
Shoes and software - AndrewWarner
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2244-shoes-and-software
======
mhd
The technology probably _did_ matter, but people don't view it in those terms.
What he describes is people testing the "technology", but they certainly don't
think about the materials or the notches. Same's true for software. People
don't care about AJAX and clouds. They do care about responsiveness and usable
pages.

This is not about "back to the basics", this is about advertising. Apart from
some "deviants", runners still use the high-tech shoes, not Converse Chucks.
And the basic ads about shoes certainly don't focus on tiny tidbits of the
technology. Maybe a large catch-phrase ("Torsion", "Pump" etc.), but the rest
is aesthethics and athletes...

------
ccc3
I think saying that customers tend to prefer "simple done well" is an
oversimplification (pun unintended, but kept anyway). I've found the real
issue is that people have a maximum rate of information absorption and when a
salesperson starts rattling off a list of features, that rate is quickly
surpassed. If you could make a potential customer in a shoe store understand
that the rubber compound in a particular shoe would make it perform 30%
better, it would likely have an impact on the sale. The problem is that it is
nearly impossible to make someone quickly understand something outside of
their frame-of-reference. Most people will just start ignoring you as soon as
you say "rubber compound."

I think this post is a more valid commentary on how products should be sold
than how products should be made. For example, I used to sell a fairly complex
piece of engineering software. I found that the most effective way to demo the
software was to find out about one of the customers problems and show the
software solving that problem over and over. Often I would only end up showing
2 or 3 features of a program that had thousands. That doesn't mean that the
customer wouldn't go on to find value in many other parts of our product once
they started using it, it just means that in the context of a sales meeting,
making one point well is often as good as you can do.

~~~
btilly
_If you could make a potential customer in a shoe store understand that the
rubber compound in a particular shoe would make it perform 30% better, it
would likely have an impact on the sale._

No. I say this because I'm the kind of customer the article is about.

When I'm buying I'm looking for a shoe I am walking around in all day. I'm
never going to race. I'm probably not going to play any sports in that shoe.
(When I play sports it is usually barefoot at the beach.) I simply don't care
about performance. As soon as you try to sell me on performance, I'm ignoring
you because it is utterly irrelevant to my life.

I care about comfort, durability, price and aesthetics. Were I single I'd move
aesthetics up the list because women do seem to care about how your shoes
look. Were my feet easier to fit I might move comfort down the list. I won't
believe anything the sales person says about durability, and my decisions on
that are the repeat buys where I walk up, name the model, try on a couple of
shoes, and walk out. The sales person will have no idea that durability was a
factor for me in that decision because I relied on past experience, and not
anything that was visible in the store.

The article is exactly right. I simply don't care about any of what the
manufacturer is trying to get people to care about. And there is no way of
delivering that message that will make me care. I only care about solving my
problem, which is keeping my feet protected at relatively low cost per unit
time without looking ridiculous.

~~~
ccc3
_I care about comfort, durability, price and aesthetics_

With the exception of price, these are all metrics of the shoe's performance.
I chose the word "performance" deliberately because it is very general and can
be measured differently by different customers.

~~~
btilly
They are metrics of performance, yes. But they are not the type of performance
that the shoe manufacturer generally tries hard to market.

------
bvttf
Since 37s is so ruby, reading this title, I was briefly hopeful that _why had
returned.

~~~
dkhan
haha, that was the reason I clicked on it too!!

------
contagionhealth
SaaS means much software has become a commodity product, like shoes. You can
still hit one out of the park by selling 'shoes' however, literally and
figuratively.

One of the reasons Zappos did so well was because they took commodity (shoes)
+ software (online store) + CS (where CS = customer service, not compsci) =
purchase.

Most tech markets now are trading commodity products; even content is a
commodity.

But you can still overcome the commoditization issues by finding something
else to sell that's hyperspecialized - and some of the most interesting
e-commerce marketplaces of the last decade scale precisely *because they
commoditize long-tail items and create a barter platform that lets those
locked out of the speciality markets participate in the trading.

Empowering individual sellers in a commodity market, aka 'normals' seems like
it was a relatively efficient mechanism for growth in the last boom. Examples
= information/ads (Google), long tail book purchasing (Amazon), and
distributed social interactions (Facebook).

The more interesting question: are we seeing a return of selling to geeks, aka
hyperspecialization?

------
mey
Not everyone is buying a shoe for the same reason, not everyone is buying
software for the same reason. When you are targeting certain markets, say
sneakers, then yes the article applies. When you move to specialized footwear
for a more demanding demographic things start to change. For example, climbing
shoes or hiking boots for more challenging terrain then just going off the
sidewalk will have other vectors of importance. (Durability, flexibility,
friction, water/weather proofing)

Compare <http://www.rei.com/category/4501296> to
<http://www.vibramfivefingers.com/>

I think the real take away is people are looking for good enough for their
situation. The more demanding their software needs, the more
features/design/implementation will be, but if all they need is a todo list,
then they'll end up at 37signals. :)

~~~
nfnaaron
"... climbing shoes or hiking boots for more challenging terrain then just
going off the sidewalk will have other vectors of importance."

Yes, but still, who are the majority of people who are buying those
specialized shoes? Normal people who don't really need them. So it still
applies, even there, even if the exact mix of people changes.

------
rguzman
>The real lesson for me is this: People want the basics done well.

What "the basics" evolves at varying rates of complexity as technology
changes. To the users this is mostly invisible except when it is directly
related to the UI or when some new technology seems like magic.

------
redstripe
"On paper these were strong selling points.."

I don't think this is a good example. Shoe "technology" is bullshit. The
technology doesn't even look good on paper because everyone knows it's just
stuff that's used to justify the bloated price of Nike runners. Aesthetics and
build quality are all people want from shoes.

Now for technology - not just software - most people don't have a good way to
judge all the stuff they don't understand. So features work as a selling
point. Nobody wants to spend money on something that may turn out to be not
good enough later. Feature lists tap into that fear/purchase hesitation.

~~~
davidedicillo
for the end user, software technology is worth as much as for shoes. Do you
think people would like Basecamp or X app less if it was build using Django
instead of Rails? Or people would leave Facebook for MySpace if they'd
integrate Cassandra?

~~~
jbooth
No, but people did leave Friendster and Myspace for Facebook because the sites
ran like crap and would try to put viruses on your computer.

~~~
cellis
They _did_ run like crap, but _most_ people left Myspace for Facebook for one
of two reasons; 1) Facebook was cleaner, and 2) Facebook was used by high
status people (started with Ivy League students).

------
steveklabnik
I'll repost my comment here:

I think there’s also a huge disconnect between the people who are making the
software and those who are using the software. We (as programmers) tend to
evaluate things in an incredibly methodological way, and care about advanced
features, and are willing to take the time to learn bad interfaces in return
for “power features.”

But most people are not us.

~~~
netcan
With software like basecamp, the feature-rich vs easy is especially
pronounced.

A project management system 9/10 of people are actually using but doesn't have
feature X is more useful than a project management system that 8/10 people are
using but does have it, often.

~~~
steveklabnik
I'm interested to see what a 37signals bugtracker would look like. Every time
I use Bugzilla or Mantis, I cringe.

------
vgurgov
I also wondering why this “People want the basics done well” cant be applied
to the car industry. Manufactures are selling so advanced vehicles restyled
every year(and you are paying for that!)All that advanced systems for auto-
ething and so on. While I just need good car that i can comfortable use for
years… I dont really care if it will give me 21 or 22 mpg or 300 or 301 hp!

Does anyone else want car produced by 37signals? )))

(Hope reposting my comment is ok, i am really interested what do HN audience
think about that, sorry for bit offtopic)

~~~
cynicalkane
Both of these are examples of a bad signal to noise filter. People think they
know what they want, but they don't.

Compound this with the fact that nobody trusts salespeople (with good reason;
they very often aren't trustworthy). "Car salesman" is sometimes used as an
epithet. The main difference is that people like to pretend they are clueful
about cars--partly for status purposes, as someone else noted--and go for the
advanced features. Whereas not too many people know or care about the
composition of a tennis racket.

What particularly bothers me is the lack of attention paid to durability. This
is the primary reason why things "ain't made like they used to be". Following
the original article, using shoes as an example, there are really only two
large makers of durable dress shoes left in the US, and only one of them makes
shoes that aren't ugly (Alden).

~~~
vgurgov
+1 i also mostly have durability as one of the top reqs in mind when shop for
a new car.

sadly you hardly can expect same quality from modern manufactures, while most
of them pray you buying another product of theirs within 1-2 years

