Read something similar the other day about the original Walkman.
The engineers wanted to add recording function, thinking it would help with sales and to only cost a negligible amount to add.
Someone cleverer said no, because if you add that feature now people will be confused what it is for. If they don’t want to record audio, they’ll think the product isn’t for them.
You include it but with no mention of it. Allow recoding to be activated with an obscure undocumented button push.
Leave a subtle hong somewhere that someone clever can find out. Wait for news of the functionality to go viral and additional products to walk off the shelf bought by people who feel clever.
I have been thinking deeply about this problem. I bought a great, silent fan from Rowenta, with beautiful housing and does what it says on the tin with no fancy accessories. 3 speed + 1 very silent mode for sleep. Hey, it’s a European product, not some Chinese knockoff.
At some point during design, one person must have said “you know, why not add a brilliant white light that turns on in silent mode? Wouldn’t that be cool?” and there was no one powerful or smart enough to stop their hubris.
Every hot summer night, I turn off my bedside lamp, and scream internally when I notice I forgot to put a dark piece of cloth to obscure the blinding white light on the fan. In these nights, I dream of sending an email to Rowenta’s customer team, and asking them to present me the head of the person responsible for this.
I am reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance lately and how technologists have made the world ugly by forgetting to keep in touch with Quality and Beauty, and this is painful reminder of it.
That bright LED's became so cheap to allow putting them everywhere certainly had downsides. There are many devices now where I have to tape over to enjoy a dark sleeping place.
Back when red LEDs were the new cheap lighting option everything was great: red doesn't affect noght vision as much and at least for me it doesn't seem to prevent sleeping on the same way that the bright white LEDs do.
I fixed a power wart LED today using black electrical tape, with a needle hole.
Ideally instead I need some stick-on semitransparent dark-alpha stickers to reduce brightness. Maybe I should use two polarized stickers, and rotate the second until brightness is perfect.
Are there non-linear solutions or HEV-sensitive photochromic solutions - so that LED brightness is low in the dark but bright enough in sunny conditions?
And yet, you did buy the fan despite the bright LED (because you didn't know it was there when you bought it). Rowenta got your money, so from their perspective, they did everything right.
I disagree here. That would be a marketing problem and I would have market it as for audio on the walk. With the focus on listening and the record option as a bonus.
Deciding on a product design that's easily marketable is also a marketing problem.
You suggest adding it as a "bonus", but for whom? Recording what on the walk? How would you advertise that along the main feature people actually buy the thing for? If not, what purpose does it serve? It's a few cents, but that's still a few cents too much if that's not what you're convincing people to buy.
Try to think of someone who didn't buy a walkman because it lacked a recording feature. What's their story? Can that easily be represented in the marketing material?
Apple messed up one thing about the iPad, which made me never use mine and eventually give it away. Basically, my iPad would die in a couple days if left unplugged. Because I only want to use it about once a week, that means I have to leave it plugged in all the time. Of course I or someone else inevitably wants to plug something else into that charger, so the iPad gets unplugged and forgotten about. Then, in a week when I actually want to use it, it's dead, and I use something else. The result was, I literally never used it.
> Basically, my iPad would die in a couple days if left unplugged.
I still have a first gen (!) iPad that still lasts for weeks on a single charge when locked. It is useless now, because there is no software support, but not because of the battery.
Or a power button that actually removes power from the device rather than just turning the display off. The "actually shutdown long press + UI" process has --just-- enough friction to make me forget to do it or not bother with it.
I think in theory general case I’d rather be able to find it easily than have more charge when it’s located. You can generally use one while plugged in.
Anyway, the root of their issue is other people unplugging it, which is a bigger issue than just the iPad. Still if you turn it off before pugging it in the iPad would have ~full charge if someone unplugged it. They hold charge for months on store shelves.
I've got the same problem with a Samsung tablet I got. I use it maybe once every two weeks, so naturally I turn it off for the duration... but it somehow manages to empty its battery while completely off?! And it takes like a million years to boot, half of it only after you unlock it for some damn reason, it's such tedium.
Same here! I was so annoyed that it didn't come with an auto-powerdown function. Did they really expect people to remember to turn them off "when they plan not to use it for a few days" (I mean who plans not to use something)
I'm fairly sure my old ipad did, maybe the ipad air 2. My current ipad pro doesn't seem to work this way. I could be mistaken, perhaps I used or charged it more.
all of my phones hold a charge for 2-3 weeks in aeroplane mode with no installed apps. Even my 6yo phone with 6yo battery does. A tablet has a much bigger battery but not a proportionally bigger power drain when the screen is off, you might hope for months in aeroplane mode with no installed apps.
Of course it is possible. From fundamentals alone, it has space for a huge battery. Heck, many cheap laptops can sleep longer than a week and still has some power left.
People generally classify the opportunity cost as zero, and if you want to say no to the reasonably good ideas, others will put pressure on you to just do it.
> My iPhone is ready to use in under 1/2 second, while my laptop always takes at least a few seconds to wake up, and then there's a bunch of stuff going on that distracts me. The iPhone is a simple appliance that I use without a second thought, but my laptop feels like a complex machine that causes me to pause and consider if it's worth the effort right now.
Funny how it's become completely the opposite nowadays.
I remember the biggest "missing features" of the iPhone people asked for were MMS and OBEX, along with 3G.
I also remember Apple had cared for most missing things by the iPhone 3G respectively iOS 3. Then they improved photo quality, speed and videos until the iPhone 4 respectively iOS 4/5. Similar things can be said about the iPad 2.
After that, I've had the feeling the product didn't improve anymore, because there was nothing actually useful left to add. I've used my iPhone 4 for 10 years, while Apple enjoyed adding more complexity without true benefit, except maybe the file manager and on-device image editing.
This writeup looks at a successful product with a small number of features that was thereby distinguished from a field of unsuccessful products with a large number of features. Accounting for many products, considering both successes and failures (i.e. using a wide selection of data), it argues that the distinguishing factor of less features was related to the device’s popularity.
In the canonical example of survivor bias, the only bombers being examined (for their characteristics) in the original flawed analysis were the ones that made it back; the planes that were shot down (and their characteristics) were not being considered — an error.
Did you read it? Where do you see mention of "a field of unsuccessful products"?
It mentions the iPad, the iPod, Gmail as successful products. It mentions "laptops" (but in the description it actually includes all desktop computers, I would say) as unsuccessful products.
I wouldn't call desktop computers or even just laptops "unsuccessful products". Would you?
Sure, but how many failed consumer products can you name that solved a problem a large number of consumers actually had way better than anything that came before?
I should probably qualify that by saying that a product that looks to be amazing but costs way too much, is impossible to get because of manufacturing issues, or requires a third-party ecosystem that doesn't exist does not actually solve the consumer problem.
Maybe, but you can't count how many times I see it happen in reverse too. Without saying it directly, a person reveals that they believe there is nothing left to invent or that whatever is currently best established can never ever be replicated or (gasp) beaten.
I've had so much fun writing small apps in pure JS and HTML witj Gemini (no harness or agent, just the free web chat) because it's forced me to keep my index.html below 1000 lines. I love the forced constraints. It's liberating. My day job is wrangling production-level codebases of a monolith service, so my tiny web apps let me live out the fantasy of cutting features instead of adding them.
> For markets that have purchasing processes with long lists of feature requirements, you should probably just crank out as many features as possible and not waste time on simplicity or usability.
It's less any technical breakthrough and more a concerted advertising campaign and collective hypnosis AKA a fad. People just decided there were all going to buy iphones. That's why the biggest threat to iphones is the trend of people buying dumb phones.
Having a "Great" product in this terms makes you subject to the whims of the crowd. As soon as they realize that your product is negative value, and/or they run out of disposable income, they will stop using it.
In any case, the landing page needs to be perfect. Anything less and you have 0 chance.
The most important innovation is in sales and marketing.
If you don't have brand recognition, your landing page has to make up for that. Making up the difference seems to be getting more difficult with each passing year. People are extremely cautious and getting increasingly so.
The average B2B user nowadays is literally triggered by anything remotely unfamiliar.
I've never been enticed by a landing page (yes, datapoint of one). It's either recommendation from source I trust (which has included reddit) and some demo/review available somewhere. Never the landing page as they usually took too much scrolling to get to the point.[0].
Better host a quick video demo/video add instead of drowning the user in copywriting.
Read something similar the other day about the original Walkman.
The engineers wanted to add recording function, thinking it would help with sales and to only cost a negligible amount to add.
Someone cleverer said no, because if you add that feature now people will be confused what it is for. If they don’t want to record audio, they’ll think the product isn’t for them.
You include it but with no mention of it. Allow recoding to be activated with an obscure undocumented button push.
Leave a subtle hong somewhere that someone clever can find out. Wait for news of the functionality to go viral and additional products to walk off the shelf bought by people who feel clever.
I have been thinking deeply about this problem. I bought a great, silent fan from Rowenta, with beautiful housing and does what it says on the tin with no fancy accessories. 3 speed + 1 very silent mode for sleep. Hey, it’s a European product, not some Chinese knockoff.
At some point during design, one person must have said “you know, why not add a brilliant white light that turns on in silent mode? Wouldn’t that be cool?” and there was no one powerful or smart enough to stop their hubris.
Every hot summer night, I turn off my bedside lamp, and scream internally when I notice I forgot to put a dark piece of cloth to obscure the blinding white light on the fan. In these nights, I dream of sending an email to Rowenta’s customer team, and asking them to present me the head of the person responsible for this.
I am reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance lately and how technologists have made the world ugly by forgetting to keep in touch with Quality and Beauty, and this is painful reminder of it.
That bright LED's became so cheap to allow putting them everywhere certainly had downsides. There are many devices now where I have to tape over to enjoy a dark sleeping place.
Back when red LEDs were the new cheap lighting option everything was great: red doesn't affect noght vision as much and at least for me it doesn't seem to prevent sleeping on the same way that the bright white LEDs do.
There are many problems in life that a brush and some black acrylic brush-on primer can fix. This is one of those problems :)
I fixed a power wart LED today using black electrical tape, with a needle hole.
Ideally instead I need some stick-on semitransparent dark-alpha stickers to reduce brightness. Maybe I should use two polarized stickers, and rotate the second until brightness is perfect.
Are there non-linear solutions or HEV-sensitive photochromic solutions - so that LED brightness is low in the dark but bright enough in sunny conditions?
And yet, you did buy the fan despite the bright LED (because you didn't know it was there when you bought it). Rowenta got your money, so from their perspective, they did everything right.
People don't talk enough about the effects of bright screens being cheap to keep on in urban areas.
Every drug store, bus stop and storefront in my city is painful to walk around at night.
You can buy the version without the bright light, but the marketing people made it 10 dollars more expensive x-) /s
I disagree here. That would be a marketing problem and I would have market it as for audio on the walk. With the focus on listening and the record option as a bonus.
Deciding on a product design that's easily marketable is also a marketing problem.
You suggest adding it as a "bonus", but for whom? Recording what on the walk? How would you advertise that along the main feature people actually buy the thing for? If not, what purpose does it serve? It's a few cents, but that's still a few cents too much if that's not what you're convincing people to buy.
Try to think of someone who didn't buy a walkman because it lacked a recording feature. What's their story? Can that easily be represented in the marketing material?
Apple messed up one thing about the iPad, which made me never use mine and eventually give it away. Basically, my iPad would die in a couple days if left unplugged. Because I only want to use it about once a week, that means I have to leave it plugged in all the time. Of course I or someone else inevitably wants to plug something else into that charger, so the iPad gets unplugged and forgotten about. Then, in a week when I actually want to use it, it's dead, and I use something else. The result was, I literally never used it.
> Basically, my iPad would die in a couple days if left unplugged.
I still have a first gen (!) iPad that still lasts for weeks on a single charge when locked. It is useless now, because there is no software support, but not because of the battery.
They boot reasonably quickly, just turn it off.
While on they are constantly listening for a “find my” signal so it’s easy to locate. For the overwhelming majority of people it’s a good tradeoff.
Not a solution. Something like “shutdown after n hours of inactivity” would fix it though.
Or a power button that actually removes power from the device rather than just turning the display off. The "actually shutdown long press + UI" process has --just-- enough friction to make me forget to do it or not bother with it.
I think in theory general case I’d rather be able to find it easily than have more charge when it’s located. You can generally use one while plugged in.
Anyway, the root of their issue is other people unplugging it, which is a bigger issue than just the iPad. Still if you turn it off before pugging it in the iPad would have ~full charge if someone unplugged it. They hold charge for months on store shelves.
every e reader I have owned does this.
Latest iPhones have Find My when they are turned off, do iPads?
> my iPad would die in a couple days if left unplugged.
Something wrong with your iPad then. All three of mine would easily hold a charge for more than 2 days even when turned on but unused (so asleep).
Mine loses maybe 20% over 2 weeks if unused.
Same
I've got the same problem with a Samsung tablet I got. I use it maybe once every two weeks, so naturally I turn it off for the duration... but it somehow manages to empty its battery while completely off?! And it takes like a million years to boot, half of it only after you unlock it for some damn reason, it's such tedium.
Same here! I was so annoyed that it didn't come with an auto-powerdown function. Did they really expect people to remember to turn them off "when they plan not to use it for a few days" (I mean who plans not to use something)
Is it even possible for tablets to hold a charge so long and provide near instant wake?
Why didn't you try powering it off when done?
I'm fairly sure my old ipad did, maybe the ipad air 2. My current ipad pro doesn't seem to work this way. I could be mistaken, perhaps I used or charged it more.
all of my phones hold a charge for 2-3 weeks in aeroplane mode with no installed apps. Even my 6yo phone with 6yo battery does. A tablet has a much bigger battery but not a proportionally bigger power drain when the screen is off, you might hope for months in aeroplane mode with no installed apps.
Of course it is possible. From fundamentals alone, it has space for a huge battery. Heck, many cheap laptops can sleep longer than a week and still has some power left.
Turn on Battery Save mode, it’ll last a month.
The hardest part of product management is saying no to reasonably good ideas. Bad ideas are pretty easy.
People generally classify the opportunity cost as zero, and if you want to say no to the reasonably good ideas, others will put pressure on you to just do it.
> My iPhone is ready to use in under 1/2 second, while my laptop always takes at least a few seconds to wake up, and then there's a bunch of stuff going on that distracts me. The iPhone is a simple appliance that I use without a second thought, but my laptop feels like a complex machine that causes me to pause and consider if it's worth the effort right now.
Funny how it's become completely the opposite nowadays.
I remember the biggest "missing features" of the iPhone people asked for were MMS and OBEX, along with 3G.
I also remember Apple had cared for most missing things by the iPhone 3G respectively iOS 3. Then they improved photo quality, speed and videos until the iPhone 4 respectively iOS 4/5. Similar things can be said about the iPad 2.
After that, I've had the feeling the product didn't improve anymore, because there was nothing actually useful left to add. I've used my iPhone 4 for 10 years, while Apple enjoyed adding more complexity without true benefit, except maybe the file manager and on-device image editing.
Survival bias powers these "insights", 100% of the time.
This writeup looks at a successful product with a small number of features that was thereby distinguished from a field of unsuccessful products with a large number of features. Accounting for many products, considering both successes and failures (i.e. using a wide selection of data), it argues that the distinguishing factor of less features was related to the device’s popularity.
In the canonical example of survivor bias, the only bombers being examined (for their characteristics) in the original flawed analysis were the ones that made it back; the planes that were shot down (and their characteristics) were not being considered — an error.
Did you read it? Where do you see mention of "a field of unsuccessful products"?
It mentions the iPad, the iPod, Gmail as successful products. It mentions "laptops" (but in the description it actually includes all desktop computers, I would say) as unsuccessful products.
I wouldn't call desktop computers or even just laptops "unsuccessful products". Would you?
>I wouldn't call desktop computers or even just laptops "unsuccessful products". Would you?
With the caveat of "Casually browsing the web" I would, actually. They have been near completely subsumed by Ipads or Phones.
Sure, but how many failed consumer products can you name that solved a problem a large number of consumers actually had way better than anything that came before?
I should probably qualify that by saying that a product that looks to be amazing but costs way too much, is impossible to get because of manufacturing issues, or requires a third-party ecosystem that doesn't exist does not actually solve the consumer problem.
Maybe, but you can't count how many times I see it happen in reverse too. Without saying it directly, a person reveals that they believe there is nothing left to invent or that whatever is currently best established can never ever be replicated or (gasp) beaten.
So firstly:
The guy who created Gmail is now 49 years old.
Why does that blow me away?
Secondly, where else does this apply beyond hardware, beyond the world of tech even?
You're blown away at how old he is, or how young he is?
My gmail account is over 20 years old!
I've had so much fun writing small apps in pure JS and HTML witj Gemini (no harness or agent, just the free web chat) because it's forced me to keep my index.html below 1000 lines. I love the forced constraints. It's liberating. My day job is wrangling production-level codebases of a monolith service, so my tiny web apps let me live out the fantasy of cutting features instead of adding them.
One of the most important [to me] books, was The Simplicity Shift[0], by Scott Jenson.
It was written pre-iPhone, when phones had seriously limited screen real estate.
He talks about how important it is to “weight” features, and order them by importance.
I am wrestling with this exact type of issue, right now, with a screen of my app.
[0] https://jenson.org/The-Simplicity-Shift.pdf (a PDF of the entire book. It’s a short read)
> For markets that have purchasing processes with long lists of feature requirements, you should probably just crank out as many features as possible and not waste time on simplicity or usability.
This was great snark.
That isn't snark — it's reality.
ERP and corporate procurement in a nutshell.
I think we're about to be overwhelmed with good software that isn't great.
Fewer features = smaller frame, easier to satisfy, better customer targeting.
If the barrier to adding that new feature is removed, what happens?
If the cost is reduced — and becomes closer to zero — there's probably more chance the feature will be added ..
.. in which case, the product is less likely to be great.
--
So perhaps, the key superpower in the age of LLM developed software is the ability to say no.
It's less any technical breakthrough and more a concerted advertising campaign and collective hypnosis AKA a fad. People just decided there were all going to buy iphones. That's why the biggest threat to iphones is the trend of people buying dumb phones.
Having a "Great" product in this terms makes you subject to the whims of the crowd. As soon as they realize that your product is negative value, and/or they run out of disposable income, they will stop using it.
In any case, the landing page needs to be perfect. Anything less and you have 0 chance.
The most important innovation is in sales and marketing.
If you don't have brand recognition, your landing page has to make up for that. Making up the difference seems to be getting more difficult with each passing year. People are extremely cautious and getting increasingly so.
The average B2B user nowadays is literally triggered by anything remotely unfamiliar.
I've never been enticed by a landing page (yes, datapoint of one). It's either recommendation from source I trust (which has included reddit) and some demo/review available somewhere. Never the landing page as they usually took too much scrolling to get to the point.[0].
Better host a quick video demo/video add instead of drowning the user in copywriting.
[0]: Compare https://nova.app/ and https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html. Everything bellow the six highlights in the former case should be its own page.
If you don't have any connections to vouch for you/your product, you need a perfect landing page to get those first few users who will then recommend.