

Knowing When Your Baby is Ugly - markbao
http://waynechang.com/2011/03/21/knowing-when-your-baby-is-ugly/

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ChuckMcM
Wow, I read it twice. Things I thought about when reading that page:

1) The OP hasn't a clue about market research. There is scale, there is
volume, and there is price.

2) Anytime there is a massive lack of standards, there is a huge complexity
play. This was a surprise?

3) Two pivots that were not mentioned, really high end home theater setups,
and custom remote construction framework.

4) Vision limited by an individual's capabilities. Its good to know what you
can and cannot pull off but its important to be able to see a bigger picture
so that if you could find someone who could do 'x' (missing piece) it would be
a better play.

I wonder sometimes about the urge to move to a bigger thing than the current
thing. The post on Entreporn touched on this as well.

Oh and I got to see a spam comment in HN comments, that was interesting.

~~~
ttol
Chuck, thanks for the comments. At the time I was enthralled by the
possibilities of the iPad and wanted to hack together something that was both
useful for me and others. I intended it as a side project (instead of a full
blown startup).

I don't regret doing it and I'm happy that I spent that month exploring (and
brushing up on my Delphi skills!). I'm thinking about open sourcing the
project but would need to clean it up some. It's all spaghetti right now.

Oh, and would love to get your feedback on my next project :-)

(And yea, that spam thing at the bottom is kinda lame)

~~~
TimJYoung
Here's a point for doing most of it in Delphi. :-)

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ttol
_phew_ I thought I was going to get flamed for using Delphi!

~~~
dools
No, to get flamed on HN you would have had to use PHP :)

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olegious
I was hoping this was about ugly babies...

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dasil003
That's pretty much an unsolvable problem.

If you tell someone their baby is ugly, not only do they don't believe it but
they also hate you. You could anonymize it, but you're just back to even
because they still won't believe you.

~~~
danssig
And to be fair, what would they do about it anyway? Trade it in?

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fookyong
Sounds like the OP is just chasing after a lottery-ticket style product that
is an instant success AND cheap to maintain AND manages to hold his interest
for longer than a week.

Starting lots of different projects is just one tactic for possible, eventual
success. Putting time, effort and a little patience into one project that you
really believe in is another. Nothing is guaranteed.

~~~
ttol
I chase high-impact projects. They don't need to be lottery-style, but they do
need to have degrees of widespread use. In this case, the market was
premature. No matter how much "time, effort, and little patience" wasn't going
to change the world overnight to use smart TV's! (Otherwise I would have stuck
with it :)

~~~
fookyong
"No matter how much "time, effort, and little patience" wasn't going to change
the world overnight to use smart TV's!"

I think my point was that not everything needs to happen "overnight".

~~~
wisty
I guess he couldn't charge people money and then not support their system.

There have been a lot of attempts to consolidate the remote market. Woz tried.
iRiver made an iPod mini competitor with an embedded remote. Then there's
AppleTV.

It would take a lot of time to get everything consolidated. And when you are
finally making a bit of money, the industry will consolidate itself and your
competitors will just target the new, consolidated standard.

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haberman
> Of course, the control interface itself had to be gorgeous to fit with
> Apple’s design ideology. The client I ended up with, as you can see above,
> used beautiful 3D effects, reflections, and animations to display the media
> options (watch the video). I didn’t get a chance to optimize for speed so
> the touch response is a little slow.

And this is how software comes to be that drives me absolutely nuts with its
slow UI.

Every time I've had to use a UI that is whooshing things about in a slow and
laggy way, a little part of me dies.

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taitems
Like the article's first comment, I too abandoned a project I was very
passionate about simply because an API was lacking. I attempted something
similar with a HTTP interface remote application for VLC. I had it working to
a "good enough" degree, but the lack of access to things as basic as album art
via the API were incredibly frustrating.

Was ditching the project lazy on my part? Most definitely. Did I have the
skill set to get work around the shortcomings? Probably not, and that's what
it boiled down to. My baby was ugly, and I wasn't capable of fixing it.

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6ren
There's a distinction between what you have right now, and the _vision_ :

\- ugly baby _product_ : don't worry, keep improving it

\- ugly baby _project_ : give up (if it won't meet your needs); or pivot or
something

For me, I've realized I don't need a huge market or revolutionary technology.
Just enough to live on, doing work that makes a difference, is enough for me
(though I like to leave the upside uncovered). Ugliness is in the eye of the
beholder.

Note: AppleTV itself is not a huge success for Apple, but Jobs keeps on with
it, because he envisions that it can be (and the luxury of resources). Ugly
duckling?

BTW: Woz also had a _universal remote_ project, and it also had business (as
opposed to technical) problems.

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reedsturtevant
it really is difficult for builder/hackers to handle the paradox, to be
tenacious yet realistic, because we love _all_ our children

