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Somewhat related: I recently googled Steve's son, Reed, out of curiosity. I haven't thought to look his kids up since when he died. Reed is a spitting image of

Somewhat related: I recently googled Steve's son, Reed, out of curiosity. I haven't thought to look his kids up since when he died. Reed is a spitting image of Steve[0] - voice and all. Steve was a hero of mine since I was a kid (I don't care what your opinion is about having a hero, let alone having steve as one). Seeing reed talk made me wistful. I miss steve dearly. It also reminded of the many things I miss about the Apple I grew up loving. Leadership with an opinion is one of them. And by opinion, I mean a leader who isn't a slave to the A|B test or to shareholders. Someone who cared deeply about his product and could communicate it in words that made me care. 0: edit here's a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHBZhruuQ44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHBZhruuQ44

hackernewds 1y ago
what's wrong with a/b tests?
- rhetocj23 1y ago
  Instagram is a product of a/b testing. Go figure
- laborcontract 1y ago
  I'm using A|B as a blanket term for things that make a company think it's improving by using the opinions of others in lieu of having an opinion themselves. Focus groups also fall into this category.
  - bitpush 1y ago
    It works for hardware, because that's the only way to do it. There's no 2 populations for hardware. All decisions are one way doors. Software must use feedback, otherwise you'll end up with duds like Camera Control, 3D touch, and .. Apple Maps (1.0). Apple doesnt have that culture, and it shows in their software.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- robin_reala 1y ago
  I don’t dislike them inherently, but as people tend to believe they’re a one-stop solution it’s worth pointing out what they can’t do: - On their own they don’t provide a hypothesis. You need to do user research to discover those. - On their own they don’t tell you the value in what you’re testing. You need further analysis to understand that. - They’re typically a short-term solution to longer-term problems. It’s easy to use them to achieve local maxima without understanding the wider picture. - They’ll only tell you what the majority of your users find effective, without highlighting what hurts the journey for a minority of users. For example you could A/B test something that improves the journey for every group apart from visually impaired users, but block them completely, and still implement it because it’s the winning bucket. Yes, there are guardrails you can put in place for all of these, and good teams do, but that requires a degree of maturity that is hard for a lot of organisations.
- potatolicious 1y ago
  It's a good tool for optimizing around local maxima and is (generally) incapable of propelling you through a major product gap to the next (and hopefully greater) maxima. But IMO the industry dogma is to use it for everything, particularly around greenfield development and new product areas that are pre-PMF. Importantly also is that in many organizations A/B testing has become a crutch to avoid understanding the underlying system being measured. Conversion rate rises by 5% if the button is green. Why? But rather than using experimentation as a tool for structured understanding many organizations devolve to "just test every change". The practical outcome is that product teams commit elementary errors because they fail to understand why their products are successful, and product velocity slows as teams prove unable/unwilling to make any decisions without pushing something to prod.
slater 1y ago
> Reed is a spitting image of Steve - voice and all i thought you might be exaggerating but holy crap, you're right
aucisson_masque 1y ago
People hate liquid glass, at least the majority. I'd say that what apple did with liquid glass, forcing it onto its customers is kind of what jobs would do. "We know better, shut up plebe" In that way, the apple from today isn't very different from the apple of jobs.
- laborcontract 1y ago
  I think everything I know about Apple's culture under jobs was that steve let his lieutenants have at each other. That culture died when Forstall was booted from the company (one of apple's biggest mistakes, IMO). Tim Cook gives people their space. It's why Jony Ive and Alan Dye have been allowed to run amok, with almost zero checks and balances.
  - AnonC 1y ago
    > That culture died when Forstall was booted from the company (one of apple's biggest mistakes, IMO). Tim Cook gives people their space. It's why Jony Ive and Alan Dye have been allowed to run amok, with almost zero checks and balances. This is what I’ve been thinking too, ever since Tim Cook fired Scott Forstall over Apple Maps. To be frank, it’s about a decade later now and Apple Maps still sucks big time in many countries, and Google Maps is what iPhone users there use. Coming back to the change of people, the huge messes made by Jonny Ives (without Steve Jobs to balance him out) on hardware (the butterfly keyboard was his design and decision, AFAIK) and software just carried on for years. Now Alan Dye and his team seem to be tanking the user interface and user experience like there’s nobody with any taste left at Apple. Add to this the turf war between John Giannandrea and Craig Federighi on the AI part, with Federighi winning the game, it doesn’t look like Tim Cook has a good grasp on people’s abilities and how to manage them. Cook has his strengths in supply chain and manufacturing, but design (along with better software quality) are not his strengths or focus areas.
- outime 1y ago
  I'd say that the majority of users instead are between "I don't care about this" and "this looks cool, whatever". The "majority" you talk about doesn't exist in my experience, it's like the 1% arguing between "this is life changing" and "I hate this".

hackernewds 1y ago

what's wrong with a/b tests?

rhetocj23 1y ago
Instagram is a product of a/b testing. Go figure
laborcontract 1y ago
I'm using A|B as a blanket term for things that make a company think it's improving by using the opinions of others in lieu of having an opinion themselves. Focus groups also fall into this category.
- bitpush 1y ago
  It works for hardware, because that's the only way to do it. There's no 2 populations for hardware. All decisions are one way doors. Software must use feedback, otherwise you'll end up with duds like Camera Control, 3D touch, and .. Apple Maps (1.0). Apple doesnt have that culture, and it shows in their software.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
robin_reala 1y ago
I don’t dislike them inherently, but as people tend to believe they’re a one-stop solution it’s worth pointing out what they can’t do: - On their own they don’t provide a hypothesis. You need to do user research to discover those. - On their own they don’t tell you the value in what you’re testing. You need further analysis to understand that. - They’re typically a short-term solution to longer-term problems. It’s easy to use them to achieve local maxima without understanding the wider picture. - They’ll only tell you what the majority of your users find effective, without highlighting what hurts the journey for a minority of users. For example you could A/B test something that improves the journey for every group apart from visually impaired users, but block them completely, and still implement it because it’s the winning bucket. Yes, there are guardrails you can put in place for all of these, and good teams do, but that requires a degree of maturity that is hard for a lot of organisations.
potatolicious 1y ago
It's a good tool for optimizing around local maxima and is (generally) incapable of propelling you through a major product gap to the next (and hopefully greater) maxima. But IMO the industry dogma is to use it for everything, particularly around greenfield development and new product areas that are pre-PMF. Importantly also is that in many organizations A/B testing has become a crutch to avoid understanding the underlying system being measured. Conversion rate rises by 5% if the button is green. Why? But rather than using experimentation as a tool for structured understanding many organizations devolve to "just test every change". The practical outcome is that product teams commit elementary errors because they fail to understand why their products are successful, and product velocity slows as teams prove unable/unwilling to make any decisions without pushing something to prod.

slater 1y ago

> Reed is a spitting image of Steve - voice and all i thought you might be exaggerating but holy crap, you're right

aucisson_masque 1y ago

People hate liquid glass, at least the majority. I'd say that what apple did with liquid glass, forcing it onto its customers is kind of what jobs would do. "We know better, shut up plebe" In that way, the apple from today isn't very different from the apple of jobs.

laborcontract 1y ago
I think everything I know about Apple's culture under jobs was that steve let his lieutenants have at each other. That culture died when Forstall was booted from the company (one of apple's biggest mistakes, IMO). Tim Cook gives people their space. It's why Jony Ive and Alan Dye have been allowed to run amok, with almost zero checks and balances.
- AnonC 1y ago
  > That culture died when Forstall was booted from the company (one of apple's biggest mistakes, IMO). Tim Cook gives people their space. It's why Jony Ive and Alan Dye have been allowed to run amok, with almost zero checks and balances. This is what I’ve been thinking too, ever since Tim Cook fired Scott Forstall over Apple Maps. To be frank, it’s about a decade later now and Apple Maps still sucks big time in many countries, and Google Maps is what iPhone users there use. Coming back to the change of people, the huge messes made by Jonny Ives (without Steve Jobs to balance him out) on hardware (the butterfly keyboard was his design and decision, AFAIK) and software just carried on for years. Now Alan Dye and his team seem to be tanking the user interface and user experience like there’s nobody with any taste left at Apple. Add to this the turf war between John Giannandrea and Craig Federighi on the AI part, with Federighi winning the game, it doesn’t look like Tim Cook has a good grasp on people’s abilities and how to manage them. Cook has his strengths in supply chain and manufacturing, but design (along with better software quality) are not his strengths or focus areas.
outime 1y ago
I'd say that the majority of users instead are between "I don't care about this" and "this looks cool, whatever". The "majority" you talk about doesn't exist in my experience, it's like the 1% arguing between "this is life changing" and "I hate this".