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I think the author misunderstood "Worse is better". Worse is not better because it is somehow more attractive to users. It is a better strategy, because by rele

by beza1e1 17y ago

I think the author misunderstood "Worse is better". Worse is not better because it is somehow more attractive to users. It is a better strategy, because by releasing early you get additional resources to continue building the big vision. Consider company BigCo, which starts a massive $10mil project that will revolutionize the industry. It is epected to finish in five years. A small startup builds a little product for $1000 in a year, which implements one of the core features of BigCos vision. This is clearly a "worse" product. Using the revenue of $0.1mil, they enhance their product. This yields $1mil revenue after two years. Two iterations later the implemented BigCos vision in four years with just $1000 starting capital. When BigCo releases their final product it is already obsolete. This is how worse is better. In the (Free) software world it isn't about money, but about users and developers. Gabriel tells a Lisp vs C example in "Worse is better", where "1987" is equivalent to the end of the five year period in my example: In concrete terms, even though Lisp compilers in 1987 were about as good as C compilers, there are many more compiler experts who want to make C compilers better than want to make Lisp compilers better.

scott_s 17y ago
I don't think that even really captures what Gabriel was getting at. The example he uses in the paper is from operating system design, where doing the "right" thing was too hard to implement. The "wrong" way is simpler to implement, and you get your OS written faster. Your OS now has a documented design flaw, and people have to work around it - but everyone does because you got your OS out first. That is, he was more addressing design choices made when solving a problem. The full discussion is in his paper. It starts with the sentence "Two famous people, one from MIT and another from Berkeley (but working on Unix) once met to discuss operating system issues.": http://www.dreamsongs.com/WIB.html http://www.dreamsongs.com/WIB.html
- gruseom 17y ago
  It's in fact hard to capture what Worse is Better was getting at, because it's sort of incoherent. I've tried 2 or 3 times to understand it over the years and concluded that, beyond the most general point (which you describe well, I think), it's not clear what he's really saying. I noticed Rich Hickey said this the other day, as politely as one possibly could: The arguments made in Worse is Better are very nuanced and I'm not sure I understand them all. http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/313989/-z_programming_languages_clojure?pp=2 http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/313989/-z_programmin... By the way, Dan Weinreb has an interesting piece in which he reveals that he was the MIT guy and Bill Joy the Berkeley guy: http://danweinreb.org/blog/the-worse-is-better-idea-and-the-future-of-lisp http://danweinreb.org/blog/the-worse-is-better-idea-and-the-... I recommend Kay Schluehr's comment on that page, which argues that arguments like WiB are drawing overly general philosophical conclusions from instances of success or failure in the market.
  - scott_s 17y ago
    I think Richard Gabriel himself demonstrated that the points were nuanced, if not outright elusive, by writing a rebuttal to the essay with the title "Worse is Better is Worse" under the pseudonym Nickieben Bourbaki. Gabriel's full account of the essays he's written is on his website: http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
    - gruseom 17y ago
      I went through a phase of reading all that stuff a number of years ago. Gabriel has a seriously pompous side, which I eventually couldn't bear any longer (probably after spending time and money tracking down his "Patterns of Software" book and then discovering how dreadful it was). But the piece you link to is refreshingly free of all that... until, amusingly, the last sentence, as if he falls off the wagon at the very end. I don't begrudge him for being unable to make up his mind whether he agrees with "worse is better". There are disadvantages to both approaches. But there's no need to be a drama queen about it ("One fellow was seriously nervous that I might have a mental disease") or inflate it into an artificially large "philosophical" question.
akeefer 17y ago
I think the point is less about competitive advantages, and more that time is never irrelevant. What you want to maximize is, as it were, the area under the curve on the time-value graph. That means delivering a reasonable amount of value as soon as you can is going to be a better strategy than delivering no value for a longer time while you try to perfect things, then eventually delivering more value. And since it's always a moving target, getting something that works "well enough" and then moving on to the next thing will always keep you ahead of people polishing their gleaming cube of perfection for ever more marginal returns.

by beza1e1 17y ago

scott_s 17y ago

I don't think that even really captures what Gabriel was getting at. The example he uses in the paper is from operating system design, where doing the "right" thing was too hard to implement. The "wrong" way is simpler to implement, and you get your OS written faster. Your OS now has a documented design flaw, and people have to work around it - but everyone does because you got your OS out first. That is, he was more addressing design choices made when solving a problem. The full discussion is in his paper. It starts with the sentence "Two famous people, one from MIT and another from Berkeley (but working on Unix) once met to discuss operating system issues.": http://www.dreamsongs.com/WIB.html http://www.dreamsongs.com/WIB.html

gruseom 17y ago
It's in fact hard to capture what Worse is Better was getting at, because it's sort of incoherent. I've tried 2 or 3 times to understand it over the years and concluded that, beyond the most general point (which you describe well, I think), it's not clear what he's really saying. I noticed Rich Hickey said this the other day, as politely as one possibly could: The arguments made in Worse is Better are very nuanced and I'm not sure I understand them all. http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/313989/-z_programming_languages_clojure?pp=2 http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/313989/-z_programmin... By the way, Dan Weinreb has an interesting piece in which he reveals that he was the MIT guy and Bill Joy the Berkeley guy: http://danweinreb.org/blog/the-worse-is-better-idea-and-the-future-of-lisp http://danweinreb.org/blog/the-worse-is-better-idea-and-the-... I recommend Kay Schluehr's comment on that page, which argues that arguments like WiB are drawing overly general philosophical conclusions from instances of success or failure in the market.
- scott_s 17y ago
  I think Richard Gabriel himself demonstrated that the points were nuanced, if not outright elusive, by writing a rebuttal to the essay with the title "Worse is Better is Worse" under the pseudonym Nickieben Bourbaki. Gabriel's full account of the essays he's written is on his website: http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
  - gruseom 17y ago
    I went through a phase of reading all that stuff a number of years ago. Gabriel has a seriously pompous side, which I eventually couldn't bear any longer (probably after spending time and money tracking down his "Patterns of Software" book and then discovering how dreadful it was). But the piece you link to is refreshingly free of all that... until, amusingly, the last sentence, as if he falls off the wagon at the very end. I don't begrudge him for being unable to make up his mind whether he agrees with "worse is better". There are disadvantages to both approaches. But there's no need to be a drama queen about it ("One fellow was seriously nervous that I might have a mental disease") or inflate it into an artificially large "philosophical" question.

akeefer 17y ago

I think the point is less about competitive advantages, and more that time is never irrelevant. What you want to maximize is, as it were, the area under the curve on the time-value graph. That means delivering a reasonable amount of value as soon as you can is going to be a better strategy than delivering no value for a longer time while you try to perfect things, then eventually delivering more value. And since it's always a moving target, getting something that works "well enough" and then moving on to the next thing will always keep you ahead of people polishing their gleaming cube of perfection for ever more marginal returns.