

Strategy: Solve Only 80 Percent of the Problem - alrex021
http://highscalability.com/strategy-solve-only-80-percent-problem

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dschobel
see also: "worse is better" and "fire your customers"

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better>

[http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/04/the_customer...](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/04/the_customer_is.html)

aka "focus on high ROI stuff and cut everything else"

are we seeing a trend here yet folks or do we need to see this principle
dressed up in anecdotes a few more times?

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idlewords
I think we're 80% of the way there

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mbenjaminsmith
That's pretty interesting - I'm fairly new to programming but now believe that
at least 50% of my time is spent dealing with fringe cases (accounting for a
small percent - a low traffic foreign language, odd xml validation problems,
etc).

The protestant work ethic would suggest you haven't finished your job until
you've covered that last percent.

The flipside to that is you can improve user experience for most of your users
most of the time with a fraction of the work.

So given a finite amount of resources, what's better?

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Retric
_what's better?_

That depends on how important the project is. It would be worth it for Google
to have someone optimize add-words for a full year even if they only got an
extra click per 1/50,000 page views. However, that much attention to detail is
useless when you have far fewer users / revenue. The secret is to focus on the
highest reward areas and shift focus when other things become more important.

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ams6110
Or unless those "other things" have unlikely but potentially really bad
consequences.

Most of the time, maybe 80% of the time avionics software does not need to
contend with the plane flying through a thunderstorm. But I hope that the
programmers didn't just toss that possibility into the "not important"
category.

The "80/20" rule is something MBA types like to toss out so that they sound
wise, but in some cases it's needs to be more like the 99.80/00.20 rule.

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runevault
When working with code that's effort has lives on the line, the rules
obviously change entirely. How many people ACTUALLY work on such systems
though? For the majority the 80/20 rule is going to be fairly legit a large
portion of the time.

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cema
The 80/20 rule is self-applicable and so applies to 80% of cases. (Captain
Obvious said hi.)

~~~
cema
If the "80" here is reasonably accurate, then here is what we have: in 80% of
the cases, we only have to focus on 80% of stuff (that's about 64% of the
total), and in the rest 20% we focus almost on 100% of stuff (that's almost
20% of the total), which means that we need to focus on almost 64+20=84% of
the total, which is still pretty close to the original 80%. :-) OK, this is
silly. (We can only get it equal when we go with 100% instead of 80%.)

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ojbyrne
Philip Greenspun also talked about this. The problem is that some gigantic
asshole will grasp onto that unsolved 20% and convince some other gigantic
asshole in charge of your destiny that the fact that you couldn't solve that
other 20% means you're a moron. Speaking from experience.

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tommia
I do wonder what will happen, when everybody starts making 80% solutions. When
I use three 80% done third party libraries will I get (1 _0.8_ 0.8*0.8 =)
51.2% done library?

Does 80 percent solutions only apply to the highest level?

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skmurphy
Solve 20% of the full problem and you probably get 80% of the dollars.

