

Andrew Chen: Are you a product fanatic? - andrew_null
http://andrewchen.typepad.com/andrew_chens_blog/2008/01/to-entrepreneur.html

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mmp
On never using popular products:

If you refuse to use certain tools because of religious or ideological reasons
then you're just narrow-minded.

If you're an start-up entrepreneur, you're in the situation of having to
efficiently allocate scarce resources, ideally you should be using the best
tools for the job without arbitrarily limiting yourself, no?

Luckily for them, the guys at Google decided to go ahead using boring uncool
commodity hardware instead of the 'better' fancy machines.

~~~
Hexstream
Popular but shitty products are rarely "the best tool for the job".

Unfortunately, there always seems to be a lot of them around...

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nickb
Andrew, all of your points are basically a slam in the face of this site's
readers. You obviously read HN a lot so you took some headlines that hit top
spots here and turned them against HN users.

Are you saying HN readers are wrong?!

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edw519
Why is it if you're a lawyer, accountant, banker, or surgeon who insists on
precision and correctness, you're called "skilled" or "competent"?

But if you're a hacker who insists on precision and correctness, you're called
a "fanatic"?

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rokhayakebe
I think the author is omiting one important fact in those successful
businesses : Time. Yes buddy, when Microsoft and walmart first launched they
were only cool to a small group, but quite lame to the vast majority. They
could not understand the value of home pc or super sized stores that cuts the
local shop business in half. Maybe not so much for walmart since it provided
instant gratification through cheap prices. It took time to educate the users,
and the masses before getting significant traction. Google was the cool
product a few years ago, today it is becoming more and more lame, but more and
more attractive to users. Therefore, if you are product fanatic and you got
techcrunched now you have earned the respect of the small smart crowd, but you
need to educate the bigger crowd. Explain them that their vision has been
imperfect and you are here to change that and this is how.... Now Personaly I
don't like to work on something revolutionary (unless it could involve
redistribution of wealth, world hunger or something similar), I don't want to
pay for someone else's r&d, but I encourage anyone who is working on something
cool to keep going, because I may sell for 5 millions in 9 months, but you
will sell for 10 billions in a few years and you will be more likely to
finance research for mental disease such as (greed).

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alaskamiller
i like the part where you put numbered lists with bullets, it really
accentuates the point.

