10 ms·

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win

156 points by dsiroker 14y ago

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
sounds 14y ago
At first I was skeptical whether the article would correctly quote Ghandi (yes, disputed) [1]. I was pleasantly surprised at how optimizely is responding to Adobe. I think I'll go try it out. [1] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mohandas_Karamchand_Gandhi#Disputed http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mohandas_Karamchand_Gandhi#Disp...
- nikunjk 14y ago
  I love even now so many people misspell Gandhi. Not a hater, but I want to know if this is the spelling that they teach in particular countries.
  - 001sky 14y ago
    Considering the spelling (apparent) in his footnoted reference, one surmises it is a (meaningless) typo.
    - Cushman 14y ago
      Maybe not meaningless; the common Westernized pronunciation does sound closer to Ghandi than Gandhi.
      - 001sky 14y ago
        English is the official language of India, no?
        viraptor 14y ago
        It's common to write foreign names in a slightly modified way matching the language used. This can be done to avoid uncommon character sets (you're going to write Moscow, not Москва), or simply because it sounds better in the sentence / people know how to read it (Warsaw, not Warszawa). Same happens with names. Your comment sounds like there's something strange about adapting the name to the language currently used.
        001sky 14y ago
        Agree, but there is nothing here about a "Foreign" language, he was Indian and thus there is (an) official spelling in English of his name.[1,2] ____________ [1] Birth/death records, etc. [2] During the British Raj, English was used for most official purposes both at the federal level and in the various states.[7] The Indian constitution adopted in 1950, envisaged the gradual phasing in of Hindi, to replace English over a fifteen-year period, but gave Parliament the power to, by law, provide for the continued use of English even thereafter.[8] But resistance to making Hindi the sole official language has resulted in English being retained for official uses. English continues to be used today, in combination with Hindi (at the central level and in some states) and other languages (at the state level).
        icebraining 14y ago
        It's an official language, along with Hindi.
juddlyon 14y ago
Give them hell for all of us who've been subsidizing their bloatware all these years! Love it. I wish some well-financed Mac devs would build a Photoshop/Fireworks killer....
- lanstein 14y ago
  Well, only for the last couple years, really - they got acquired fairly recently.
evan_ 14y ago
Correlation does not imply causation- Many, many causes have gone through the first three steps but not the final step.
rorrr 14y ago
If you look at the home pages for both products, it's absolutely clear which one uses their own "medicine". http://optimizely.com http://optimizely.com https://www.omniture.com/en/products/conversion/test-and-target https://www.omniture.com/en/products/conversion/test-and-tar...
- tisme 14y ago
  They're both valid approaches. The one is classic sales copy, the other is the new hip web x.0 look. It's worth nothing that omniture pulls in a very very large amount of money, so they must be doing something right.
- ssharp 14y ago
  Enterprise software sales techniques are often mocked but they're clearly producing results. If you're an enterprise buyer, you don't care about a hip look and getting through the sales process as fast as possible, like many small customers do. I think comparing Adobe's page to Optimizely and declaring who is eating their own dog food does not offer any insight. In enterprise sales, there are so many other steps in sales the funnel to worry about than the web page. You need to optimize in places that have the highest returns. At most, I'd guess that Adobe is testing things on that page to capture leads that are probably not even apparent.
- 6ren 14y ago
  If it was "absolutely clear", there'd be no need to test.
tsotha 14y ago
Ugh. I'm so sick of this quote it's guaranteed to get you ignored permanently.
- wtracy 14y ago
  The quote is still meaningful in the context of social movements, but I agree that using it in the context of market competition is pretty tacky.
  - asdfs 14y ago
    Even in the context of social movements it's rather meaningless when used as a form of argument for something.
    - sliverstorm 14y ago
      Seriously. I still can't figure why anyone would believe that being ignored was proof you were on track to winning, but folks try to make the argument all the time.
      - MichaelApproved 14y ago
        The expression is not meant as proof that you're on the track to winning, it's meant to encourage you if you're currently being ignored. Sure, being ignored is part of the losing process but it's also part of the winning process. Don't get discouraged just because you're being ignored.
        smallblacksun 14y ago
        I agree that Gandhi didn't mean that it as proof, but many, many people on the internet use it to mean precisely that.
        sliverstorm 14y ago
        Yup, something alone the lines of, "YOU SEE THAT!? SEE HOW THEY ARE IGNORING US!?! THAT PROVES WE WILL CRUSH THEM!"
larrys 14y ago
"Why are they so afraid to mention this “one startup”?" They don't want to legitimize you or give you any publicity. That's obvious and a good business strategy on their part. After all what do they have to gain by doing so?
- chj 14y ago
  Exactly. I am surprised that the author even asked.
  - snprbob86 14y ago
    Seemed rhetorical to me...
throwaway1012 14y ago
I am a regular contributor on HN but I work in this industry and so i am using a throwaway account. Dan, 1.3 billion 'visitors' is a really vague representation. Is it user sessions or page views or number of unique visitors measured in one of the experiment/control groups? Test & Target mbox hell as mentioned in the post is very very true. Learning to use it within one hour is a joke. The technology they use is really stale and hasn't changed a lot in the recent years. Many of the players who started after 2008/09 have far superior implementations, thanks to lot of advancements in browser technologies which T&T failed to capitalize. I am very happy for Optimizely's success and these two posts will bring them a good amount of well deserved PR. Test & target and in fact a good number of other providers are way ahead of Optimizely in this game. The number of sessions/experiments is one good metric but it is definitely not the best one to measure the leader in the race. * What is optimziely's ARR? At 2800 customers paying $250/month [1], it should be around $8.5M. Lets be generous and make it $10M. A handful of T&T's high profile clients will be paying Adobe that amount. * How many IR100, IR500 [2], top 100 travel, publishing, finance sites are in Optimizely's client list? Builtwith's data is not very accurate. We have worked with the guy from builtwith to compute some lists and their methodologies are not very great. They just look for signals in the script tags and it throws lot of false positives. Out of my own interest, i have spent hours writing parsers and scripts to compile the list and Optimizely is not really in that picture. You can have thousands of clients paying you hundreds of dollars or have a few hundred clients paying 5/6 figure amounts. Optimizely has been after the former while the other players including T&T have been targeting the latter. I guess Optimizely is now trying to expand their enterprise client list since that is where the big money is but it takes a lot more to compete in that arena with long sales cycles and vast requirements. * How many user sessions are being served? Requests is probably the worst measure. T&T mentioned it because they can show their artificially inflated metric which is a result of their terrible implementation. IMO, user sessions is a better measure. 1.3 billion user sessions (in 2 years)[3] is still no where close to what the other providers serve. Number of tests currently running is also a good measure. Optimizely is a great product and they have made it super easy to run A/B tests but false proclamation claiming you are number one when you are not even close is not very nice. [1] Optimizely probably has a good number of clients in that 2800+ who pay $10k-20K a month. The highest openly priced plan is $360. I guess it wouldn't be wrong to assume that 50% of the customers will be in one of the two lower plans ($17 or $71). Optimizely's current ARR would be somewhere between $5M to $10M (My guess!) [2] http://www.internetretailer.com/top500/list/ http://www.internetretailer.com/top500/list/ [3] There was no mention of the timeline. So i assume it is from when they started in 2010.
giis 14y ago
About the quote: I first came across this quote in my college library,in some linux book.Though I didn't know who wrote this quote at that time,I really liked it and wrote it down on my college books.I was the only guy who was sticking with linux ,where as all my friends advised me to switch to j2ee/.net platform because thats where jobs are available for it but not linux. When I told,I'm going to do something project with linux,the reply will be "Linux is OS,what could you possible do with it?".I still remember,the day-before When a company came for campus recruitment,I was doing some linux related on my new desktop.Then one friend commented 'he doesn't need to be prepare for interview,he will get a job with linux :P'. Next day,I was lucky to meet a linux-enthusiast in my interview panel and 9 students got a job out of 180 students.My name topped that list !:) Few days later,the same guy who commented a day-before the interview,saw this quote on my book asked 'did you wrote this quote?'.I said,"read it some book". again he insisted 'don't lie,looks like you wrote this'.I replied 'no i didn't' In my final-year college project,I mentioned thanks for my parents and my guide and 'unknown' person who wrote this quote. After few years,one of my oss project received foss india awards (www.giis.co.in/LFY.png).I came to know to this quote was actually written by Gandhi. As for as I'm concern this quote has 3 questions : What will you do when others ignore you? [are you going to give up?] What will you do when others laugh at you? [are you going to get discouraged ?] What will you do when others fight with you? [are you going to quarrel with them? or shut-up & continue your work]
nrao123 14y ago
This is an excellent case study unfolding in real time in the A/B Testing software industry on how large incumbent products (Adobe's Omniture - Test & Target) get killed by startups (Optimizely) . The core of the issue seems to be something called MBox (http://www.managingecommerce.com/glossary/i-n/mbox http://www.managingecommerce.com/glossary/i-n/mbox) which is a mechanism for setting up a test e.g. Does A page perform better than B page - which is the essence of A/B testing. Of course, some genius strategist comes up with "our value is driven of by the number of tests/experiments that people run so lets set our pricing strategy of that" and then over time you slowly "capture more value than you create". And then comes a startup which calls BS on that practice because most tests don't end up anywhere & they design a really radically simpler software that is not constrained by "per test" & other artificial constraints! They win by creating more value than they capture. More background on that topic here: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/09/does-open-conflict-with-making-money.html http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/09/does-open-conflict-with-maki...

156 points by dsiroker 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

At first I was skeptical whether the article would correctly quote Ghandi (yes, disputed) [1]. I was pleasantly surprised at how optimizely is responding to Adobe. I think I'll go try it out. [1] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mohandas_Karamchand_Gandhi#Disputed http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mohandas_Karamchand_Gandhi#Disp...

nikunjk 14y ago
I love even now so many people misspell Gandhi. Not a hater, but I want to know if this is the spelling that they teach in particular countries.
- 001sky 14y ago
  Considering the spelling (apparent) in his footnoted reference, one surmises it is a (meaningless) typo.
  - Cushman 14y ago
    Maybe not meaningless; the common Westernized pronunciation does sound closer to Ghandi than Gandhi.
    - 001sky 14y ago
      English is the official language of India, no?
      - viraptor 14y ago
        It's common to write foreign names in a slightly modified way matching the language used. This can be done to avoid uncommon character sets (you're going to write Moscow, not Москва), or simply because it sounds better in the sentence / people know how to read it (Warsaw, not Warszawa). Same happens with names. Your comment sounds like there's something strange about adapting the name to the language currently used.
        001sky 14y ago
        Agree, but there is nothing here about a "Foreign" language, he was Indian and thus there is (an) official spelling in English of his name.[1,2] ____________ [1] Birth/death records, etc. [2] During the British Raj, English was used for most official purposes both at the federal level and in the various states.[7] The Indian constitution adopted in 1950, envisaged the gradual phasing in of Hindi, to replace English over a fifteen-year period, but gave Parliament the power to, by law, provide for the continued use of English even thereafter.[8] But resistance to making Hindi the sole official language has resulted in English being retained for official uses. English continues to be used today, in combination with Hindi (at the central level and in some states) and other languages (at the state level).
      - icebraining 14y ago
        It's an official language, along with Hindi.

juddlyon 14y ago

Give them hell for all of us who've been subsidizing their bloatware all these years! Love it. I wish some well-financed Mac devs would build a Photoshop/Fireworks killer....

lanstein 14y ago
Well, only for the last couple years, really - they got acquired fairly recently.

evan_ 14y ago

Correlation does not imply causation- Many, many causes have gone through the first three steps but not the final step.

rorrr 14y ago

If you look at the home pages for both products, it's absolutely clear which one uses their own "medicine". http://optimizely.com http://optimizely.com https://www.omniture.com/en/products/conversion/test-and-target https://www.omniture.com/en/products/conversion/test-and-tar...

tisme 14y ago
They're both valid approaches. The one is classic sales copy, the other is the new hip web x.0 look. It's worth nothing that omniture pulls in a very very large amount of money, so they must be doing something right.
ssharp 14y ago
Enterprise software sales techniques are often mocked but they're clearly producing results. If you're an enterprise buyer, you don't care about a hip look and getting through the sales process as fast as possible, like many small customers do. I think comparing Adobe's page to Optimizely and declaring who is eating their own dog food does not offer any insight. In enterprise sales, there are so many other steps in sales the funnel to worry about than the web page. You need to optimize in places that have the highest returns. At most, I'd guess that Adobe is testing things on that page to capture leads that are probably not even apparent.
6ren 14y ago
If it was "absolutely clear", there'd be no need to test.

tsotha 14y ago

Ugh. I'm so sick of this quote it's guaranteed to get you ignored permanently.

wtracy 14y ago
The quote is still meaningful in the context of social movements, but I agree that using it in the context of market competition is pretty tacky.
- asdfs 14y ago
  Even in the context of social movements it's rather meaningless when used as a form of argument for something.
  - sliverstorm 14y ago
    Seriously. I still can't figure why anyone would believe that being ignored was proof you were on track to winning, but folks try to make the argument all the time.
    - MichaelApproved 14y ago
      The expression is not meant as proof that you're on the track to winning, it's meant to encourage you if you're currently being ignored. Sure, being ignored is part of the losing process but it's also part of the winning process. Don't get discouraged just because you're being ignored.
      - smallblacksun 14y ago
        I agree that Gandhi didn't mean that it as proof, but many, many people on the internet use it to mean precisely that.
        sliverstorm 14y ago
        Yup, something alone the lines of, "YOU SEE THAT!? SEE HOW THEY ARE IGNORING US!?! THAT PROVES WE WILL CRUSH THEM!"

larrys 14y ago

"Why are they so afraid to mention this “one startup”?" They don't want to legitimize you or give you any publicity. That's obvious and a good business strategy on their part. After all what do they have to gain by doing so?

chj 14y ago
Exactly. I am surprised that the author even asked.
- snprbob86 14y ago
  Seemed rhetorical to me...

throwaway1012 14y ago

I am a regular contributor on HN but I work in this industry and so i am using a throwaway account. Dan, 1.3 billion 'visitors' is a really vague representation. Is it user sessions or page views or number of unique visitors measured in one of the experiment/control groups? Test & Target mbox hell as mentioned in the post is very very true. Learning to use it within one hour is a joke. The technology they use is really stale and hasn't changed a lot in the recent years. Many of the players who started after 2008/09 have far superior implementations, thanks to lot of advancements in browser technologies which T&T failed to capitalize. I am very happy for Optimizely's success and these two posts will bring them a good amount of well deserved PR. Test & target and in fact a good number of other providers are way ahead of Optimizely in this game. The number of sessions/experiments is one good metric but it is definitely not the best one to measure the leader in the race. * What is optimziely's ARR? At 2800 customers paying $250/month [1], it should be around $8.5M. Lets be generous and make it $10M. A handful of T&T's high profile clients will be paying Adobe that amount. * How many IR100, IR500 [2], top 100 travel, publishing, finance sites are in Optimizely's client list? Builtwith's data is not very accurate. We have worked with the guy from builtwith to compute some lists and their methodologies are not very great. They just look for signals in the script tags and it throws lot of false positives. Out of my own interest, i have spent hours writing parsers and scripts to compile the list and Optimizely is not really in that picture. You can have thousands of clients paying you hundreds of dollars or have a few hundred clients paying 5/6 figure amounts. Optimizely has been after the former while the other players including T&T have been targeting the latter. I guess Optimizely is now trying to expand their enterprise client list since that is where the big money is but it takes a lot more to compete in that arena with long sales cycles and vast requirements. * How many user sessions are being served? Requests is probably the worst measure. T&T mentioned it because they can show their artificially inflated metric which is a result of their terrible implementation. IMO, user sessions is a better measure. 1.3 billion user sessions (in 2 years)[3] is still no where close to what the other providers serve. Number of tests currently running is also a good measure. Optimizely is a great product and they have made it super easy to run A/B tests but false proclamation claiming you are number one when you are not even close is not very nice. [1] Optimizely probably has a good number of clients in that 2800+ who pay $10k-20K a month. The highest openly priced plan is $360. I guess it wouldn't be wrong to assume that 50% of the customers will be in one of the two lower plans ($17 or $71). Optimizely's current ARR would be somewhere between $5M to $10M (My guess!) [2] http://www.internetretailer.com/top500/list/ http://www.internetretailer.com/top500/list/ [3] There was no mention of the timeline. So i assume it is from when they started in 2010.

giis 14y ago

About the quote: I first came across this quote in my college library,in some linux book.Though I didn't know who wrote this quote at that time,I really liked it and wrote it down on my college books.I was the only guy who was sticking with linux ,where as all my friends advised me to switch to j2ee/.net platform because thats where jobs are available for it but not linux. When I told,I'm going to do something project with linux,the reply will be "Linux is OS,what could you possible do with it?".I still remember,the day-before When a company came for campus recruitment,I was doing some linux related on my new desktop.Then one friend commented 'he doesn't need to be prepare for interview,he will get a job with linux :P'. Next day,I was lucky to meet a linux-enthusiast in my interview panel and 9 students got a job out of 180 students.My name topped that list !:) Few days later,the same guy who commented a day-before the interview,saw this quote on my book asked 'did you wrote this quote?'.I said,"read it some book". again he insisted 'don't lie,looks like you wrote this'.I replied 'no i didn't' In my final-year college project,I mentioned thanks for my parents and my guide and 'unknown' person who wrote this quote. After few years,one of my oss project received foss india awards (www.giis.co.in/LFY.png).I came to know to this quote was actually written by Gandhi. As for as I'm concern this quote has 3 questions : What will you do when others ignore you? [are you going to give up?] What will you do when others laugh at you? [are you going to get discouraged ?] What will you do when others fight with you? [are you going to quarrel with them? or shut-up & continue your work]

nrao123 14y ago

This is an excellent case study unfolding in real time in the A/B Testing software industry on how large incumbent products (Adobe's Omniture - Test & Target) get killed by startups (Optimizely) . The core of the issue seems to be something called MBox (http://www.managingecommerce.com/glossary/i-n/mbox http://www.managingecommerce.com/glossary/i-n/mbox) which is a mechanism for setting up a test e.g. Does A page perform better than B page - which is the essence of A/B testing. Of course, some genius strategist comes up with "our value is driven of by the number of tests/experiments that people run so lets set our pricing strategy of that" and then over time you slowly "capture more value than you create". And then comes a startup which calls BS on that practice because most tests don't end up anywhere & they design a really radically simpler software that is not constrained by "per test" & other artificial constraints! They win by creating more value than they capture. More background on that topic here: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/09/does-open-conflict-with-making-money.html http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/09/does-open-conflict-with-maki...