If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good (2010)

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.

> But this isn't about the iPad or the iPod -- it's about product design.

Obviously GenAI. The author time-traveled to us, stole that sentence and put it in his article. He got encoding issues on blogspot so he typed the dash himself.

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.

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.

The hardest part of product management is saying no to reasonably good ideas. Bad ideas are pretty easy.

Survival bias powers these "insights", 100% of the time.

> 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'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.

> I believe this "more features = better" mindset is at the root of the misjudgment,

It always amuses me when some new device is launched and it has "bigger numbers" and "moar numbers" in every metric. And it's crap to use.

Unfortunately this article is from 2010. Apparently Apple's competition went so low, usability wise, that even Apple is forgetting what usability is.

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?

> 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.

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.

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So perhaps, the key superpower in the age of LLM developed software is the ability to say no.

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.

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.

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Preach it louder for the people in the back. I get into "debates" (really one-sided shouting matches where I'm the one getting shouted at) any time I defend a product that doesn't match the checklist-like sensibilities of the nerd intelligensia. Ironically, the Unix Philosophy that everyone adores is basically the same concept.