
Go That Way, Really Fast - bdfh42
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/09/go-that-way-really-fast.html
======
bldg46
The first meetings about Chrome were held in 2006.

The entire project is based on Apple's WebKit, which was a cross-platform,
arguably best-of-breed browser toolkit on the day they started.

Lars Bak, the architect of V8, has been working on language technologies since
the early 90s, including Smalltalk.

A key Chrome team member, Ben Goodger, had already been working on browsers
since the Netscape era, and was an early participant in Firefox.

There really are no miracles in software. People used to talk about "Netscape
time" or marvel at how Google seemed to come out of nowhere. But even in those
cases you can see how prior to those projects becoming household words, they
had a long gestation period, during which time they were protected from
competition. Netscape included a lot of people from the earlier NCSA Mosaic
effort. Google was an academic project that, as an economic entity, grew up in
the sheltering shadow of Yahoo.

I'm not saying these people didn't work hard, or aren't brilliant, or don't
deserve their success. It's just that whenever you see someone moving much
faster than is normally considered possible, don't assume that it's _only_ due
to skill. It's far more likely that they had some history of working on the
problem, for far longer than you think.

~~~
inscitekjeff
How do I upvote this comment 5 more times? :)

~~~
dctoedt
Only if HN were to give members a fixed number of upvotes per original posting
-- or per day, hour, week, etc. -- and let the members dispense those upvotes
as they see fit. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulative_voting#Use>.

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alextgordon
_Google went from nothing, no web browser at all, to best-of-breed in under
two years_

That's obviously wrong. The Chrome beta was over two years ago, and you can
bet V8 didn't just appear overnight. Chrome is older than its 1.0. Not to
mention that it's based on WebKit, which has been in development for a decade
(if you start from KHTML).

~~~
statictype
Why not also throw in libc as well and say it's been over multiple decades?

~~~
alextgordon
Yes, why not. My point is that Chrome has no clear cut "starting date". It's
the culmination of multiple teams over multiple time periods.

To compare its progress with IE's over the last two years is a little
dishonest, as many of the things that IE is doing _now_ were implemented in
WebKit before Chrome's release. It's essentially writing off a huge stretch of
time in Chrome's code's history.

~~~
Herring
Microsoft is also quite welcome to use webkit. In fact most everyone would be
much happier if they did.

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derefr
> Yes, Apple has indisputably better taste -- and an impeccably controlled
> experience. But at their current rate of progress, they'll be playing second
> or third fiddle to Google in the mobile space inside a few years. It's
> inevitable.

I'm not sure whether the second sentence is supposed to actually contradict
the first here, or if it's just a separate, orthogonal assertion (perhaps
about technical quality or features)—but if Atwood is really trying to imply
that you can iterate toward "tastefulness", that's simply ignorant.

There is a reason that the term "design" exists as a separate and unique idea
from "implementation." By looking at your entire problem space top-down, you
can see the "shape" of the space, and so head straight toward the _global_
minima. Plopping down in one place and running really fast will just get you
to the top of the nearest hill, not the tallest mountain. Google is great at
hill-climbing, but I've never seen them start on a hill, realize they were
stuck, climb down, and find a mountain. (Instead, Google's successful projects
either _start_ at the base of the tallest mountain—Pagerank, Gmail, Chrome,
etc.—or are acquired from someone else who has already done the design stage
for them—Maps, Groups, etc. It doesn't seem like Android is in either of these
categories.)

~~~
rimantas
I am not even sure what the second sentence means. Google no longer produces
phones. Was it about OS? Then how do you compare order of the fiddles? By
market share? Makes little sense. By revenue? Makes no sense in this case. By
customer satisfaction? iOS progress it tightly coupled with hardware: iPhones,
iPad, iPod touch. Android progress is handicapped by carriers — how do they
push updates to handsets.

------
brown9-2
Is Jeff actually using the version numbers of Chrome as evidence of how fast
they move?

They release often yes but the Chrome team recently announced they'll be
bumping the major version number for _every_ release now. The version number
isn't that significant, its arbitrary.

~~~
ergo98
It seems that they're racing to get to 9 for "version parity" with Internet
Explorer.

And really, as you mentioned the whole version number is utterly meaningless.
In contrast some open source projects have evolved and changed incredibly over
many years and still sit at a sub-1.0 version number. Anyone who would call
that slow would be adding superficial analysis noise.

~~~
edanm
That may be true. But this is a good example of something that means one thing
to programmers, and another to customers. _We_ know version numbers are
meaningless, but I'm guessing most people would put down software version 0.3,
because it doesn't sound good. Come to think of it, I would also prefer a
version 10 over a version 0.6, even if consciously it makes no sense.

Just another reason webapps are better. No version numbers to keep track of!
:)

~~~
tl
As another example, Minecraft (recently mentioned on HN) is currently on
version 1.1.0 despite still being in its Alpha.

------
pclark
The problem with this attitude:

> _So if something gets in our way while doing that, well, we're not gonna
> fight you._ We'll just turn. And keep going forward, really fast. Which is
> why those clones better move quick if they want to keep up with.

Is that you can gloss over really valuable opportunities because you perceive
them as being hard.

Startups get so hung up on releasing features ("we deploy thrice a day!!") for
the sake of features, that they forget to ask if they're valuable (and to
whom.)

Going for "low hanging fruit" of features works insanely well, but I think
eventually you need to stretch your arms else you'll start using the wrong
metrics for your company (eg: version numbers as opposed to engagement.)

I see startups all the time not want to compete with better funded / larger
companies / better branded companies and shift to do something else, for
reasons that can only be explained as lack of confidence / fear of failing at
it. a) product markets are rarely winner takes all (Stack Exchange platform is
not a winner take all service), b) winners don't win forever (eg: eBay?), c)
if someone is that entrenched and you're terrified of attacking them - no one
else will dare, so they won't expect it.

Failing (iterating) fast is a great attitude, but only when you change for the
right reason. My concern with always changing away from barriers is that
eventually you end up with a really dumb proposition, and when you question
why it's because you iterated so fast without stopping and thinking "is this
good?"

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brisance
It's OK to iterate fast if there are few/no dependencies on the platform and
the cost of upgrading is low. e.g. the high-end 3D gaming market is
essentially dead as a business because consumers eventually got wiser about
today's top-of-the-line 3D card becoming commodity chips 6 months down the
road.

------
edw519
Misleading abridged title.

The second sentence of the original advice was, "If something gets in your
way, turn." Removing it from the title turns good advice into wrong advice.

Something will _always_ get in your way, no matter how fast you go. So the
faster you go the more important Sentence 2 becomes.

Like your race car, when your business doesn't have a steering wheel, things
can't turn out well.

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jollojou
Even though Atwood refers to version numbers as (false) indicators of
progress, he has an important point: the earlier you release, the sooner
you'll be able to make crucial corrections.

If your product managers are clairvoyant you do not need short release cycles.
The PMs just tell the developers what kind of features the market will value
in, say, three years. The development team is then able to concentrate on
building a feature-rich and consistent product without the pressure of
producing something quickly and then testing it on the market.

In any other case, you probably benefit from releasing several major versions
within a couple of years.

------
robgough
Seems like decent enough advice, but I can't help feel that there are going to
be plenty of examples of when this fails. Anyone got any?

~~~
erikstarck
boo.com.

(Edit: for those too young to remember:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boo.com>)

~~~
yesbabyyes
I don't remember exactly how Boo.com went up and down, but wasn't the site
extremely delayed? Atwood seems to talk about release early, release often (go
fast, turn) and Boo.com, in my memory, did just the opposite.

~~~
erikstarck
That depends on what you mean by "delayed". :)

They built the site in an incredibly short time span but they got started too
late and it had way too many features to cram in to such a short development
time of course leading to plenty of bugs at release time.

The entire company didn't exist for much longer than a year so they almost
didn't even have time to be delayed before they were gone. :)

From Wikipedia: "Boo.com's Swedish founders famously spent their way through
£125 million ($188 million) in just six months."

Aaah, 1999. Those were the days. :)

------
ergo98
The whole post went off track, and fast, when Jeff had to trollishly add in
the Android bit near the end--

"The Google Android project is another example. Android _doesn't have to be
better_ than the iPhone (and _it most definitely isn't_ ; it's been _mediocre
at best_ until recent versions). They just need to be faster at improving.
Google is pushing out Froyos and Gingerbreads and Honeycombs with incredible,
breakneck speed. Yes, _Apple has indisputably better taste_ \-- and _an
impeccably controlled experience_."

Jeff's judgment on Android versus iPhone is utterly and absolutely irrelevant,
and strongly diminishes his post.

Of course the entire post was utterly vacuous (really, top of HN? "Evolve" is
now a comment of such insight that it teaches HN something?), so the Android
troll was just par for the course.

