
To create a new category, name a new game - andyraskin
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/create-new-category-name-game-andy-raskin
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mysterydip
I wish this was easier to do as an employee: you see the writing on the wall,
they pay you to be an expert in a field, but no one listens to your "we should
be moving in this direction". You're met with one of my most annoying phrases:
"this is how we've always done it."

The opportunity passes by, now your company is playing catch-up and managers
above you are asking how they missed it. If you say "I told you so," you get a
reprimand instead of acknowledgement.

~~~
throwaway13337
It really depends on the direction.

A lot of times, devs want to move in a new direction of whatever the hip tech
stack is this year. This would help their career by adding the tech to their
resume but the business benefit is almost always net negative.

Rather than arguing with a developer, they might just give a response that is
outside of the developers' domain. The real reason is that it was a bad idea
for the business.

~~~
mysterydip
That's a fair point. The perspective of developers is different from that of a
manager with perhaps a longer term view or other knowledge than the people in
the trenches.

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Animats
He writes "goodbye, ownership, hello usership" like that's a good thing.
That's the business experience of outsourcing a service. You don't own that
part of the business any more. You're just a user of some service that doesn't
want to be bothered with your problems.

~~~
TAForObvReasons
For what it's worth, a large portion of the HN community is involved with SaaS
business. SaaS epitomizes that concept

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pbhjpbhj
>Because once someone buys into your new game, it becomes their orthodoxy.
They become fiercely loyal to it as an organizing principle for how they act
in the world.

>Until someone shows up with another story about an even newer game. That’s
inevitable, of course, but hopefully it doesn’t happen until you’ve gotten
very successful helping customers win at what will suddenly become an old
game.

All seems a bit postmodern (post-truth I think it's the current rendition of
that) ... I'm more interested in what's objectively better.

This sounds more like "we got well marketed to, drank the coolaid and now
don't want to change (because we'd lose face, demonstrating our susceptibility
to being conned ... which seems to me like the big problem in UK [and USA]
politics at present).

~~~
austhrow743
Once you've created your objectively better thing you still have to go out and
sell it. This is about how to do that.

~~~
solarmist
Plus objectively better usually doesn't mean across the board. It's only
objectively better in some particular aspect.

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_bxg1
I'm sorry, but I find this post insufferable. It just reeks of corporate
buzzwording with a dash of disingenuous manipulation.

Also, unrelated: I hate those "conversational" customer service bubbles. I
don't know what I expect to happen when I click them, but I know that
"Jennifer H", whose picture is shown next to it, is not sitting at a keyboard
eagerly awaiting my questions. Maybe I expect a chatbot, maybe I expect
outsourced customer-service-farms, but I don't click buttons when I don't know
what they really do, especially when I know they're avoiding being up-front
about it.

~~~
dang
I hate buzzwordy articles (and chatbox popups) too, but this article is better
than usual and I think the point is a good one. There are situations in which
you can't win at the old game, but if you reframe what you're doing as a new
game, you can turn yourself into an early defining player instead of a hapless
latecomer.

We see this in technical domains too. For example, I think Clojure succeeded
this way. (We can argue about how much Clojure has succeeded, but it's a
Lisp—we have to grade on a curve.) I don't think any attempt at improving on
Common Lisp, no matter how technically solid, could have achieved that without
"naming a new game", to use the article's vocabulary. Hot newness dominates
improved oldness: every element of the set of hot newness beats every element
of the set of improved oldness. Elixir/Erlang is another example. I say this
article is one of the rarest things, a piece of marketing literature (like
Crossing the Chasm and maybe the Innovator's Dilemma) that is useful to
engineers.

~~~
_bxg1
It came across to me as "Just use this one weird trick and you can convince
people of _anything_!" The runner example in particular seemed to emphasize
the convincing over the content. I suppose it's possible to use the same
technique benevolently, but the article didn't seem concerned with that
question.

~~~
brlewis
Engineers' emphasis on content over convincing is why we often fail to
persuade. I think dang is right that this is a piece of marketing literature
that's useful to engineers.

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abrichr
> _“If AI can diagnose cancer better than doctors, why can’t AI understand
> [sales] reality better than a salesperson?”_

[citation needed]

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fenwick67
Classic con-man tactic. "This is the NEW thing, it's a game-changer, you can
get in on the ground floor"

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bathtub365
“Goodbye, ownership. Hello, usership” is a great tagline for the insane, rent-
seeking business models that are en vogue in Silicon Valley.

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tantalor
This is probably better well known as a "paradigm shift".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift)

~~~
ska
I think paradigm shift, at least when accurately used, runs much deeper than
this.

~~~
tantalor
Maybe you need to completely reevaluate what you think a paradigm shift really
is? Could be you've been thinking about it wrong the whole time.

~~~
ska
Perhaps, but evidence doesn't seem to point that way :) I agree it's not an
easy bright line distinction, but it's the sort of term that dilution makes
far less useful.

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sushisource
It makes for a good setup for the piece, but the whole "do or don't carboload
before endurance racing" is still very much a subject of debate.

~~~
thepete2
His point is "train your body to burn fat instead of carboloading". I don't
get it, why not do both?

~~~
runamok
Yeap basically you should do your long runs slowly and more or less fasted. It
sucks and sometimes you crash but it helps train you to burn fat more
efficiently. You still want to carbo load before your long (20+) race...

