
Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive - deapu
http://deap.co/2016/01/29/how-bad-products-survive/
======
ChuckMcM
This is a really, really, important point. How many times have you gotten an
app or a tool, used it a few times, and then not ever used it again? If you
are an early adopter type you probably have many times. Whether it is todo
lists or pizza delivery, if you don't do it enough to ingrain the habit it
doesn't stick. And once your head is filled with the cognitive load of day to
day stuff you revert to your habits (which are not 'the new thing').

My favorite example is for this is Evernote, which I know a lot of people
tried and never got anywhere with. If you don't have the habit of just
sticking stuff in Evernote, stuff won't be there when you are looking for it,
and your habit of using it will never develop because there is no "reward" for
using it. And few people have the stamina to force themselves to use something
long enough for the habit to kick in.

That is why businesses, apps, and others need to have some mechanism that
helps remind you for at least a month to repeatedly use the product, in order
to train your subconscious in its availability. And it is why customer
acquisition is so hard.

~~~
WA
For me, this is Twitter. I'm mostly a reader. Writing tweets was incredibly
unsatisfying so far and I never got into any kind of habit with it.

Sometimes, I have the urge to simply get some random thoughts out of my brain.
Sounds like a perfect thing for Twitter, except with Twitter, I have the
expectation that my stuff somehow gets noticed.

So instead, I use JOURNAL.TXT for that. I write the thought down, it's out of
the system and the urge fades. And there's clearly no expectation for my
thoughts to go anywhere. It's written for an audience of one.

~~~
zer0th
Some years ago I came up with a system which I still use extensively. I added
these lines to my .bashrc file:

    
    
      log(){
      pushd ~/logs;
      echo >> $*;
      date >> $*;
      cat >> $*;
      } 
    

So whenever I have a piece of information that I'd like to keep - a thought on
a project, a word from a foreign language I am learning, ideas for christmas
gifts, some bash-fu and so on... - I fire up a terminal (mod+return, in my
case) and enter

    
    
      log filename
    

Now I can type down that piece of information right away. File names could be
"english" (for vocab) or "xmas" (for gifts) or the name of a project. So
either the file already exists and I thus add to it or a new file is created
instantly.

It is super quick and non-distracting (i.e. I don't 'accidentally' get carried
away by looking at previous thoughts or tweaking the config of a journal
application etc.) What's more I find it very convenient that the function
automatically adds the current date to each entry.

Btw, I've got another function called "show" which I can call whenever I feel
like just briefly skimming through a file

    
    
      show(){
      cat ~/logs/$*;
      }
    

For my daily todo list I enjoy abusing markdown syntax. I do this because
syntax highlighting makes it easier to quickly scan through the files. (I use
gedit with the monokai theme)

So at the beginning the list looks something likes this:

Task 1

Task 2

<!-- some details on task 2 -->

Task3

Task4

<!-- some details on task 4 -->

(comments turn gray so that actual tasks stand out)

Whenever I begin a task I place a "-" in front of its line. Now I see this red
minus and thus know that I have started a task that needs to be completed.
When I've finished the task I replace the - with a # and now the whole line
turns blue. I've line numbers enabled in gedit so when I want to change the
status of an item I simply hit ctrl+i and enter the corresponding line number.
Some tasks occur daily, at least for a while. In that case I revisit a task's
line again at the end of the day and remove the "#". Similarly, when I want to
delete an unnecessary task I go to its line and hit ctrl+d and thus delete it.
It is super primitive but I like it. ;)

~~~
melvinmt
> So either the file already exists and I thus add to it or a new file is
> created instantly.

If you want the same thing but want to do it in an app instead of manually in
the terminal you should check out Notational Velocity
([http://notational.net](http://notational.net)).

~~~
tiatia
Looks interesting.

But only MacOS? No Linux?

Encrypted database? I once tried a password keeper. I think it was called
xpassword or something like that. After having a corrupted database twice
within days, I pass.

I you want privacy your HDD should be encrypted anyway.

~~~
ikurei
nvpy is a functional but admitedly very ugly linux clone. Both can use
Simplenote, which works similarly if you're fine with a webapp.

For the windows crowd there is the also ugly-but-functional ResophNotes.

------
cpncrunch
I think perhaps the writer is using some cognitive dissonance to unfairly
dismiss the market leaders as being "shitty". Any time I have used OpenTable
(as a user) it has been a really great experience. It does exactly what you
expect it to do, and it's always a very smooth experience.

OpenTable has been around since 1998, so I imagine they are the market leader
because they were the first to market and their product works well. You can
never please everyone, but just because a product doesn't have your pet
feature doesn't mean it is "shitty".

~~~
vitd
My experiences with it are that it is extremely shitty. I often go to it to
see if there are any tables at my desired time, and if there are, I manually
call the place and book the reservation directly. Whenever I go to it, it
tries to push a bunch of unrelated crap to me. No, I don't want to get daily
emails about this restaurant I'm eating at once while on vacation. (Does
anyone want that?) The UI is horrible and confusing. I avoid it if possible,
and only grudgingly use it when I don't have another choice (near wifi, but no
cell signal, for example).

~~~
cpncrunch
>No, I don't want to get daily emails about this restaurant I'm eating at once
while on vacation

I'm a spam nazi...if anyone spams me, I'll remember. I see I still have the
opentable@mydomain.com active, which means they haven't spammed me yet.

I just had another look at their site, and I don't see any UI issues myself.
You find the restaurant, choose date, and it shows you the times available.
You then just confirm the details and click COMPLETE RESERVATION. Nothing too
skanky about that. There are boxes you can tick in the confirmation page to
subscribe to updates, but they are unticked by default (at least in Canada,
where it is now illegal to sign people up automatically).

------
mentos
Imagine facebook is a spherical magnet with ten thousand small lead balls
clung to it. If you're trying to create a better magnet it can't just be the
same as facebook's. Putting the same magnet near facebook's will only collect
a small handful of peripheral users. If you want to capture the critical mass
you have to energize a magnet with an attractive force so great that it will
begin to vibrate users close to the facebook core and attract them through the
empty space between to you.

~~~
zepolen
I found a better analogy to be a fire.

Think of products/startups as fires, they start small, can't use large logs
straight away, need constant attention, you could use a lot of petrol
(financing) to get it started faster, but it could also just fizzle out
immediately if the large logs don't catch fire as well.

Once they get going, you don't have to watch it so closely, you can just add a
log here and there, maybe remove some ash.

The goal of the fire is to get people to gather around it. The warmth in this
case matters a lot, but also the people gathering around the fire.

In fact some people might pick another fire because it has people who are
interested in the same things as them.

Sometimes a fire gathers TOO many people, and it gets crowded. The maker of
the fire didn't make sure it grew large enought to provide warmth to many
people - and so people on the outside get cold and go to another fire.

Most of the time though, if someone is by a fire that provides enough warmth
for him and he likes the people around it, there is little compelling reason
to go to another one.

~~~
obelisk_
I am generally not a fan of analogies but I think yours is a good one.

------
dahart
I've just learned this lesson the hard way. I had my own terminology for it,
so it's helpful and educational to learn words and phrases that others will
understand and use.

But absolutely, I'm exactly the type of person the article is talking about, I
have experience and an amazing team, and our "improvements" have more or less
failed spectacularly. We learned that design ideas that are "better" than the
status quo often confuse and alienate customers, because they're already used
to something, and everyone else does it that way. A de facto standard is a
powerful force, and shouldn't be ignored or shunned.

I have to do _something_ different! so I'm thinking the solution is to do only
one "improvement" differently at a time, and to do it very slowly and
deliberately, and with a lot of two-way communication along the way. That's a
theory, who has evidence for or against?

~~~
skewart
Without knowing anything about your product or market it's really hard to say,
but my gut reaction is to be skeptical that the incremental improvement
strategy would work out better.

Is there anything other than a "better" design that differentiates your
product? Or, if not, can you acquire your customers differently, at a point
where they aren't already habituated to doing things the bad old way?

Ultimately I would say your best bet is to get back to basics and spend a ton
of time listening to customers and watching them use your product, and your
competitors' products. You might have changed the wrong things about the
design? Or maybe there's some other pain point they actually have, but no one
even thinks it's possible to do things differently because they're so used to
the status quo.

I would also be very mindful of incentives of various people, including both
the users and the purchasers. Users in workplaces don't necessarily want
something that is faster or more efficient to use (in a business setting they
might have job secuirty, pay, andceven self-worth tied to knowing how to use a
very complicated system). Buyers who aren't users very often buy based on
specs more than design or ease of use (easier to rationally explain decision
to higher ups). Consumers often buy/engage for how things make them feel, or
for satisfying one of a few very basic desires (which they might not want to
admit).

Not sure how applicable, or new, this is go you. These are just thoughts that
come to mind.

------
thetruthseeker1
It reminds me of the GoT dialogue " Chaos is a ladder, my friend" : What I
mean is the products that are 'shitty' and are thriving is because probably
each one of them were created to solve a problem where absolutely nothing like
that product existed before and the original product founders were sharp
enough to notice a market and business opportunity. This shitty product was so
good when it came out, it changed the way ppl did business and led to its mass
adoption with little marketing. The other better products that came later on,
however usable they are, are probably providing marginal ( as per the product
users) value over the previous product hence lower adoption rate and requires
huge marketing $. That is why if you notice a new market/business opportunity
it is most lucrative path.

------
shekyboy
This is a great article. So true at all the levels.

Look at any mid to large scale company and their internal ticketing systems,
HR systems, travel booking systems, time tracking systems.

The last company I worked for, did not upgrade the employee laptop OS from
Windows XP for over 10 years as their legacy ticketing system wasnt supported
on the newer versions. Obviously this was a cost issue of the new ticketing
platform but also the unknown cost of retraining the whole company.
Additionally people and organizations get comfortable with the "evil you
know".

Frankly as a new entrepreneur this is also incredibly hard to test in the
market. Most early customer development will give you signals that they want
it, but won't act when it comes time to switch.

This is why you see SaaS services succeeding by cracking few employees or
small teams at a time. Think of Yammer, Slack etc.

They don't need the whole company or department to change. Just few employees
or the team can use it and slowly infect the rest of the company. That would
be the only way to overcome this problem (although not all products can do
this).

------
emodendroket
MS Office, which to this day has features its competitors don't, isn't really
a great example.

~~~
occamrazor
Indeed MS Office can be a pain the neck, but I haven't found a better product
in the same market category (i.e. desktop WYSIWYG office suites)

~~~
dreamcompiler
That's not because MS Office is great. It's because it's really capital-
intensive to build an office suite, and no VC is going to fund you to compete
with MS.

~~~
emodendroket
There are competitors today and there were others in the past.

------
hcrisp
_" Broken gets fixed; crappy lasts forever_"
[http://dandreamsofcoding.com/2013/05/06/broke-gets-fixed-
cra...](http://dandreamsofcoding.com/2013/05/06/broke-gets-fixed-crappy-is-
forever/)

------
hawleyal
Designers often describe the terms convention and intuition as contributing to
good user experience. Convention is the "institutional knowledge" described in
the article. Intuition is how easy something is to use without prior
experience or convention. For instance, a car steering wheel is not intuitive
but is rather conventional. If you make a car without a steering wheel, it may
be better, but it won't be as popular.

Regardless, I don't think the article accurately represents other forces in
adoption and popularity outside of convention and intuition. There are many
things such as chance, social trends, commercial backing, et al.

~~~
Outdoorsman
Ctrl F quickly revealed that you're the first poster to mention "convention"
("institutional knowledge" decoded) and emphasize its importance...

By definition, half the human population is below average in intelligence
(half above)...average people typically go with the flow...the above average
often question the flow...the gifted are constantly aware of the flow, but are
often complacent if they're not in a position to force-feed change...

Resistance to change is a powerful force, especially when your business
(owner), or job (employee) may be at stake in the form of risk-taking that
will lead to uncertain outcomes...

------
blcArmadillo
Perhaps a litte off topic but does anyone here hate open table, if so can you
share why? I've always found making a reservation a very plesant experience.
To see all the availble times and make a reservation only takes a couple
clicks.

~~~
zzalpha
The article is from the point of view of the restaurant, claiming the backend
tooling sucks, which wouldn't surprise me. Optimizing the front end consumer
experience while neglecting the back office is not uncommon.

~~~
blcArmadillo
Ok, this makes sense now. I read "restaurant customers" as the customers of
the restaurant (i.e. people wanting to reserve a table) not the restaurants
themselves. Makes sense now. Thanks.

------
anjc
This article seems a little tech-centric. Products don't tend to flourish
based purely on technical merit, and there could be many reasons why that
product has thrived other than network effects, e.g. aggressive pricing
strategies, good sales team, good marketing, brand awareness from customers,
switching costs for the restaurant, the health of the food service industry,
or perhaps it doesn't bring in enough customers for it to be a priority for
restaurateurs, etc etc.

If shitty products tend to thrive it's probably more often due to industry
lifecycles, incumbent dominance, solidification of position via acquisitions
etc, and the difficulties of innovating in large organisations

------
Nutmog
Can you not just clone the shitty product so existing training is still
useful? Do software companies enforce copyrights on things like the location
of buttons and the names of menu items?

~~~
rwhitman
Patents are probably the most powerful tool for entrenched players here. Adobe
patented several GUI conventions including their most common shortcut key
commands in Photoshop, so that competitors would always have a slight learning
curve for new users.

Occasionally more aggressive companies will come after a cloned product with a
lawsuit, for instance Facebook sued a number of early competitors for various
intellectual property and trademark reasons. Doesn't hold up in court publicly
but I imagine there have been a lot of backroom settlements made this way over
the years.

------
empressplay
This article makes a good point. Any switch to a new product has to exceed the
cost / benefit ratio of the old one, and familiarity of staff in high turnover
industries certainly factors in to that CBR. So, you don't need to make a
product that's just "better" to compete in these industries, it needs to be
_spectacularly_ better in order to convince business owners to invest the time
in educating existing and new hires. An important point.

------
makecheck
Bad software survives because major investments by large organizations were
made in tools that had closed (and even platform-specific) file formats. At
the time, maybe no one fully understood the gravity of the investment they
were making. Since the _data_ is hard to interpret consistently, competition
is practically impossible.

Regulation of software is overdue. I can think of a few rules off the bat that
would make a huge difference in spurring the development of quality software:

1\. New software files such as documents must be stored in a format that can
be read without ambiguity by modern machines, adhering to all regulations.

2\. _Executable specifications_ for all interpretations of file formats must
be provided publicly, since broadly-available cross-platform execution
environments (e.g. Python) are now widely available. In other words, you're
not allowed to obfuscate what your file format does by publishing a 500 page
document to explain how a single spreadsheet row is interpreted; you must
instead provide, for example, a short Python script to illustrate the exact
behavior, that anyone on any system can inspect and run.

3\. Auditors must be able to correlate your software's interpretation of files
with your executable specifications. Any discrepancies require the software to
be updated, for as far back as issues have been found.

4\. Software is prohibited from re-saving any file in an older format that
does not adhere to regulated behavior. Users are not permitted to avoid this
type of auto-upgrade, any more than they are permitted to continue wiring
their houses with last century's electrical codes.

5\. Software may not depend on the behavior of machines or methods that are
impractical to obtain (e.g. "what Windows 95 used to do here"). If existing
formats have such restrictions, they must upgrade according to the step above.

~~~
rrrx3
I love the thrust of your argument, but I think we all know how pragmatically,
this will never happen any time soon. Could you imagine a "Bureau of Software
Fidelity" or somesuch? We can't even get the post office to deliver mail
regularly in some parts of the country, and that's been their primary function
for over 100 years.

------
davidw
Because 'economics'. Switching costs, network effects, etc...

Here's my favorite book on the subject:
[http://amzn.to/1JMtX0X](http://amzn.to/1JMtX0X)

And yes, that's an affiliate link:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10982630](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10982630)

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

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

~~~
aback
Also craigslist.org.

That site looks like 1995 called and wants its web page back. It's a triumph
of non-engineering.

But that network effect. Man oh man.

~~~
skyyler
What features would make craigslist better? I like it not in spite of its
bareness but because of it.

~~~
tmaly
I would add some minimal responsive css so its easier to click on the form
elements on a mobile phone

------
ziszis
Every new product needs to overcome the formula "product value >> adoption
cost".

You can simplify and call OpenTable shitty, but they met this threshold with
their customers. Their customer looked at their product and said, it's new and
different, but it is worth it.

If you can't displace an existing solution you haven't got it right.

If the value is significantly greater and it is only about UI familiarity
there are many ways around it. One way is to emulate the UI of the product you
are displacing. This famously happened in the Word vs. WordPerfect wars.

------
emmanueloga_
This resonates with me with regard to software projects.

Maybe the refactoring and/or innovation aversion I've seen in many software
projects has to do mostly with this institutional knowledge the article talks
about.

It doesn't matter how crappy a project is or how many defects the team agrees
a project has... introducing a different solution is seen as prohibitively
risky or costly, given the amount of time people has spent learning and
putting in place workarounds.

------
oxplot
Can anyone with startup experience talk about the effectiveness of the method
that Simon Sinek promotes [1] as a way to break through a market filled with
"shitty" products?

[1]:
[https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_insp...](https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action?language=en)

~~~
rgbrenner
What Simon says is actually marketing 101.. they teach this in undergrad intro
marketing (without all the bs about 'greatness', etc). The problem with it
when it comes to startups/small businesses, is that it's expensive. If you
want to go that route, you need to get out the entire message - A + B + C.
Whereas, the sales-based approach he's criticizing, you only need to get out C
and part of B.

So if you want to go the marketing route, you're going to be spending a lot
more on ads, pr, etc to get your entire message out there.

Despite what he says, Apple did not follow the path he says. Apple in its
early days followed the sales-based approach. It wasnt until they were making
money that they turned to a marketing-based approach. This is a very normal
route for companies to take.

[Edit: now that you understand this is marketing vs sales.. you can find
plenty of articles on this by pg, jessica livingston and others.]

~~~
oxplot
Are you sure about it being marketing 101 and not 901? I can clearly see 100%
of ads I've seen over the past month from established or younger companies
doing exactly what Simon is criticizing.

------
uremog
While yes, I do use OpenTable for places at which I am already an existing
customer, it's not that simple. I'm usually not willing to visit a restaurant
that I might not get into. OT is the most painless way to make the
reservation, and I far prefer this over calling. Without a restaurant being
accessible on OT, I would not be going there nearly as often.

------
petke
This goes equally well for all these new languages popping up. Even if it is
better at everything it does that is not enough. Legacy code and developer
community consists of huge amounts of institutional knowledge. Its asking a
lot of anyone to make the change.

I think about the only new languages that have a chance are domain specific
languages in a brand new domain.

------
tmaly
the book Hooked does a good job talking about what makes a product habit
forming. I almost think its all hindsight in the examples they use.

Positioning something in your mind is so difficult in this day and age with so
much information overload.

------
crimsonalucard
Also explains why shitty code thrives.

------
geori
MS Office (specifically Excel) is not a shitty product. There's a reason why
it has a larger monopoly with finance types Wall Street than Google does with
search. Power users can quickly build powerful financial models with it.

~~~
adrianN
Doing complex modelling in Excel is not a good idea. There is no way to do
proper software engineering, so bugs are common and hard to find. For
examples, see

[http://www.eusprig.org/horror-stories.htm](http://www.eusprig.org/horror-
stories.htm)

~~~
eterm
Except "proper software engineering" would mean whatever is being built simply
never gets built.

In many cases it's better to get somewhere quickly with excel then work out if
"proper software engineering" is required than never get off the ground
because engineering something is too difficult.

Think of excel like lego. Someone can quickly build something out of lego. Now
if someone tried to build a cathedral from lego, you might suggest that they
find an architect and do some proper house building, but without lego they
would never have tried.

And chances are they're not building a cathedral.

~~~
adrianN
Just like I wouldn't want to live in a house built from LEGO, I'm somewhat
wary of Excel models as the basis for investment strategies in major banks.
The problem with the quick and hacky solution is that it's never replaced,
because that would cost money, and the current solution "looks like it works".

~~~
iofj
However the excel solution has a lot of things going for it :

1) applications/reports built by the people designing and understanding the
underlying needs and inner workings of whatever they're offering. Whilst very
good programmers can match this (given enough - that's a lot - time), average
programmers won't even try.

2) excel sheets require nowhere near the manpower required for your
alternative. That factors into a cost-benefit analysis that may not favor real
development.

3) Speed of development. Markets change. Investments change. Sometimes
literally in minutes. Anything involving more than 1-2 people who are
intimately involved in the strategy itself cannot possibly keep up.

4) Excel is in fact a pure functional programming language [1]. Unless you
deeply understand excel I wouldn't be so quick to call it stupid. There are
entire classes of bugs that simply can't exist in excel spreadsheets that are
regularly found in programs.

[1] [http://ndc-london.com/talk/pure-functional-programming-in-
ex...](http://ndc-london.com/talk/pure-functional-programming-in-excel/)

These sheets are pretty good. You can really get nice app ideas from some of
them:
[http://www.exinfm.com/free_spreadsheets.html](http://www.exinfm.com/free_spreadsheets.html)

~~~
collyw
"excel sheets require nowhere near the manpower required for your alternative.
That factors into a cost-benefit analysis that may not favor real
development."

Not to build, but to maintain and constantly clean up the errors by using the
wrong tool for the job. I know form experience having wasted countless hours
because my organisation insisted on using it as a tool to upload data to our
database, and using it as the database before that.

~~~
nommm-nommm
The errors they invariably introduce are also very expensive. Not just fixing
them, but actions on incorrect data can be very very expensive. I've seen it,
and in my experience its almost universal.

I'm not saying Excel is always the wrong solution, I am saying Excel is not
always the right solution but it can appear to be. That makes it very
dangerous.

------
jvoorhis
While we are all going off-topic, I'd like to see a "collapse thread" feature
on HN. Quite often the comments page is dominated by a tangential discussion
as seen here.

~~~
amlgsmsn
I agree, the author picked a really bad example(Office) to make his otherwise
good point. Office certainly isn't a shitty product compared to its
competition.

You can use browser extensions like hckrnews or 'Hacker news enhancement
suite' to collapse comments.

[http://hckrnews.com/about.html#extensions](http://hckrnews.com/about.html#extensions)
[http://hckrnews.com/about.html#extensions](http://hckrnews.com/about.html#extensions)

~~~
pcurve
I love you.

------
doggfood
dude, it's called first mover advantage

~~~
jessaustin
Seems like this should have triggered the dupe warning?

------
ised

       s/OpenTable/Microsoft Word/g;
       s/Microsoft Word/Microsoft Windows/g;

