
Great products do less, but better - breadandcrumbel
https://uxdesign.cc/great-products-do-less-things-but-better-5dde0ee3fc76
======
iagooar
Nope. Only after our software reached a certain amount of features (compared
to our competition, mainly) did we start to experience real growth.

Our customers would not accept not having some features because the fewer
features are so great. Nope. They need many features, and have complex
workflows, that's how it goes.

This doesn't mean that the features you offer shouldn't have a clear purpose
and be easy to use.

~~~
stingraycharles
My experience is that who you're selling to matters a lot. In case of B2B,
enterprises usually have tons of requirements and the approach of "less
features but better" will not work: there's too much enterprise "cruft" that
need to be implemented (e.g. SSO, audit logs, RBAC, etc) before they will even
start considering you.

~~~
eitland
> there's too much enterprise "cruft" that need to be implemented (e.g. SSO,
> audit logs, RBAC, etc) before they will even start considering you.

Calling SSO, audit logs and RBAC "cruft" in a business setting might not
exactly inspire confidence in prospective customers.

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
I think your parent poster's point is that SSO, audit logs, and RBAC aren't
core product features. We could have a development team spend weeks on all of
these, without implementing one feature that solves the core customer problem,
that would get another business to use our product.

~~~
stingraycharles
This was exactly my point, thanks for elaborating.

~~~
benologist
A while back I stared extracting all this cruft / boilerplate stuff into a
parallel web application that complements your web app so we can avoid
rewriting it and let it stably do the boring stuff while your application
develops independently. I have a few details left to take care of in the
coming weeks and then it will just be a rock-solid, well-tested, well-
documented companion web app for everything from tiny web apps through to SaaS
and Stripe Connect platforms which it supports through modules.

[https://userdashboard.github.io/home](https://userdashboard.github.io/home)

~~~
eitland
Based on a cursory review this looks really useful!

I'm bookmarking this for future reference, both to use it for side projects
and to study.

~~~
benologist
Thanks! Let me know if you need any help or have any questions. In the next
couple weeks it's going to reach feature-completion with internationalization.

------
Hendrikto
The article contains an image of a (relatively basic) calculator, asking the
question: "How many of these buttons will you really push?"

Well… all of them. I may not need tan every day, but when I do, I need it to
be there.

~~~
jeswin
I skimmed the article and closed it when I saw the Scientific Calculator being
shown as an example of complexity. Most people would stop using it if a "UX
Designer" tried to simplify it.

Not everything is a todo list app with rounded corners.

~~~
Damogran6
I hope you didn't miss the overall message for one poorly articulated example,
then. Because there was an informative point put forth.

~~~
rq1
This example made the point unbeknownst to the author.

This Dieter Rams mantra is a recurring theme.

What do you think about cockpits interfaces and Bloomberg terminals? Should we
add some more “white spaces”?

Prioritising information/functionality does not mean sacrificing their
density.

~~~
bch
I think your comment points out “context matters”. Cockpits aren’t consumer
goods.

~~~
kinkrtyavimoodh
Yes but most consumers aren't uneducated idiots, and for the purposes of this
discussion, there is nothing that specific about a cockpit that can't be true
for a scientific calculator or an audio console.

This attitude is how you get Macbook "Professional"s whose keyboards stop
working in 2 months.

------
TeMPOraL
This line of thinking is how we end up with a market of disposable, crappy
toys satiating the immediate needs of "minimum viable users" but being
incredibly wasteful over time.

Out of the examples named:

\- Twitter - has plenty of features, and a larger ecosystem of additional
features that, despite them trying their hardest, they didn't manage to kill.

\- Lyft - it's a meatspace service that's to some extent open-ended in terms
of feature, but the app aspect itself is featureful compared to their simpler
competitor: central dispatch taxi ordered through a phone call.

\- Venmo - can't comment on it, it doesn't seem to exist in my parts of the
world.

\- Slack - it has lots and lots of features, constantly adds new ones, and it
has a large ecosystem of integrations. Those features and integrations are a
big reason Slack is adopted in organizations, over alternatives. If you want
to compare it against a focused tool that does one thing and does it well,
compare it against IRC.

Great products do their primary use case well, but have high mastery ceiling -
meaning there's potential to learn to use the tool better to achieve higher
efficiency/productivity/satisfaction - and support interoperability, which
means a bespoke set of features can be integrated by users who need it.

~~~
coldtea
> _If you want to compare it against a focused tool that does one thing and
> does it well, compare it against IRC._

IRC hardly does what it does well.

~~~
spurdoman77
IRC vs slack is misguided comparison. Irc is protocol, slack is centralized
service.

~~~
coldtea
Still, if we just concentrate on a irc client implementation and ignore the
service, it's the user experience we're comparing...

------
cousin_it
Counterpoint: Joel Spolsky's "Bloatware and the 80/20 myth" from 2001.

> _Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of
> features. In the last 10 years I have probably heard of dozens of companies
> who, determined not to learn from each other, tried to release “lite” word
> processors that only implement 20% of the features. This story is as old as
> the PC. Most of the time, what happens is that they give their program to a
> journalist to review, and the journalist reviews it by writing their review
> using the new word processor, and then the journalist tries to find the
> “word count” feature which they need because most journalists have precise
> word count requirements, and it’s not there, because it’s in the “80% that
> nobody uses,” and the journalist ends up writing a story that attempts to
> claim simultaneously that lite programs are good, bloat is bad, and I can’t
> use this damn thing ’cause it won’t count my words. If I had a dollar for
> every time this has happened I would be very happy._

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-
iv...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv-bloatware-
and-the-8020-myth/)

~~~
mromanuk
Following that example, looks like there is no minimalist general case, but
should be possible to achieve a minimal product for journalist, taking into
account what they need. By further extending this logic, would be possible to
arrange different sets of minimal features for every type of users, or at
least cover a majority of those user cases and not force a one size-fits-all
approach.

~~~
heavenlyblue
Except it’s much easier to learn how to ignore all the features you don’t
necessarily need, than to start learning a completely new product every time
one of the features you need isn’t in the one you’re currently using.

~~~
heavenlyblue
On that matter, it should be possible to re-package the same product but with
different UI configurations.

I am pretty sure modern IDEs are quite configurable. Why not word processors?

~~~
TeMPOraL
Because now every repackaging works differently and you need N copies of the
same product if one doesn't contain _all_ features you need.

~~~
gmueckl
This is why a lot of applications provide something like workspaces where you
get to pick and choose a UI configuration based on the task at hand. I first
saw this in Blender and Eclipse (Blender 2.80 has made this feature more
prominent, but it's from the old 1.x days). Maya has this to some extent.
Adobe has introduced this in Photoshop and some other products. And all of
these programs allow you to come up with your own configurations, too. FreeCAD
also has this kind of concept, but there the workspaces are actually pretty
much corresponding to UI modes, even though you can switch bith independently.

The worst outlier here is Visual Studio. It has this kind of concept
internally and keeps different UI configurations for editing and debugging.
But you get zero control over that as a user. The UI switch when
entering/leaving the debugger is hardcoded.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Sure. But workspaces are a way for the _user_ to refocus the UI on particular
family of features. But all other features are not gone; they're still there
in the program. Depending on the feature type, some may be accessible through
menus and could be included into workspace on demand by changing some options.

~~~
heavenlyblue
So what's the problem with having those features if we are focusing on the
fact that only the presence of them in the UI may make the it more
distracting?

~~~
TeMPOraL
The article we're discussing argues for removing _features_ , not merely their
UI indicators.

As for the justification for keeping rarely used features somewhere in the UI
anyway, a minimally familiar user will be able to ignore currently unused
features faster than they'll be able to find hidden features when they're
needed. Human vision has an amazing ability to filter and focus.

------
nadam
This tends to be true in case of consumer products and tend to be not true in
case of professional products. Google search is simple, Google AdWords is not,
and never was. You cannot create a professional 3D modeling software, photo
editing software, IDE, video editing software without starting relatively
complex. Professionals need to use quite a lot of sophisticated features to be
productive. The learning curve is less of a concern in a professional setting.
(I kind of know it because I have been working on a VR 3D modeler for a while.
To create a professional-grade software the barrier to entry is quite high, so
small developers try to create simple-to-use consumer, hobby-ist, products. I
am creating a hobby-ist product, which is already much more complex than a
consumer product.) If you look at reviews of the smaller products, the
overwhelming majority of criticism is lack of features.

------
treggle
This is an overly broad generalization.

Computer software products can and should come in all sizes and flavors and
designs.

This is the most powerful and flexible machine invented. You can’t say the
software that runs in them should be like this or like that.

What you can say is some products do well by being simple.

~~~
deltron3030
It's likely true in their own bubble of small business apps on Product Hunt
where performance is mostly measured in time savings and the simplification of
processes.

But this doesn't hold for more creative applications that are more like games,
where the time spend doing a task is time that is regarded as time well spend,
where there is value in developing your own workflow and explorations.

------
mrob
I'd use every one of the buttons on that calculator. Admittedly I've never had
need for gradians, but they're on the same button as degrees and radians, so
it would still get pushed. For everyday use I use Qalculate!, and for more
complicated calculations Maxima or LibreOffice Calc, all of which are far more
advanced than a Sharp EL-501X. Dumbing down products makes them worse.

~~~
daxterspeed
I think the scientific calculator could be an example of this principle on its
own. It's often far more useful for a mathematician than struggling with the
calculator app on a phone or booting up a clunky laptop.

Ultimately I think the principle is flawed. The amount of features isn't an
issue but rather whether each and every feature works well and adds to the
value of the product. Eg. a scientific calculator would be an awful fit for a
todo list application.

------
huhtenberg
A more accurate statement would've been -

    
    
        Solving fewer problems, better makes for a great product.
    

There are more ways to make a great product. This is just one of them.

------
gridlockd
"Less features make my job easier, so please have less features" \- UX
designers reluctant to solve the problem they were hired to solve

Well, duh. Developers can relate, short programs are exponentially easier to
write well than large ones. That's _the challenge_.

> Think about the most successful products you know. The ones you use
> everyday, as a customer. Twitter, Lyft, Venmo, Slack.

I wouldn't think of these products and I don't use them every day.

I would think of very complex applications with an incredible amount of
features that I'll mostly never use. However, this large surface area overlaps
with what I need. There is no "more focused" app that does the job.

I would also think of the top software companies - Microsoft, Oracle, SAP,
IBM. None of these companies are known for their "simple and focused"
applications. Quite the contrary.

Sure, if you have a little app that's just a frontend for one thing, keep the
focus. Otherwise, keep in mind that "it doesn't do the _one_ thing we need" is
generally a deal-breaker, whereas "it does one-hundred things we _don 't_
need" is not. Everyone's needs are slightly different and critical mass is
important.

------
andmarios
That's good advice; if you are building a command-line tool for Unix. :)

The thing is I can chain command-line tools using a pipe, embed them into
scripts and more. I probably can't do that with your app.

My guess is that great products are based around workflows rather than
features. Have a vision, work towards it.

~~~
GuB-42
And even with command line tools, a few extra features don't hurt. Going from
GNU tools to the more barebone Unix stuff is often a pain. Things like no
option for ls to sort by size, no "human readable" sizes, no recursive grep,
etc... While some of these can be replaced by pipelines having a shortcut for
common use cases is nice.

An example is "tar xvzf file.tgz". The "z" option is just a shortcut for "gzip
-cd file.tgz | tar xvf -", but most people are quite happy with this bloat.

------
smallstepforman
The pictured sharp calculator made me rage at the state of modern desktop
calculators in most OS’s. The other day I needed atan (inverse tan) and found
the built in windows/osx calculators do not support this function. Google for
web calculator, nothing. In the end I hacked up a quick c based program. A 40
year old calculator with a 4004 or 6502 CPU can do more than default desktop
applications.

Removing features can eliminate a customer or two.

~~~
jimktrains2
Both Mac and window have scientific mode.

[https://support.apple.com/guide/calculator/welcome/mac](https://support.apple.com/guide/calculator/welcome/mac)

[https://support.microsoft.com/en-
us/help/4039496/windows-10-...](https://support.microsoft.com/en-
us/help/4039496/windows-10-scientific-calculator)

There is also bc, that macos should have by default.
[https://www.gnu.org/software/bc/](https://www.gnu.org/software/bc/)

~~~
jaifraic
Having used bc as my calculator for a while, i recently switched to insect -
because it has fore features. For example it can parse and convert between
physical units and has a lot of predefined constants. So instead of using two
command line tools (bc to calculate, units to convert) i just use insect.

[https://github.com/sharkdp/insect](https://github.com/sharkdp/insect)

There is a web version available as well:
[https://insect.sh](https://insect.sh)

------
rahimnathwani
Many great products have many, many features. One of the examples given (Lyft)
might appear simple on the surface, but think about the complexity behind just
one element: the matching and routing for Lyft Line (similar to UberPool).

Lyft has many, many engineers, and I'm pretty sure they're doing more than
fixing bugs, dealing with infrastructure scaling etc.

One thing great products _do_ seem to have in common is that they are easy to
use, in the sense that their UI has few elements, and much complexity is
hidden from the user.

This is similar to the concept of having APIs that are simple, but which are
serviced by code that does a lot under the hood, hiding the complexity from
the API consumer.

~~~
AstralStorm
Other examples include AutoCAD, Photoshop, Premiere, Corel suite, Office
(Word, Excel, Access). Visual Studio, Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA. Eagle. VMWorks
management suite. Visio, Rational Enterprise Architect. All of digital audio
workstation products. Most video production applications. Heck, Windows and
Mac OS.

None of those cut features ever. This is why they're great, because you can do
many things not possible otherwise, or hard and requiring hoops, with them.

The UX is nicely layered and chunked to overwhelm less. (With some mistakes
like lately seen in Windows 8 or 10.)

Great products do more _and_ better. None of these applications started small.
They were only somewhat smaller from out and responded to feedback about
additional features.

Comparing tiny apps like Twitter or Slack to these is funny.

------
ThomPete
Tell that to WeChat and a bunch of other Asian products.

The idea of great products is kind of misguided.

Talking about great products is something industry people do it's not
something users of the product think about them.

In other words, it's academically interesting but not useful to determine
whether a product is actually successful which IMO is part of the greatness of
a product.

------
ken
As examples of this thesis, apparently, it shows photographs of a camera
flash, a bookshelf radio, a turntable, and a pocket calculator. Yow.

How many people have used _any_ of those standalone devices in the past 10
years? How many of you have used, in the past 10 minutes, any of those as a
feature of a single device that includes all of these? I rest my case.

The 1968 Braun catalog may end up in an industrial design museum for its
beauty, but people aren't buying products like that for their beauty today,
any more than they're buying 1968 sports cars. People open their wallet for
features.

------
krm01
Though the article doesn’t say anything new, it’s astonishing how hard it is
for founders (especially of SaaS products) to actually do this. I run a UI/UX
design firm that focusses on B2B SaaS products and the biggest difference I
see between great and ok products is the founder’s a ability to accept
simplification and focus. Feature creep sounds like you may be adding ‘more
value to your end users’. In reality, you’re making your product more generic,
less valuable, and slower in terms of helping the user get from point A to B.

------
lunchladydoris
My iPhone is a great product because it does more.

Great products don't have to be spartan. But in my experience they do seem to
be intentional and value craftsmanship.

~~~
lilgreenland
I would rather have fewer, but higher quality apps on my smart phone.

~~~
Hendrikto
I am not sure I see your point. You choose what apps you install, and you can
uninstall bad ones.

~~~
oriolid
It is easier to develop high quality app for iOS than Android.

With iOS, there are only relatively few different devices, they behave almost
the same and most of the users are running up to date OS. On the other hand,
there are too many Android devices to test your app with, many of them are
buggy in unique ways (especially some models from Samsung and Huawei, and you
can't ignore those because they have largest market shares), and on top of
that manufacturers generally don't port new Android releases to old devices,
so you have to support old APIs if you want to reach most Android users.

Sometimes our users complain that we spend all of our resources supporting
iOS, Windows and OS X and Android support is just a second thought. In reality
we spend most of our time on Android and it's still the worst.

Source: I develop a multiplatform audio app for living.

------
everyone
I recently wrote this to someone who was thinking of learning Pico-8 (a very
minimal game engine) I was saying they should just learn Unity instead.

...

Something like Pico-8 reminds me of a program from my days as an architect.
Sketchup, it was a very intuitive 3d modelling program aimed at architects, it
was very easy to learn, but once you've got the hang of it you start running
into all sorts of limitations, like the initially lovely UI becomes a total
mess when u have a big and / or complex model, it performs really bad, it cant
do proper renders at all, and so on. In the end, after struggling with
Sketchups limitations I just learned 3DSmax It could do everything Sketchup
could do + soooooo much more, the learning curve was much steeper at the very
start, but afterwards, working with it was much easier and faster, and allowed
me to do a lot more. I would have been much better off if I had started with
3DSMAX, as opposed to wasting time struggling with Sketchup trying to get it
to do stuff it couldnt.

~~~
speedplane
> Sketchup ... was a very intuitive 3d modelling program aimed at architects,
> it was very easy to learn, but once you've got the hang of it you start
> running into all sorts of limitations

I'm not sure Sketchup was really aimed at architects. Few real licensed
architect rely on Sketchup (although they may use it occasionally). It's a
great piece of software to get the uninitiated into modeling (it worked for
you) and it can handle many non-professional tasks pretty well (e.g., light
home renovation). Also (and this is big) sketchup is free. The professional
tools cost thousands a year, if I remember correctly 3DSMax is ~$400/month. No
3D modeling newbie is going to drop that cash just to get their feet wet with
the profession. Sketchup is not the end-all, but it has its place.

And lets take the analogy further: easy-to-use starter kits in every field are
incredibly helpful. They allow you to learn a field without a huge commitment
and then to decide whether you want to invest more of your time. If someone
did indeed start with 3DSMax without using sketchup, there's a strong
likelihood that they'd get frustrated and give up. More generally, if you have
to tackle a difficult problem, start small and break off a piece rather than
trying to conquer the whole.

~~~
everyone
It definitely was aimed at architects (among others) when it came out in 2000.

I had just started architecture college then, we did everything on paper, I
only learned Autocad during my 1st summer job. 'Computers' were more the realm
of architectural technicians back then, I didnt know any architects who could
use any 3d modelling software at all. Architects were generally quite computer
illiterate, Sketchup was a program simple enough for a computer illiterate
person to begin using.

Also quote from wikipedia about its intended purpose.

" SketchUp debuted in August 2000 as a general-purpose 3D content creation
tool and was envisioned as a software program "that would allow design
professionals to draw the way they want by emulating the feel and freedom of
working with pen and paper in a simple and elegant interface, that would be
fun to use and easy to learn and that would be used by designers to play with
their designs in a way that is not possible with traditional design software.
It also has user friendly buttons to make it easier to use." "

------
austincheney
Unfortunate. So many of the comments here seem to miss the point and this is a
theme I have noticed through my career as a developer.

Yes, every button on a calculator is eventually needed by someone as are every
optional concern in every application, but every optional concern is not
needed by everybody and certainly not frequently.

Selectivity of desired features is a bias. The inability to account for bias
in product design makes for shitty products that are either excessively
complex or excessively expensive.

All terrain tires that are extremely safe for driving in snow are great, but I
don’t need that living where I do since it almost never snows here. It is an
unnecessary excess that I certainly would not want to pay for. For me this is
no different than the _tan_ button of a calculator which I have also never
needed.

The inability to perceive or account for bias, as evidenced by the comments
here, are why many employers are hesitant to elevate developers to product
management positions, which is another form of selective bias.

------
teddyh
I think bad products do either too few things adequately or many things badly.
Good products either do a few things well or many things adequately. _Great_
products, on the other hand, do many things well, _by appearing to do fewer
things_. Additional features are designed, in great products, to be discovered
as you need them.

------
magoon
This is a religious debate. Some people are delighted by additional features,
others by thoughtful design. It’s hard to see the other viewpoint and how this
can be mutually exclusive.

~~~
gridlockd
> Some people are delighted by additional features, others by thoughtful
> design.

UX designers in particular are delighted by thoughtful design. You want to
avoid an "inmates running the asylum" kind of situation.

~~~
AstralStorm
Some are delighted by fads like minimalism. You should keep those people as
far from design as possible.

Others prefer better looks over function. See above.

------
garganzol
If you don't mind, here is my personal angle:

"In reality, great products do a whole lot, while providing a helpful,
intuitive and somewhat shy interface. In this way, they allow to achieve solid
results for complex problems in no time.

Customers who are lucky enough to interact with such product at least once in
their life often describe it as being simple and even magical.

But do not let this fool you. Simplicity and magic do not equal to the lack of
functions or settings.

Great products get the job done. They do it in timely fashion. They do not
brag. They do not ask you to sign in. The do not put you through myriads of
advertising. They do not overcast nor crash customers' lives by their own
egos. They just work."

------
BenoitEssiambre
This might be a bit of professional bias on my part but I like to think of
product-market fit using ideas inspired by information theoretic model-data
fit:

Low resolution fit: The product vaguely and simply fits its market.

High resolution fit: The product is complex and is tightly tailored to the
market.

Overfit: The product is so tightly tailored to some users that it only fits
well a small part of the market.

Underfit: The product is so generic that it's easy to copy or is missing
important features.

Then it becomes about trying to achieve optimal fit. It's almost a bayesian
thing in my mind. You want a product or platform that is not overfitted, not
underfitted, high resolution where it needs to be, low resolution otherwise.

There is one more dimension I find useful which I will call "crossfit" because
it is inspired from the concepts of cross entropy
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_entropy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_entropy))
or KL divergence
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kullback%E2%80%93Leibler_diver...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kullback%E2%80%93Leibler_divergence)).

Having bad crossfit means that the product fit is biased in some suboptimal
way. It might fit a side market of a greater market, it might focus on aspects
that would be more important in another market or it might use a design
language that is better tailored to different users.

Having bad crossfit often happens when product teams with expertise in one
domain apply their knowledge to a second domain without being sufficiently
familiar with the differences. Without taking into account differences in key
details of the new domain, without learning the new lingo or without properly
weighting the different levels of importance of challenges, product fit tends
to end up not quite right.

An extreme but common example is that of software developers (like myself)
designing interfaces that are very difficult to use for anyone but other
software developers. However, it can also happen in subtler ways even for
experienced product designers when they jump into a new field they are not
very familiar with.

Having good crossfit is about learning to speak the language of your users.

~~~
marmaduke
This is a pretty interesting view, probably could be operationalized for web
sites and apps with analytics data.

------
muzani
Article doesn't say anything new. It seems like a headline you send your boss
because you want someone else to say the obvious.

~~~
TeMPOraL
That's what a lot of these articles - and a lot of consulting business - exist
for. In environments with lots of internal politics, external validation is
valuable for both credit and CYA reasons.

------
Geee
Great products appear to do less. Products should be composed in a way that
allows them to do more while appearing to do less.

------
arendtio
> The ones you use everyday, as a customer. Twitter, Lyft, Venmo, Slack.

Somehow I am living in a different world. I don't use any of those services on
a daily basis. Actually, Twitter is the only one I come across sometimes when
someone links/embeds some tweet.

------
davidajackson
There is a notion of feature death with products but to improve retention you
do need to keep shipping out new features so I disagree here.

It feels like this article is piggybacking off the minimalism advocated in
design schools. Minimalism is not the same thing as throwing out or ignoring
features. How does the author reconcile their thesis with the fact that
they're suggesting ignoring customer suggestions?

The attitude of if it ain't broke don't fix it is really you asking to be
crushed by a competitor.

This said, the caveat here is when it comes to ideas. Better approaches to
solving a problem are often simpler or more elegant, and require an out-of-
the-box approach.

------
nathan_f77
This is very timely advice for me. It sounds very easy in theory, but in
practice it's been very difficult when you have lots of customers and leads
pulling you in many different directions.

On the other hand, you can always have a distinction between products and
companies. Especially when companies acquire other companies, just to add one
more product to their portfolio (e.g. Google, Facebook.)

So no-one is saying that a single company can't work on multiple products at
the same time. Sometimes it's just not very obvious whether something should
be a feature or a separate product with it's own brand, landing page, and
pricing.

------
meerita
This article was written with full fallacies. One example of this logical
fallacy is because it doesn't count that features are done based on KPI. It's
not about adding nonsensical features, it's about to increase KPIs, therefore,
make even more business. Also, this rule doesn't apply to all products, so
it's a fallacy. People who downvote this just doesn't understand or never
carried a business seriously. They're just hedonists on design. That's all.

------
indymike
Hmm. So the device in your pocket that replaces a cell
phone,radio,camera,flashlight,computer,pager calculator,day timer, music
player and more is not the perfect counter example?

~~~
JohnFen
Actually, I don't think that it is, as it does few of those things
particularly well. In fact, this is a large part of why I've decided to stop
using smartphones and to start carrying both a feature phone and a handheld
computer instead.

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madiathomas
Me: "I am selling this product that does X very well" Prospect: "Does it do Y
and Z?. If it can do Y and Z, I will buy it"

Y and Z is different for each and every client. That's how products becomes
bloated. It is demand from real world clients that demands features to be
added before they can buy your product.

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andai
Has anyone used Notational Velocity / nvAlt? I've been reading about it all
day (longingly -- sold my Mac a while back), and that's why this headline
jumped out at me. I have tried dozens of apps and haven't found anything that
even _comes close._

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sbmthakur
_Google Search_ is a good example of this. But this isn't always true.
_WeChat_ and _Facebook_ can be considered as counter examples.

~~~
arendtio
Nowadays, I come to think of it as 'Google Search' _was_ a good example.

Back in the nineties, it was a very simple page, but today, there is all sort
of clutter on that page. It starts with the privacy layers, goes on with the
location bar (plus other bars) and goes on with all those boxes in the results
(not even talking about ads). I mean, yes, some are truly valuable, but
somehow the page doesn't feel as clean anymore as it used to be.

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amelius
Ok let's apply this to phones. How could a phone without a rich app ecosystem
become "great"?

~~~
julienreszka
Most people use less than 10 apps on their phone.

~~~
com2kid
And it is a different 10 for each person.

And those 10 apps change over time. Heck I only use trip planning apps a
couple times a year, but I wouldn't buy a phone that didn't allow me to use
one at all.

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peter_retief
Sounds easy but its really hard to do, and yes I agree with the concept

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makach
Wow, is it enough to read the title?

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meerita
Fallacy.

