

1.0 Is The Loneliest Number - powdahound
http://ma.tt/2010/11/one-point-oh/

======
philwelch
This is going to sound fanboyish, which I hate, but there's a valid point in
here:

At least as far as major new product categories go, Apple doesn't ship a
Minimum Viable Product. They ship a Minimum Earthshaking Product. Anything
that's strictly necessary for their new product to be earthshaking
(multitouch, the little touches on the iPhone UI like the rubber band inertial
scrolling) they will spend years to perfect; anything that's a niggling little
feature (copy and paste) they'll leave for the next version.

~~~
pkaler
In the Kano Model this is called an exciter.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kano_model>

The greatest problem with Customer Development and the concept of the Minimum
Viable Product is that there is no rigorous classification for quality and
value.

A great book to read with respect to product management is Agile Product
Management with Scrum. <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321605780>

There are also slides here:
[http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/system/presentation/file...](http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/system/presentation/file/11/SDBP05_AgileProductMgmt.pdf)

------
irons
The trouble with this analysis is that the 1.0 iPod wasn't "rudimentary", it
was _simple_. Likewise the original iPhone, which was so rudimentary that a
year later, the only competitive devices looked just like it.

If you're going to ship a great product and then improve on it at a terrifying
pace, then yes, your original version is going to look dated pretty quickly.
But using Apple as his exemplar gives weirdly short shrift to the incidental
detail of first shipping a great product, regardless of how it looks in
hindsight.

~~~
px
I think rudimentary is a good descriptor in this instance.

It can mean "being in the earliest stages of development" or "basic; minimal"

~~~
irons
No product which cleans its competitors' clocks from the word go can be fairly
described as rudimentary, regardless of the competitive landscape a decade
later. If the motion picture cameras Chaplin was using ninety years ago seem
rudimentary now, it's because our context is different. At the time, they were
bleeding edge.

I sympathize with trying to motivate people to ship sooner and faster, but
he's painting his examples as if they weren't world-beating hits, which only
took time to go from solidly profitable to gargantuanly profitable.

------
marze
Another way to look at Apple's initial 1.0 tablet and phone are that they got
it _right_.

This will be more obvious in about three years, but at the time of the 1.0
release other phones and tablets looked like a lot of things but nothing like
the iPhone 1.0 and the iPad 1.0. Already, the competing phones look a lot like
the iPhone 1.0 and the competing tablets will look a lot like the iPad 1.0.

That is what Apple is doing that no one seems to be able to, getting 1.0 so
on-the-money right that competitors have no choice but to follow as best they
can.

------
wccrawford
"How painful it must have been to have everyone criticizing them for all the
flaws they had already fixed "

I can so see that. Any established hardware company is working 2-3 iterations
ahead when they launch a product. It has always boggled me that Sony is
working on a PS4 while I'm playing a brand-new PS3. Or that intel is working
on a chip 2 generations more advanced than the one I just bought the first day
it was released.

I mean, I understand -why-, but it still seems like the world is slightly
crazy for it.

~~~
willheim
They're already working on Gran Turismo 6 when GT5 hasn't been released yet...
a victim of the "just one more thing" syndrome.

------
mrschwabe
Quite possibly the best analogy you have ever read:

"Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an
audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there.
That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the
public it’s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world."

------
powdahound
Other reasons to ship early:

\- Users love to see products continuously improving. They'll often think more
highly of you for adding requested features if you already had them in
development.

\- You can use releases to generate buzz.

\- It's easier to track the effect individual features have on your metrics.

\- Scaling :)

------
Ygor
It is often mentioned that it is good to ship early. And all the points
obviously stand since we have so many working examples. However, my question
is: How many products have failed because they were shipped to early? And does
this happen often? Is there a way to found the ratio?

Could it be possible that we only notice the examples of success, and fail to
recognize the cases where the product failed because it wasn't polished
enough?

Is it even possible for a product to fail because it was released to early, or
are there other (hidden?) reasons?

~~~
moultano
It happens with videogames all the time. Developers get pushed to hit an
unrealistic ship date, the game gets panned by critics, fans revolt, when 6
more months could have fixed it.

"A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever." -Shigeru
Miyamoto <http://www.iwise.com/PW9YU>

That said, this attitude is coming from an era when it was difficult to update
games after release, so I'm not sure to what extent it still applies.

~~~
dagw
_when 6 more months could have fixed it._

Only if you have enough cash to pay everybody for 6 more month.

------
mattiask
The release early and release often is an often repeated mantra, the problem
is that it's only about half true and mostly misunderstood.

The reason for releasing early is often stated as that the user feedback will
guide your product and design. The problem is that user-driven development is
a crapshot, as Henrik Ford famously being quoted: "If I'd given people what
they asked for I'd built a faster horse".

The core idea of your product needs to be in place and well implemented when
you release, you don't need all the features but first impressions do matter.
The main reason for releasing early is that most people can't recognize a good
idea so it's better to release early than toil on some idea for years before
realizing that you're the only one finding it useful

First mover advantage is highly overrated, after all, apple didn't build the
first touch-screen smartphone, they simply built the "first" one offering a
great experience.

So find a balance between polish, features and time to release, don't just
release something half crappy to see how people react. The road to success is
paved by ideas that were basically good but were implemented poorly and then
discarded before given another chance.

------
dools
_"if you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too
long"_

Fantastic quote. I'm going to put it on my wall ...

~~~
thenbrent
Yep, it sure is a great quote, shame he didn't attribute it to Reid Hoffman,
who has been saying it since at least 2006:
[http://www.cambrianhouse.com/blog/startups-
entrepreneurship/...](http://www.cambrianhouse.com/blog/startups-
entrepreneurship/why-being-embarrassed-is-critical-to-the-success-of-your-
startup/)

------
Kilimanjaro
"if you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version, you waited too
long."

------
simonpreed
We're about to ship our site and this couldn't have come at a better time,
very poignant post.

There's still a part of me that wants to wait for feature X before going live
but I've started to realise this is just fear. Fear that it won't get the
response we'd like but that's all it is, fear.

We're going to ship the product we've got and if it doesn't take then we'll
keep doing what we love and iterating.

------
trotsky
Release early and often is a highly useful mantra. It's too bad the message is
so bogged down in one infinite loop religious zeal. You don't have to follow
apple closely at all to know that they clearly plan and break launch dates
regularly, sometimes for years on end. No question that a fair amount of that
is caused by scope creep and its-not-ready-yet syndrome.

------
clutchski
I love the design of the comments section. Is this a common wordpress theme on
handrolled?

~~~
modernerd
It's handrolled. Matt's themes are designed by Nicolò Volpato:
<http://ma.tt/2010/06/new-summer-design/>

After each redesign, he releases his previous theme in the wordpress.org
themes directory: <http://ma.tt/themes/>

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avk
I loved reading this in Do More Faster but I preferred the original chapter
title: "Usage is like oxygen for ideas." If you enjoyed this post, the book is
full of similar goodness. This was the best though :) Nice job, photomatt!

