

The Milo Criterion - rheide
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/09/23/the-milo-criterion

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spiralganglion
I was rather let down by this.

The author does a fantastic job of establishing that, through metaphorical
thinking, he has hit upon some good wisdom for marketing and development of
new products. Good, good. That this wisdom invalidates Lean Startup theory,
MVP, etcetera. Ok, controversial, but I can dig it. He alludes to the process
he went through to nurture this wisdom, and how it has been subconsciously
applied by many, to great success. Getting inspirational, I love it. Then he
says that he won't be sharing what he's come up with. The end. Excuse me?

Sure, given the premise, I can do my own musing on the subject and come to my
own conclusions. But I don't have the same degree of experience as this
author. I don't blog about "refactored perception", I don't think about these
sorts of things very often (I work in a _very_ different industry), so I would
love the insight of someone who does.

I'm interested in seeing the arc of his thinking, going from the initial
abstract musing with calves and cows, to a fascinating new approach to
practical process. That sounds like a great arc to see, even if I won't be
following it myself.

In hindsight, this just feels a bit like Article Bait or Concept Bait (as
opposed to link bait). It promises a "refactored perception", and delivers a
"redacted prescription".

ADDENDUM: Yes, it's a great read. I really enjoyed reading it. It'll give me
some good things to think about. But the ending is a complete cop-out, only
conceding the tiniest hint that he might follow up on this in the future. I
agree, better to not have the last section at all. Better still, to say that
he will indeed write more if people show interest. I would love to read more
about this.

~~~
lloeki
One thing that emphasizes the effect (as is the case with most blogs recently)
is that the scroll bar shows a lengthy page but the content only makes a small
part at the top.

End result: Unbeknownst to me, the page is comment-filled, so I was happily
reading and scrolling down expecting content that up till now was really
enjoyable, and was suddenly struck by The End. What a let down.

I really like the Ars Technica approach of initially hiding the comments. It
really helps not raising expectations length-wise.

~~~
justincormack
You didnt read the comments then? Including the one where he says "Oh well, I
said I wouldn’t post my actual critique, but looks like I’ve gotten sucked
into doing so in the comments." they are laregly an extension of the article,
all high quality...

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jacques_chester
Is it just me, or was the point of this meandering ditty that "You should
introduce adaptations at the same rate that people want to adapt"?

I mean, that's not very helpful. I can figure that out myself.

Even the analogy of Milo is broken, given what we know about strength gains
(Olympic weightlifting is my hobby). In particular, strength gains are non-
linear. Any developmental curve is the consequence not of some given simple
multiplicative factor but of a complex set of feedback loops that govern
adaptation.

And so it is with technological advancement. I'd be amazed to see a single
number governing adaptation to novelty (which is what we're discussing here).

If anything it's going to depend on who is adapting, what they've seen in the
past, what they're adapting to and so on. If it seems like a smooth, linear
process, that's because we're looking at it from an overly compressed time
frame. Lots of phenomena look smooth if you squish them up.

~~~
sgentle
I think that would be a fair way to summarise it, but be careful not to reduce
something to obviousness and then say it's too simple.

The interesting point for me is that much of startup marketing wisdom seems to
say "make things people want", whereas there's another school that says "make
people want things" - aka the Blue Ocean strategy and kin. How is it that both
of these things can exist? Why did Google succeed by beating the dead search
horse? Why did Twitter succeed at selling SMS-meets-chat-meets-blog-
meets-I'm-on-acid?

Likely everyone with an eye to marketing has some sense of a rubber band
connecting the ambition to the zeitgeist. You can pull the market with you a
little, but go too far and you lose it. It is, in fact, quite a popular idea
that Twitter and Google just happened to be in the right place at the right
time.

But "right place at the right time" is a bit hand-wavy and qualitative.
Perhaps it would be better to find a more structured way of thinking about it.
That, to me, is the point of this article - not so much Greek calves or the
order of growth curves.

What if the success of the lean startup movement isn't that it lets you
develop faster, but rather that it forces you to develop slower. That is, that
by bringing customers and product closer, it prevents you from stretching the
rubber band too far. If so, perhaps you could yield better results by
reallocating effort from product iterations into determining and exploiting
those limits.

I suspect where Venkat is going is that instead of asking "what do people
want?" on one side and "how can we make them want it more?" on the other, you
could treat marketing and development as being simultaneous complementary
processes; much as a good video game will always present content at the limit
of your skill, you could position your product at the limit of customer
tolerance for change.

My guess: this was all inspired by Facebook's hilarious mismanagement of that
limit.

However, I'm in agreement with the other commenters: major weak sauce that
this wasn't examined further. Since when did Ribbon Farm leave the apple cart
wheels-down? Conflict-averse indeed!

~~~
jacques_chester
A thoughtful reply, thankyou.

> Why did Google succeed by beating the dead search horse? Why did Twitter
> succeed at selling SMS-meets-chat-meets-blog-meets-I'm-on-acid?

It so happens I recently wrote an essay on essentially this topic. Email me
and I'll be happy to forward it to you.

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stupid

      The calf grew into a cow at about the rate that Milo grew  into a man.
    

Calves grow for a year or so.

    
    
      A rather freakish man apparently, since grown cows can weigh over 1000 lb.
    

Also freakish since he had the maturation rate of a cow, or had a knack for
breeding cows with the maturation rate of a man.

    
    
      The point is, the calf grew old along with the boy.
    

No, it didn't.

    
    
      I have been pondering this story for a couple of years...
    

Have you really been pondering this story for a couple years? Maybe not that
closely.

Your metaphor is broken. Milo lifted lots of different calves.

~~~
lucasjung
It's a Greek myth, so how much realism do you really expect? For what it's
worth, the way I've always heard it was that the boy and the calf did grow up
together.

Seriously: your only problem with the story is that the cow and the boy grew
up at about the same rate? Really?

~~~
hugh3
Milo of Croton was a real guy, so it's not a "Greek Myth" in the usual sense.
Almost certainly most of the exaggerated stories told about him are
apocryphal, though.

 _Legends say he carried his own bronze statue to its place at Olympia, and
once carried a four-year-old bull on his shoulders before slaughtering,
roasting, and devouring it in one day._

