trade volume decreases significantly, we call it a market collapse. Usually, some segment of the market that existed ceases to exist (example in a moment). There is a demand for inferior goods and services, and a demand for superior goods. The demand for superior goods generally increases as the buyer becomes wealthier, and the demand for inferior goods generally increases as the buyer becomes less wealthy. In this case, wealthier buyers cannot buy the superior relevant software previously available, even if they create demand for it. Therefore, we would say a market fault has developed as the market could not organize resources to meet this demand. Then, the volume of high-quality software sales drops dramatically. That market segment collapses, so you are describing a market collapse. > There’s probably another name for this You might be thinking about "regression to normal profits" or a "race to the bottom." The Market for Lemons is an adjacent scenario to both, where a collapse develops due to asymmetric information in the seller's favor. One note about macroecon — there's never just one market force or phenomenon affecting any real situation. It's always a mix of some established and obscure theories.
- dahart 1y ago
  The Wikipedia page for Market for Lemons more or less summarizes it as a condition of defective products caused by information asymmetry, which can lead to adverse selection, which can lead to market collapse. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons The Market for Lemons idea seems like it has merit in general but is too strong and too binary to apply broadly, that’s where I was headed with the suggestion for another name. It’s not that people want low quality. Nobody actually wants defective products. People are just price sensitive, and often don’t know what high quality is or how to find it (or how to price it), so obviously market forces will find a balance somewhere. And that balance is extremely likely to be lower on the quality scale than what people who care about high quality prefer. This is why I think you’re right about the software market tolerating low quality; it’s because market forces push everything toward low quality.
talldatethrow 1y ago
I'm a layman, but in my opinion building quality software can't really be a differentiator because anyone can build quality software given enough time and resources. You could take two car mechanics and with enough training, time, assistance from professional dev consultants, testing, rework, so and so forth, make a quality piece of software. But you'd have spent $6 million to make a quality alarm clock app. A differentiator would be having the ability to have a higher than average quality per cost. Then maybe you're onto something.
ikiris 1y ago
I'm proud of you, it often takes people multiple failures before they learn to accept their worldview that regulations aren't necessary and the tragedy of Commons is a myth are wrong.
mmooss 1y ago
Maybe you could compete by developing new and better products? Ford isn't selling the same car with lower and lower costs every year. It's really hard to reconcile your comment with Silicon Valley, which was built by often expensive innovation, not by cutting costs. Were Apple, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft successful because they cut costs? The AI companies?
- jimbokun 1y ago
  Microsoft yes, the PC market made it very hard for Apple to compete on price. Meta and Alphabet had zero cost products (to consumers) that they leveraged to become near monopolies. Aren’t all the AI companies believed to be providing their products below cost for now to grab market share?
  - mmooss 1y ago
    > Apple Apple's incredible innovation and attention to detail is what made them legendary and successful. Steve Jobs was legendary for both. > Meta and Alphabet had zero cost products (to consumers) that they leveraged to become near monopolies. What does zero cost have to do with it? The comment I responded to spoke of cutting the business's costs - quality inputs, labor, etc. - not their customers' costs. Google made a much better search engine than competitors and then better advertising engine; Facebook made the best social media network. > Aren’t all the AI companies believed to be providing their products below cost for now to grab market share? Again, what does that have to do with cutting costs rather than innovating to increase profit?
jjaksic 1y ago
Yes, I was in this place too when I had a consulting company. We bid on projects with quotes for high quality work and guaranteed delivery within the agreed timeframe. More often than not we got rejected in favor of some students who submitted a quote for 4x less. I sometimes asked those clients how the project went, and they'd say, well, those guys missed the deadline and asked for more money several times
potato3732842 1y ago
>There’s probably another name for this, it’s not quite the Market for Lemons idea. I don’t think this leads to market collapse, I think it just leads to stable mediocrity everywhere, and that’s what we have. It's the same concept as the age old "only an engineer can build a bridge that just barely doesn't fall down" circle jerk but for a more diverse set of goods than just bridges.
aucisson_masque 1y ago
You're laying it out like it's universal, in my experience there are products where people will seek for the cheapest good enough but there are also other product that people know they want quality and are willing to pay more. Take cars for instance, if all people wanted the cheapest one then Mercedes or even Volkswagen would be out of business. Same for professional tools and products, you save more by buying quality product. And then, even in computer and technology. Apple iPhone aren't cheap at all, MacBook come with soldered ram and storage, high price, yet a big part of people are willing to buy that instead of the usual windows bloated spyware laptop that run well enough and is cheap.
- p1necone 1y ago
  > the cheapest one then Mercedes or even Volkswagen would be out of business I would argue this is a bad example - most luxury cars aren't really meaningfully "better", they just have status symbol value. A mid range Honda civic or Toyota corolla is not "worse" than a Mercedes for most objective measurements.
  - sssilver 1y ago
    As someone who drove both, I vehemently disagree. Stripped of logos, one is delightful, the other just nominally gets the job done. The Mercedes has superior suspension that feels plush and smooth. Wonderful materials in the cabin that feel pleasant to the touch. The buttons press with a deep, satisfying click. The seats hug you like a soft cloud. All of that isn’t nothing. It is difficult to achieve, and it is valuable. All of that make the Mercedes better than a Corolla, albeit at a higher cost.
    - const_cast 1y ago
      It is, pretty much, nothing. As in the job of being a car is about the same. Will you get there faster? No. Will you get there safer? Well... no. Will you get there with less traffic? Will the drive be easier? Eh... no. So it's about equivalent. You might be slightly more comfortable. If you happen to be paying attention when you take that measurement, otherwise you wouldn't notice.
xg15 1y ago
This is also the exact reason why all the bright-eyed pieces that some technology would increase worker's productivity and therefore allow more leisure time for the worker (20 hour workweek etc) are either hopelessly naive or pure propaganda. Increased productivity means that the company has a new option to either reduce costs or increase output at no additional cost, one of which it has to do to stay ahead in the rat-race of competitors. Investing the added productivity into employee leisure time would be in the best case foolish and in the worst case suicidal.
- diputsmonro 1y ago
  Which is why government regulations that set the boundaries for what companies can and can't get away with (such as but not limited to labor laws) are so important. In absence of guardrails, companies will do anything to get ahead of the competition. And once one company breaks a norm or does something underhanded, all their competitors must do the same thing or they risk ceding a competitive advantage. It becomes a race to the bottom. Of course we learned this all before a century ago, it's why we have things like the FDA in the first place. But this new generation of techno-libertarians and DOGE folks who grew up in a "move fast and break things" era, who grew up in the cleanest and safest times the world has ever seen, have no understanding or care of the dangers here and are willing to throw it all away because of imagined inefficiencies. Regulations are written in blood, and those that remove them will have new blood on their hands.
  - kortilla 1y ago
    Some regulations are written in blood, a huge chunk are not. Shower head flow rate regulations were not written in blood. Your post started out talking about labor laws but then switched to the FDA, which is very different. This is one of the reasons that people like the DOGE employees are tearing things apart. There are so many false equivalences on the importance of literally everything the government does that they look at things that are clearly useless and start to pull apart things they think might be useless. The good will has been burned on the “trust me, the government knows best”, so now we’re in an era of cuts that will absolutely go too far and cause damage. Your post mentioning “imagined inefficiencies” is a shining example of the issue of why they are there. Thinking the government doesn’t have inefficiencies is as dumb as thinking it’s pointless. Politicians are about as corrupt of a group as you can get and budget bills are filled with so much excess waste it’s literally called “pork”.
crote 1y ago
> People want cheap, so if you sell something people want, someone will make it for less by cutting “costs” (quality). Sure, but what about the people who consider quality as part of their product evaluation? All else being equal everyone wants it cheaper, but all else isn't equal. When I was looking at smart lighting, I spent 3x as much on Philips Hue as I could have on Ikea bulbs: bought one Ikea bulb, tried it on next to a Hue one, and instantly returned the Ikea one. It was just that much worse. I'd happily pay similar premiums for most consumer products. But companies keep enshittifying their products. I'm not going to pay significantly more for a product which is going to break after 16 months instead of 12 months. I'm not going to pay extra for some crappy AI cloud blockchain "feature". I'm not going to pay extra to have a gaudy "luxury" brand logo stapled all over it. Companies are only interested in short-term shareholder value these days, which means selling absolute crap at premium prices. I want to pay extra to get a decent product, but more and more it turns out that I can't.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
lmpdev 1y ago
I’d argue this exists for public companies, but there are many smaller, private businesses where there’s no doctrine of maximising shareholder value These companies often place a greater emphasis on reputation and legacy Very few and far between, Robert McNeel & Associates (American) is one that comes to mind (Rhino3D), as his the Dutch company Victron (power hardware) The former especially is not known for maximising their margins, they don’t even offer a subscription-model to their customers Victron is an interesting case, where they deliberately offer few products, and instead of releasing more, they heavily optimise and update their existing models over many years in everything from documentation to firmware and even new features. They’re a hardware company mostly so very little revenue is from subscriptions
boznz 1y ago
>lower costs, and therefore lower quality, Many high-quality open-source designs suggest this is a false premise, and as a developer who writes high-quality and reliable software for much much lower rates than most, cost should not be seen as a reliable indicator of quality.
femto 1y ago
It can depend on the application/niche. I used to write signal processing software for land mobile radios. Those radios were used by emergency services. For the most part, our software was high quality in that it gave good quality audio and rarely had problems. If it did have a problem, it would recover quickly enough that the customer would not notice. Our radios got a name for reliability: such as feedback from customers about skyscrapers in New York being on fire and the radios not skipping a beat during the emergency response. Word of mouth traveled in a relatively close knit community and the "quality" did win customers. Oddly we didn't have explicit procedures to maintain that quality. The key in my mind was that we had enough time in the day to address the root cause of bugs, it was a small enough team that we knew what was going into the repository and its effect on the system, and we developed incrementally. A few years later, we got spread thinner onto more products and it didn't work so well.
- throwaway2037 1y ago
  > feedback from customers about skyscrapers in New York being on fire Which skyscrapers (plural)? Fires in NYC high-rise buildings are incredibly rare in the last 20 years.
  - femto 1y ago
    Don't know. The customer ran a radio network which was used by fire brigade(s?) in NY, so we weren't on the "coal face". It was about 15 years ago. It was an interesting job. Among other things, our gear ran stage management for a couple of Olympic opening ceremonies. Reliability was key given the size of the audience. We also did gear for the USGC, covering the entire US coastline. If you placed an emergency call at sea, it was our radios that were receiving that signal and passing it into the USCG's network.
amy_petrik 1y ago
> We were sure that a better product would win people over and lead to viral success. It didn’t. Things grew, but so slowly that we ran out of money after a few years before reaching break even. Relevant apocrypha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFcb-XF1RPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFcb-XF1RPQ
dismalaf 1y ago
The problem with your thesis is that software isn't a physical good, so quality isn't tangible. If software does the advertised thing, it's good software. That's it. With physical items, quality prevents deterioration over time. Or at least slows it. Improves function. That sort of thing. Software just works or doesn't work. So you want to make something that works and iterate as quickly as possible. And yes, cost to produce it matters so you can actually bring it to market.
astrobe_ 1y ago
> People want cheap There is an exception: luxury goods. Some are expensive, but people don't mind them being overpriced because e.g. they are social status symbols. Is there such a thing like "luxury software"? I think Apple sort of has this reputation.
BLenkomo 1y ago
I feel your realization and still hope my startup will have an competitive edge through quality. In this case quality also means code quality which in my coding believe should lead to faster feature development
mdnahas 1y ago
These economic forces exist in math too. Almost every mathematician publishes informal proofs. These contain just enough discussion in English (or other human language) to convince a few other mathematicians in the same field that they their idea is valid. But it is possible to make errors. There are other techniques: formal step-by-step proof presentations (e.g. by Leslie Lamport) or computer-checked proofs that would be more reliable. But almost no mathematician uses these.
froggit 1y ago
> There’s probably another name for this, it’s not quite the Market for Lemons idea. "Enshittification." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

by dahart 1y ago

thijson 1y ago

I kind of see this in action when I'm comparing products on Amazon. When comparing two products on Amazon that are substantially the same, the cheaper one will have way more reviews. I guess this implies that it has captured the majority of the market.

thijson 1y ago
Luxury items however seem to buck this trend, but this is all about conspicuous consumption.
rpnx 1y ago
I think this honestly has more to do with moslty Chinese sellers engaging in review fraud, which is a rampant problem. I'm not saying non-Chinese sellers don't engage in review fraud, but I have noticed a trend that around 98% of fake or fraudulently advertised products are of Chinese origin. If it was just because it was cheap, we'd also see similar fraud from Mexican or Vietnamese sellers, but I don't really see that.
- olejorgenb 1y ago
  You have to have bought the item om Amazon to review right? So these reviewers buy and return, or how does it work?
  - svachalek 1y ago
    There are various ways to do the trick, sometimes they ship out rocks to create a paper trail, sometimes they take a cheap/light product and then replace the listing with something more expensive and carry over all the reviews (which is just stupid that Amazon allows but apparently they do)
  - monkeyelite 1y ago
    If you think about it there is basically no scalable way for Amazon to ensure a seller is providing the same product over time - and to all customers. Random sampling can make sure a product matching the description arrives. But someone familiar with it would have to carefully compare over time. And that process doesn’t scale. One thing Walmart does right is having “buyers” in charge of each department in the store. For example fishing - and they know all the gear and try it out. And they can walk into any store and audit and know if something is wrong. I’m sure Amazon has responsible parties on paper - but the size and rate at which the catalog changes makes this a lower level of accountability.

rom16384 1y ago

I had the same realization but with car mechanics. If you drive a beater you want to spend the least possible on maintenance. On the other hand, if the car mechanic cares about cars and their craftsmanship they want to get everything to tip-top shape at high cost. Some other mechanics are trying to scam you and get the most amount of money for the least amount of work. And most people looking for car mechanics want to pay the least amount possible, and don't quite understand if a repair should be expensive or not. This creates a downward pressure on price at the expense of quality and penalizes the mechanics that care about quality.

AtlasBarfed 1y ago
Luckily for mechanics, the shortage of actual blue collar Hands-On labor is so small, that good mechanics actually can charge more. The issue is that you have to be able to distinguish a good mechanic from a bad mechanic cuz they all get to charge a lot because of the shortage. Same thing for plumbing, electrical, HVAC, etc etc etc But I understand your point.
- Multicomp 1y ago
  Here in Atlanta Georgia, we have a ToyoTechs business. They perform maintenance on only Toyota-family automobiles. They have 2 locations, one for large trucks, one for cars, hybrids, and SUV-looking cars. Both are always filled up with customers. Some of whom drive hundreds of miles out of state to bring their vehicles exclusively there, whether the beater is a customized off-roader or a simple econobox with sentimental value. Why? Because they are on a different incentive structure: non-comissioned payments for employees. They buy OEM parts, give a good warranty, charge fair prices, and they are always busy. If this computer fad goes away, I'm going to open my own Toyota-only auto shop, trying to emulate them. They have 30 years of lead time on my hypothetical business, but the point stands: when people discover that high quality in this market, they stick to it closely.
  - worik 1y ago
    People understand cars. Abstract data structures, not so much. There are laws about what goes into a car, strict regulation. Software, not so much. Until my boss can be prosecuted for selling untested bug ridden bad software that is what I am instructed to produce

naasking 1y ago

> What I realized is that lower costs, and therefore lower quality, This implication is the big question mark. It's often true but it's not at all clear that it's necessarily true. Choosing better languages, frameworks, tools and so on can all help with lowering costs without necessarily lowering quality. I don't think we're anywhere near the bottom of the cost barrel either. I think the problem is focusing on improving the quality of the end products directly when the quality of the end product for a given cost is downstream of the quality of our tools. We need much better tools. For instance, why are our languages still obsessed with manipulating pointers and references as a primary mode of operation, just so we can program yet another linked list? Why can't you declare something as a "Set with O(1) insert" and the language or its runtime chooses an implementation? Why isn't direct relational programming more common? I'm not talking programming in verbose SQL, but something more modern with type inference and proper composition, more like LINQ, eg. why can't I do: let usEmployees = from x in Employees where x.Country == "US"; func byFemale(Query<Employees> q) => from x in q where x.Sex == "Female"; let femaleUsEmployees = byFemale(usEmployees); These abstract over implementation details that we're constantly fiddling with in our end programs, often for little real benefit. Studies have repeatedly shown that humans can write less than 20 lines of correct code per day, so each of those lines should be as expressive and powerful as possible to drive down costs without sacrificing quality.

rjbwork 1y ago
I consider functional thinking and ability to use list comprehensions/LINQ/lodash/etc. to be fundamental skills in today's software world. The what, not the how!
- naasking 1y ago
  Agreed, but it doesn't go far enough IMO. Why not add language/runtime support for durable list comprehensions, and also atomically updatable ones so they can be concurrently shared, etc. Bring the database into the language in a way that's just as easily to use and query as any other value.
  - 1y ago

regularfry 1y ago

There's an analogy with evolution. In that case, what survives might be the fittest, but it's not the fittest possible. It's the least fit that can possibly win. Anything else represents an energy expenditure that something else can avoid, and thus outcompete.

mtalantikite 1y ago

My wife has a perfume business. She makes really high quality extrait de parfums [1] with expensive materials and great formulations. But the market is flooded with eau de parfums -- which are far more diluted than a extrait -- using cheaper ingredients, selling for about the same price. We've had so many conversations about whether she should dilute everything like the other companies do, but you lose so much of the beauty of the fragrance when you do that. She really doesn't want to go the route of mediocrity, but that does seem to be what the market demands. [1] https://studiotanais.com/ https://studiotanais.com/

ayewo 1y ago
> But the market is flooded with eau de parfums -- which are far more diluted than a extrait -- using cheaper ingredients, selling for about the same price. Has she tried raising prices? To signal that her product is highly quality and thus more expensive than her competition?
- arolihas 1y ago
  looks like they are trying native advertising first
  - mtalantikite 1y ago
    That's actually been new for her, maybe the past two or so months after 10 years in business, and it seems to be working better than any other type of advertising she's done in the past.
- mtalantikite 1y ago
  She has, these prices are actually lower than they were before, as most customers don't seem to care about things like concentration. Likely it's just that most aren't that informed about the differences. They'll pay more because it's Chanel or because a European perfumer made it, not because the quality is higher.
  - 1y ago

rpnx 1y ago

I actually disagree. I think that people will pay more for higher quality software, but only if they know the software is higher quality. It's great to say your software is higher quality, but the question I have is whether or not is is higher quality with the same or similar features, and second, whether the better quality is known to the customers. It's the same way that I will pay hundreds of dollars for Jetbrains tools each year even though ostensibly VS Code has most of the same features, but the quality of the implementation greatly differs. If a new company made their IDE better than jetbrains though, it'd be hard to get me to fork over money. Free trials and so on can help spread awareness.

dsr_ 1y ago
The Lemon Market exists specifically when customers cannot tell, prior to receipt and usage, whether they are buying high quality or low quality.
- disgruntledphd2 1y ago
  Wow, that's actually a good argument for some kind of trial or freemium setup. Interesting.
  - codethief 1y ago
    That must be why WinRAR became so popular. :-)
- esafak 1y ago
  That does not describe the current subscription-based software market, then, because we do try it, and we can always stop paying, transaction costs aside.
  - dsr_ 1y ago
    The transaction costs are generally significant.
  - rstuart4133 1y ago

mieubrisse 1y ago

I had the exact same experience trying to build a startup. The thing that always puzzled me was Apple: they've grown into one of the most profitable companies in the world on the basis of high-quality stuff. How did they pull it off?

dsr_ 1y ago
Not on Macintosh. On iPod, iPhone and iPad. All of those were marketed as just-barely-affordable consumer luxury goods. The physical design and the marketing were more important than the specs.
ivm 1y ago
"Market comes first, marketing second, aesthetic third, and functionality a distant fourth" ― Rob Walling in "Start Small, Stay Small" Apple's aesthetic is more important than the quality (which has been deteriorating lately)
mike_hearn 1y ago
They focused heavily on the quality of things you can see, i.e. slick visuals, high build quality, even fancy cardboard boxes. Their software quality itself is about average for the tech industry. It's not bad, but not amazing either. It's sufficient for the task and better than their primary competitor (Windows). But, their UI quality is much higher, and that's what people can check quickly with their own eyes and fingers in a shop.
- alt227 1y ago
  This is one of the best descriptions I have seen of Apple, very well put
esafak 1y ago
By being a luxury consumer company. There is no luxury (quality) enterprise software. There is lock-in-extortion enterprise software.
mrguyorama 1y ago
Apple's supposed high quality is mostly marketing. They have constant, frequent, hardware design issues that they just don't even acknowledge and somehow people still treat their hardware as "high quality" They once shipped a phone that lost signal if you held it with your hand. Their solution, after insisting that people hold their phone differently, was cheap plastic cases. They shipped a new keyboard that would fail after singular grains of dust got into it, in order to save a millimeter of thickness on a product that was already quite thin. In order to repair or replace the keyboard, you have to replace half of the whole machine, for half the price of a brand new laptop. Apple does not spend real effort on hardware quality.

turol 1y ago

> There’s probably another name for this Race to the bottom

anigbrowl 1y ago

There’s probably another name for this Capitalism? Marx's core belief was that capitalists would always lean towards paying the absolute lowest price they could for labor and raw materials that would allow them to stay in production. If there's more profit in manufacturing mediocrity at scale than quality at a smaller scale, mediocrity it is. Not all commerce is capitalistic. If a commercial venture is dedicated to quality, or maximizing value for its customers, or the wellbeing of its employees, then it's not solely driven by the goal of maximizing capital. This is easier for a private than a public company, in part because of a misplaced belief that maximizing shareholder return is the only legally valid business objective. I think it's the corporate equivalent of diabetes.

didibus 1y ago
In the 50s and 60s, capitalism used to refer to stakeholder capitalism. It was dedicated to maximize value for stakeholders, such as customers, employees, society, etc. But that shifted later, with Milton Friedman, who pushed the idea of shareholder capitalism in the 70s. Where companies switched to thinking the only goal is to maximize shareholder value. In his theory, government would provide regulation and policies to address stakeholder's needs, and companies therefore needed focus on shareholders. In practice, lobbying, propaganda and corruption made it so governments dropped the ball and also sided to maximize shareholder value, along with companies.

nothercastle 1y ago

But do you think you could have started with a bug laden mess? Or is it just the natural progression down the quality and price curve that comes with scale

esafak 1y ago

It depends on who is paying versus using the product. If the buyer is the user, they tend value quality more so than otherwise. Do you drive the cheapest car, eat the cheapest food, wear the cheapest clothes, etc.?

abetusk 1y ago

This is a really succinct analysis, thanks. I'm thinking out loud but it seems like there's some other factors at play. There's a lower threshold of quality that needs to happen (the thing needs to work) so there's at least two big factors, functionality and cost. In the extreme, all other things being equal, if two products were presented at the exact same cost but one was of superior quality, the expectation is that the better quality item would win. There's always the "good, fast, cheap" triangle but with Moore's law (or Wright's law), cheap things get cheaper, things iterate faster and good things get better. Maybe there's an argument that when something provides an order of magnitude quality difference at nominal price difference, that's when disruption happens? So, if the environment remains stable, then mediocrity wins as the price of superior quality can't justify the added expense. If the environment is growing (exponentially) then, at any given snapshot, mediocrity might win but will eventually be usurped by quality when the price to produce it drops below a critical threshold.

brundolf 1y ago

Exactly. People on HN get angry and confused about low software quality, compute wastefulness, etc, but what's happening is not a moral crisis: the market has simply chosen the trade-off it wants, and industry has adapted to it If you want to be rewarded for working on quality, you have to find a niche where quality has high economic value. If you want to put effort into quality regardless, that's a very noble thing and many of us take pleasure in doing so, but we shouldn't act surprised when we aren't economically rewarded for it

qaq 1y ago

I see another dynamic "customer value" features get prioritized and eventually product reaches a point of crushing tech debt. It results in "customer value" features delivery velocity grinding to a halt. Obviously subject to other forces but it is not infrequent for someone to come in and disrupt the incumbents at this point.

bruce511 1y ago

You're on the right track, but missing an important aspect. In most cases the company making the inferior product didn't spend less. But they did spend differently. As in, they spent a lot on marketing. You were focused on quality, and hoped for viral word of mouth marketing. Your competitors spent the same as you, but half their budget went to marketing. Since people buy what they know, they won. Back in the day MS made Windows 95. IBM made OS/2. MS spend a billion $ on marketing Windows 95. That's a billion back when a billion was a lot. Just for the launch. Techies think that Quality leads to sales. If does not. Marketing leads to sales. There literally is no secret to business success other than internalizing that fact.

nostrademons 1y ago
Quality can lead to sales - this was the premise behind the original Google (they never spent a dime on advertising their own product until the Parisian Love commercial [1] came out in 2009, a decade after founding), and a few other tech-heavy startups like Netscape or Stripe. Microsoft certainly didn't spend a billion $ marketing Altair Basic. The key point to understand is the only effort that matters is that which makes the sale. Business is a series of transactions, and each individual transaction is binary: it either happens or it doesn't. Sometimes, you can make the sale by having a product which is so much better than alternatives that it's a complete no-brainer to use it, and then makes people so excited that they tell all their friends. Sometimes you make the sale by reaching out seven times to a prospect that's initially cold but warms up in the face of your persistence. Sometimes, you make the sale by associating your product with other experiences that your customers want to have, like showing a pretty woman drinking your beer on a beach. Sometimes, you make the sale by offering your product 80% off to people who will switch from competitors and then jacking up the price once they've become dependent on it. You should know which category your product fits into, and how and why customers will buy it, because that's the only way you can make smart decisions about how to allocate your resources. Investing in engineering quality is pointless if there is no headroom to deliver experiences that will make a customer say "Wow, I need to have that." But if you are sitting on one of those gold mines, capitalizing on it effectively is orders of magnitude more efficient than trying to market a product that doesn't really work. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU

sdeframond 1y ago

"Quality is free"[1], luxury isn't. Also, one should not confuse the quality of the final product and the quality of the process. [1] https://archive.org/details/qualityisfree00cros https://archive.org/details/qualityisfree00cros

hinkley 1y ago

If you’re trying to sell a product to the masses, you either need to make it cheap or a fad. You cannot make a cheap product with high margins and get away with it. Motorola tried with the RAZR. They had about five or six good quarters from it and then within three years of initial launch were hemorrhaging over a billion dollars a year. You have to make premium products if you want high margins. And premium means you’re going for 10% market share, not dominant market share. And if you guess wrong and a recession happens, you might be fucked.

caseyy 1y ago

> I don’t think this leads to market collapse You must have read that the Market for Lemons is a type of market failure or collapse. Market failure (in macroeconomics) does not yet mean collapse. It describes a failure to allocate resources in the market such that the overall welfare of the market participants decreases. With this decrease may come a reduction in trade volume. When the trade volume decreases significantly, we call it a market collapse. Usually, some segment of the market that existed ceases to exist (example in a moment). There is a demand for inferior goods and services, and a demand for superior goods. The demand for superior goods generally increases as the buyer becomes wealthier, and the demand for inferior goods generally increases as the buyer becomes less wealthy. In this case, wealthier buyers cannot buy the superior relevant software previously available, even if they create demand for it. Therefore, we would say a market fault has developed as the market could not organize resources to meet this demand. Then, the volume of high-quality software sales drops dramatically. That market segment collapses, so you are describing a market collapse. > There’s probably another name for this You might be thinking about "regression to normal profits" or a "race to the bottom." The Market for Lemons is an adjacent scenario to both, where a collapse develops due to asymmetric information in the seller's favor. One note about macroecon — there's never just one market force or phenomenon affecting any real situation. It's always a mix of some established and obscure theories.

dahart 1y ago
The Wikipedia page for Market for Lemons more or less summarizes it as a condition of defective products caused by information asymmetry, which can lead to adverse selection, which can lead to market collapse. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons The Market for Lemons idea seems like it has merit in general but is too strong and too binary to apply broadly, that’s where I was headed with the suggestion for another name. It’s not that people want low quality. Nobody actually wants defective products. People are just price sensitive, and often don’t know what high quality is or how to find it (or how to price it), so obviously market forces will find a balance somewhere. And that balance is extremely likely to be lower on the quality scale than what people who care about high quality prefer. This is why I think you’re right about the software market tolerating low quality; it’s because market forces push everything toward low quality.

talldatethrow 1y ago

I'm a layman, but in my opinion building quality software can't really be a differentiator because anyone can build quality software given enough time and resources. You could take two car mechanics and with enough training, time, assistance from professional dev consultants, testing, rework, so and so forth, make a quality piece of software. But you'd have spent $6 million to make a quality alarm clock app. A differentiator would be having the ability to have a higher than average quality per cost. Then maybe you're onto something.

ikiris 1y ago

I'm proud of you, it often takes people multiple failures before they learn to accept their worldview that regulations aren't necessary and the tragedy of Commons is a myth are wrong.

mmooss 1y ago

Maybe you could compete by developing new and better products? Ford isn't selling the same car with lower and lower costs every year. It's really hard to reconcile your comment with Silicon Valley, which was built by often expensive innovation, not by cutting costs. Were Apple, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft successful because they cut costs? The AI companies?

jimbokun 1y ago
Microsoft yes, the PC market made it very hard for Apple to compete on price. Meta and Alphabet had zero cost products (to consumers) that they leveraged to become near monopolies. Aren’t all the AI companies believed to be providing their products below cost for now to grab market share?
- mmooss 1y ago
  > Apple Apple's incredible innovation and attention to detail is what made them legendary and successful. Steve Jobs was legendary for both. > Meta and Alphabet had zero cost products (to consumers) that they leveraged to become near monopolies. What does zero cost have to do with it? The comment I responded to spoke of cutting the business's costs - quality inputs, labor, etc. - not their customers' costs. Google made a much better search engine than competitors and then better advertising engine; Facebook made the best social media network. > Aren’t all the AI companies believed to be providing their products below cost for now to grab market share? Again, what does that have to do with cutting costs rather than innovating to increase profit?

jjaksic 1y ago

Yes, I was in this place too when I had a consulting company. We bid on projects with quotes for high quality work and guaranteed delivery within the agreed timeframe. More often than not we got rejected in favor of some students who submitted a quote for 4x less. I sometimes asked those clients how the project went, and they'd say, well, those guys missed the deadline and asked for more money several times

potato3732842 1y ago

>There’s probably another name for this, it’s not quite the Market for Lemons idea. I don’t think this leads to market collapse, I think it just leads to stable mediocrity everywhere, and that’s what we have. It's the same concept as the age old "only an engineer can build a bridge that just barely doesn't fall down" circle jerk but for a more diverse set of goods than just bridges.

aucisson_masque 1y ago

You're laying it out like it's universal, in my experience there are products where people will seek for the cheapest good enough but there are also other product that people know they want quality and are willing to pay more. Take cars for instance, if all people wanted the cheapest one then Mercedes or even Volkswagen would be out of business. Same for professional tools and products, you save more by buying quality product. And then, even in computer and technology. Apple iPhone aren't cheap at all, MacBook come with soldered ram and storage, high price, yet a big part of people are willing to buy that instead of the usual windows bloated spyware laptop that run well enough and is cheap.

p1necone 1y ago
> the cheapest one then Mercedes or even Volkswagen would be out of business I would argue this is a bad example - most luxury cars aren't really meaningfully "better", they just have status symbol value. A mid range Honda civic or Toyota corolla is not "worse" than a Mercedes for most objective measurements.
- sssilver 1y ago
  As someone who drove both, I vehemently disagree. Stripped of logos, one is delightful, the other just nominally gets the job done. The Mercedes has superior suspension that feels plush and smooth. Wonderful materials in the cabin that feel pleasant to the touch. The buttons press with a deep, satisfying click. The seats hug you like a soft cloud. All of that isn’t nothing. It is difficult to achieve, and it is valuable. All of that make the Mercedes better than a Corolla, albeit at a higher cost.
  - const_cast 1y ago
    It is, pretty much, nothing. As in the job of being a car is about the same. Will you get there faster? No. Will you get there safer? Well... no. Will you get there with less traffic? Will the drive be easier? Eh... no. So it's about equivalent. You might be slightly more comfortable. If you happen to be paying attention when you take that measurement, otherwise you wouldn't notice.

xg15 1y ago

This is also the exact reason why all the bright-eyed pieces that some technology would increase worker's productivity and therefore allow more leisure time for the worker (20 hour workweek etc) are either hopelessly naive or pure propaganda. Increased productivity means that the company has a new option to either reduce costs or increase output at no additional cost, one of which it has to do to stay ahead in the rat-race of competitors. Investing the added productivity into employee leisure time would be in the best case foolish and in the worst case suicidal.

diputsmonro 1y ago
Which is why government regulations that set the boundaries for what companies can and can't get away with (such as but not limited to labor laws) are so important. In absence of guardrails, companies will do anything to get ahead of the competition. And once one company breaks a norm or does something underhanded, all their competitors must do the same thing or they risk ceding a competitive advantage. It becomes a race to the bottom. Of course we learned this all before a century ago, it's why we have things like the FDA in the first place. But this new generation of techno-libertarians and DOGE folks who grew up in a "move fast and break things" era, who grew up in the cleanest and safest times the world has ever seen, have no understanding or care of the dangers here and are willing to throw it all away because of imagined inefficiencies. Regulations are written in blood, and those that remove them will have new blood on their hands.
- kortilla 1y ago
  Some regulations are written in blood, a huge chunk are not. Shower head flow rate regulations were not written in blood. Your post started out talking about labor laws but then switched to the FDA, which is very different. This is one of the reasons that people like the DOGE employees are tearing things apart. There are so many false equivalences on the importance of literally everything the government does that they look at things that are clearly useless and start to pull apart things they think might be useless. The good will has been burned on the “trust me, the government knows best”, so now we’re in an era of cuts that will absolutely go too far and cause damage. Your post mentioning “imagined inefficiencies” is a shining example of the issue of why they are there. Thinking the government doesn’t have inefficiencies is as dumb as thinking it’s pointless. Politicians are about as corrupt of a group as you can get and budget bills are filled with so much excess waste it’s literally called “pork”.

crote 1y ago

> People want cheap, so if you sell something people want, someone will make it for less by cutting “costs” (quality). Sure, but what about the people who consider quality as part of their product evaluation? All else being equal everyone wants it cheaper, but all else isn't equal. When I was looking at smart lighting, I spent 3x as much on Philips Hue as I could have on Ikea bulbs: bought one Ikea bulb, tried it on next to a Hue one, and instantly returned the Ikea one. It was just that much worse. I'd happily pay similar premiums for most consumer products. But companies keep enshittifying their products. I'm not going to pay significantly more for a product which is going to break after 16 months instead of 12 months. I'm not going to pay extra for some crappy AI cloud blockchain "feature". I'm not going to pay extra to have a gaudy "luxury" brand logo stapled all over it. Companies are only interested in short-term shareholder value these days, which means selling absolute crap at premium prices. I want to pay extra to get a decent product, but more and more it turns out that I can't.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

lmpdev 1y ago

I’d argue this exists for public companies, but there are many smaller, private businesses where there’s no doctrine of maximising shareholder value These companies often place a greater emphasis on reputation and legacy Very few and far between, Robert McNeel & Associates (American) is one that comes to mind (Rhino3D), as his the Dutch company Victron (power hardware) The former especially is not known for maximising their margins, they don’t even offer a subscription-model to their customers Victron is an interesting case, where they deliberately offer few products, and instead of releasing more, they heavily optimise and update their existing models over many years in everything from documentation to firmware and even new features. They’re a hardware company mostly so very little revenue is from subscriptions

boznz 1y ago

>lower costs, and therefore lower quality, Many high-quality open-source designs suggest this is a false premise, and as a developer who writes high-quality and reliable software for much much lower rates than most, cost should not be seen as a reliable indicator of quality.

femto 1y ago

It can depend on the application/niche. I used to write signal processing software for land mobile radios. Those radios were used by emergency services. For the most part, our software was high quality in that it gave good quality audio and rarely had problems. If it did have a problem, it would recover quickly enough that the customer would not notice. Our radios got a name for reliability: such as feedback from customers about skyscrapers in New York being on fire and the radios not skipping a beat during the emergency response. Word of mouth traveled in a relatively close knit community and the "quality" did win customers. Oddly we didn't have explicit procedures to maintain that quality. The key in my mind was that we had enough time in the day to address the root cause of bugs, it was a small enough team that we knew what was going into the repository and its effect on the system, and we developed incrementally. A few years later, we got spread thinner onto more products and it didn't work so well.

throwaway2037 1y ago
> feedback from customers about skyscrapers in New York being on fire Which skyscrapers (plural)? Fires in NYC high-rise buildings are incredibly rare in the last 20 years.
- femto 1y ago
  Don't know. The customer ran a radio network which was used by fire brigade(s?) in NY, so we weren't on the "coal face". It was about 15 years ago. It was an interesting job. Among other things, our gear ran stage management for a couple of Olympic opening ceremonies. Reliability was key given the size of the audience. We also did gear for the USGC, covering the entire US coastline. If you placed an emergency call at sea, it was our radios that were receiving that signal and passing it into the USCG's network.

amy_petrik 1y ago

> We were sure that a better product would win people over and lead to viral success. It didn’t. Things grew, but so slowly that we ran out of money after a few years before reaching break even. Relevant apocrypha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFcb-XF1RPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFcb-XF1RPQ

dismalaf 1y ago

The problem with your thesis is that software isn't a physical good, so quality isn't tangible. If software does the advertised thing, it's good software. That's it. With physical items, quality prevents deterioration over time. Or at least slows it. Improves function. That sort of thing. Software just works or doesn't work. So you want to make something that works and iterate as quickly as possible. And yes, cost to produce it matters so you can actually bring it to market.

astrobe_ 1y ago

> People want cheap There is an exception: luxury goods. Some are expensive, but people don't mind them being overpriced because e.g. they are social status symbols. Is there such a thing like "luxury software"? I think Apple sort of has this reputation.

BLenkomo 1y ago

I feel your realization and still hope my startup will have an competitive edge through quality. In this case quality also means code quality which in my coding believe should lead to faster feature development

mdnahas 1y ago

These economic forces exist in math too. Almost every mathematician publishes informal proofs. These contain just enough discussion in English (or other human language) to convince a few other mathematicians in the same field that they their idea is valid. But it is possible to make errors. There are other techniques: formal step-by-step proof presentations (e.g. by Leslie Lamport) or computer-checked proofs that would be more reliable. But almost no mathematician uses these.

froggit 1y ago

> There’s probably another name for this, it’s not quite the Market for Lemons idea. "Enshittification." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification