
Lead Bullets - aaronbrethorst
http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/25/lead-bullets/
======
InclinedPlane
Famed chef Gordon Ramsay has a show called "Kitchen Nightmares" where he
rescues restaurants that are in trouble. There's a fair share of drama and
spectacle in every episode but much of what he does is apply the same
fundamental changes to every restaurant. And it's not silver bullets, it's
just sound execution of basic, common sense practices. Keep the menu simple,
make stuff fresh, keep the kitchen clean, keep service timely, keep spending
under control, etc.

If you have a product that has traction in the market it's not necessary to
try for silver bullet features. It's only necessary to get your ducks in a row
and execute well. Execution tends to be multiplicative along every aspect. If
you can deliver solid features AND solid usability AND solid performance AND
solid reliability AND solid customer service then there's no reason why you
shouldn't do well.

Ultimately I think the search for silver bullets comes out of a sense of
denial. People like to think that the reason their restaurant is doing poorly
is some external problem they have no control over, rather than because they.
Don't clean their kitchen and their food is bland.

~~~
jamesaguilar
The same phenomenon occurs in online games like Starcraft. People in the lower
leagues of Starcraft constantly go to message boards like the TeamLiquid
forums and ask for advice on strategy, critiques of replays, etc. But in 99%
of cases, basic fundamentals like always making workers, constantly producing
out of existing production buildings before making new ones, and not becoming
supply-blocked (a form of production bottleneck) are the real problem. But
they have the same sort of denial you are referring to where they want to
believe that if they just _knew_ something that they don't know, they could
win.

It's actually kind of sad that these biases towards easy thoughts exist,
because often the fundamentals are more accessible than the silver bullet is
to any given practitioner. In other words, almost anyone can execute on
fundamentals with practice, but the grand silver bullet strategies are often
beyond the capabilities of a typical person.

~~~
robryan
I think thats a case of perceiving the basics to be to hard to properly
execute on. Maxing out build orders in multiple buildings in multiple
locations while optimally planning for expansion and getting the right balance
of things being built is hard. I guess how this applies is that people want a
short cut so they don't have to be the best they can be at the fundamentals.

~~~
sliverstorm
I'm rather of the opinion they simply do not realize how important the
fundamentals are. Fundamentals are not glamorous and easy to miss for the
untrained eye, so when your enemy comes knocking with twice as many troops you
are inclined to think they must be doing something special.

~~~
gchpaco
Starcraft actually makes the fundamentals deliberately difficult, note, which
is one of the reasons it is so competitive but also one of the reasons it has
such a steep learning curve. If you're a Zerg in SC2 you must program yourself
every thirty seconds to go around to every hatch and inject larvae, every
time, even in the middle of microing a battle. This is hard to do for most
humans and even for professional gamers, and is one of the (many) things that
drives me absolutely bats about SC2.

The thing that infuriates me about that particular example is it would take
thirty seconds for someone at Blizzard to make that ability autocastable. But
the analogous macro capabilities (Terran mules, Protoss chronoboost) are not
so easily automated, and so everybody has to have this stupid timer in their
heads. I like the Company of Heroes/Dawn of War 2 model better, where you can
set something on "overwatch" which means the moment you have the resources, it
will start building it. Not everything in DOW2 is overwatchable but a
significant amount of the niggling details like troop reinforcement is, and it
can really simplify things like "I want a Chimera ASAP". Even in DOW2 it isn't
always appropriate--overwatch reinforcement can bleed resources you are
banking to some higher tier unit dry--but it's nice to have the option.

~~~
sliverstorm
I personally agree, but I suspect if Blizzard allowed enough of that sort of
thing the nature of the game would become much more macro-focused, and what
makes the game unique and great appears to be a balance between micro and
macro.

------
dazbradbury
Comment pulled from techcrunch:

Chris Zaharias · Having worked in sales at Netscape for four years (1995-99) I
have to very respectfully disagree with Ben. Netscape did not recover from a
better, faster, free IIS by building a better web server (called Netscape
Enterprise Server, or NES). That helped to a small extent, but much more
important were a) competitive advantages in email servers, proxy servers and
directory servers; b) bundling of those solutions into a server suite
(SuiteSpot); c) effective management of inbound lead flow (kudos to Todd
Rulon-Miller & Bill Kellinger); and d) stellar, massive, but arguably long-
term damaging OEM sell-thru by Ram Shriram's team that allowed Netscape to
continue to grow overall server revenues.

Of those $400M server revenues, very little was NES, and as the graph at the
below link shows, NES was _always_ in decline relative competitors.

[http://www.securityspace.com/de/s_survey/data/man.200909/htt...](http://www.securityspace.com/de/s_survey/data/man.200909/httpbyip.html)?
mod=TmV0c2NhcGUtRW50ZXJwcmlzZQ%3D %3D

~~~
kb101
I recall working at a growing company that suddenly stopped blowing its
forecasts out of the water and sales began to tank (part of an overall market
downturn). C-level executives were slaughtered and we were soon treated to a
blustery, military-metaphor-laced "hardass" speech to rally the troops,
courtesy of the new VP who was keen to let us know that business was war and
we were in it to win it, etc. It was lead bullet time.

Fast forward some quarters later, after three rounds of layoffs, a refocusing
of the product line on the core brands, and a general slow rebound of the
market, and the company was back in the black... but: the blustery VP in
question had nothing to do with any of this and had been shown the door (with
a nice golden parachute).

Additionally, opportunities to take advantage of new market directions were
missed. The company's strategy was to bundle sales around the best-selling
products and continue incremental development around those. Ancillary, low-
selling products were cut. Which is all well and good, but the company is now
vulnerable to several new competitors who took advantage of new directions in
client demand that the VP of War Metaphors missed... and now the company is
finding itself making acquisitions of technology and (more importantly)
cultures that are completely foreign and incompatible. (Windows-centric old-
school company trying to absorb open-source Linux-based startups.) So far the
solution has been to leave the acquired companies relatively intact...
"synergy" is non-existent and culture clash is evident, with top brass from
the acquired startups fleeing as soon as their contracts permit.

Additionally, the company is now facing the looming threat of cloud services
and large-scale computing becoming cheaper and more commoditized.
Unfortunately, nothing is being done to innovate or reinvent where reinvention
is necessary; the current leadership does not perceive the threat (yet).
(Disclaimer: I no longer work there, so they may have some stealth project to
address this; but based on my contacts I doubt it.)

After reading the other recent HN post by the same author entitled "Nobody
Cares" and now this latest little bit of bullet-based sophistry, I must say
flatly that I do not find these observations helpful. First of all, the war
metaphor and language is distracting and obfuscates issues. But if we must
stick with this metaphor, there are times when what hulks in the door must be
brought down in a hail of lead, and times when the monster in the door is
wearing a bulletproof vest-- so you better hope you have a silver bullet and
the ability to accurately aim between the eyes.

What strikes me most about the subtext of the OP's commentary is how lonely
and unnecessarily self-limiting it is. I would not like to be running one of
his portfolio companies and be faced with a challenge. It seems the likely
response would be "you're on your own, nobody cares about your excuses, it's
lead bullet time, not silver bullet time" etc. In other words, get me my
return, I don't need to hear about anything else.

Real insight is knowing who cares and who doesn't, and maximizing your
connections to the former, disconnecting from the latter. Real understanding
of when to use lead and when to use silver and when not to fire bullets at all
is what guides a company through tough times, but more importantly, allows it
to seize opportunities for growth. Simply spouting "tough"-sounding platitudes
and militaristic mantras about winning wars does nothing to help, and is
distraction more than anything else.

~~~
Retric
His point is simply sometimes the issue is strategy and some times it's
execution. If you make a great MMO that people love but it's crashing all the
time then fix the bugs and you just might end up making money hand over fist.
If you make a solid but older MMO that people enjoy but the subscriber numbers
are incontinuous decline then you might want to pivot into free to play etc.

~~~
corford
All sound advice but surely everyone knows this already?? I guess I'm missing
the insightful part of this lead bullets mantra.

------
gamache
_“Yet our best trained, best educated, best equipped, best prepared troops
refuse to fight. As a matter of fact, it’s safe to say that they would rather
switch than fight.”—Public Enemy, Fight the Power_

Seriously? Public Enemy sampled it, they clearly didn't say it. Thomas N. Todd
did. <http://www.njcdlp.org/Thomas_N_Todd.html>

~~~
oconnor0
Do you have a transcript of Thomas N. Todd saying that so I can see some
context?

~~~
kreek
It's from the late 70s so you probably won't find a transcript online. The
speech was delivered at a Nation of Islam temple. See footnote #22 in the link
below.

[http://books.google.com/books?id=r_p_Q6TUrQoC&pg=PA261&#...</a>

------
mathattack
Interesting. Focus on the fundamentals and fight in your markets, rather than
chasing magic. I hear it a lot. "We should do an ASP", "We need to be a
services company" and "We should buy company X."

I wonder if the last point is why buyers tend to do worse than sellers in M&A.
Of course buyers chasing silver bullets probably helps HN readers on the
margin. :-)

------
dmk23
TLDR summary of the article:

"Confront reality and focus on execution of your product/sales plan to get
competitive. No pie-in-the-sky strategizing would save your bacon if you fail
to get stuff done."

------
larrys
"They did not want to hear that, but it made things clear: we had to build a
better product. There was no other way out. No window, no hole, no escape
hatch, no backdoor."

This is simply known as "not resting on your laurels".

Or as Andy Grove would say "Only the paranoid survive," ... "Business success
contains the seeds of its own destruction," ... "Success breeds complacency.
Complacency breeds failure."

(And all of the above also leads to missed opportunity.)

------
Geee
At least you have to be very careful where to shoot those lead bullets. You
can't just pull through with lots of work without having some fundamental idea
or vision of how to beat your competition. I think being lean is all about
looking those small silver bullets in everything you do. I'd hate it if
someone told me to stop looking for silver bullets.

------
numeromancer
On a related note, the Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers:
<http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html>.

------
russell
"No Silver Bullet", Fred Brooks,
[http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~cah/G51ISS/Documents/NoSilverBulle...](http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~cah/G51ISS/Documents/NoSilverBullet.html)

He did hold out hope that a bunch of silver bullets might do the trick. Read
the article. Most of them seem quite quaint. Nonetheless, Brooks's writings
saved me from a lot of self-inflicted grief.

------
ctdonath
Methinks this is the core of why Apple is so successful: they do everything
RIGHT. By not looking for shortcuts and silver bullets, they minimize things
going wrong.

~~~
mahyarm
They do many things that are consumer facing right, but there are somethings
that are developer facing that are just wrong. You don't know how much pain
and confusion iOS provisioning profiles and signing give to my coworkers and
myself initially. It's the majority of the questions I get asked about in
relation to iOS.

~~~
robterrell
That's off-topic, but this this is a pet peeve of mine, I'll bite. Have you
tried code signing Blackberry apps? Desktop apps, java apps? Shockwave xtras,
god forbid? Apple made something really complicated & poorly documented into
something that was only moderately difficult and mostly automated, and with
Xcode 4 it's possible to know basically nothing about it and develop apps on
your own devices, so I'd say Apple did it pretty well.

~~~
mahyarm
Just because it's horrible everywhere and apple is 'less horrible' is still no
excuse. It still can be done much better, the developer shouldn't have to do a
quarter of the error prone BS with provisioning. Provisioning is very fragile
in general and is also a cause of automated build breakages here when it
really should never be.

Provisioning is also required 100% of the time to run unsigned apps in iOS.
Many of those devices you mentioned let you run unsigned apps after a warning
prompt, or at least on a developer device. This can avoid a lot of BS during
development.

I've haven't worked with android, but from the lack of complaining by my
android working coworkers, I'm guessing that it's much better or non existant
on android, apple's main competition.

------
liamk
Techcrunch looks terrible on my iPad. Divs on top of content and text that
goes blurry when I use the iPad's zoom function.

~~~
cellis
Is this the best you can do to add to the discussion?

