Comment by cstross | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cstross | Hacker News Reader

The foundation of Apple'a current success is based on this principle -- curation of a selection of best options from a wide possible range makes buying decisions easier for customers than giving them the whole phase space.

Before Steve Jobs returned in the late 90s, Apple's Mac range was a hot mess. Apple was trying to compete with the entire range of PC manufacturers, so in addition to licensed third-party Mac clones, they were making multiple ranges of desktop Mac with overlapping specs, on the principle that they could occupy one shelf slot per machine in Fry's or Target with each model. So you had the Centris, the Performa, and the Quadra ranges, with high, middle, and low end machines in each range, educational and professional media authoring variants, and the powerbook range ...

Jobs returned and priority #1 was to staunch the cash haemorrhage. Rationalizing the product range and supply chain was a huge part of this. So he drew a simple diagram. X-axis: consumer and professional. Y-axis: desktop and portable. Four models would occupy the entire grid, with roughly three specification levels in each (think Goldilocks and the Three Bears). This gave us the iBook and iMac machines (consumer), and the Powerbook and Mac Pro machines (professional), with differentiation based on CPU speed/memory/disk capacity within each cell.

This made the choice of which machine to buy vastly easier on the customer; it was glaringly obvious which model you wanted, all you had to do was decide how much speed/memory/disk capacity you needed, and that was it, rather than trying to figure out what the difference was between a Centris 630 and a Quadra 630AV (hint: RGB video out, 10MHz, and about $250) and so on ...

This turned the precipitous decline in Mac sales around. It took years to build up to the current powerhouse, but it staunched the arterial bleeding -- and all by giving the customers less choice, not more.

It drives me nuts that none of their competitors learn this lesson.

So you want to buy an Asus wifi router?

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus/asus-routers/pcmcat29320005...

Enjoy your paralysis.

It's only 24 options and you can filter by what you want to the left of the product listings. Each filter cuts your number of choices by more than half. Who gets paralyzed with this??

Your typical human who knows nothing about wifi technology, but knows they need a home wireless router

Normal people.

Heck, geeky people who aren't obsessively keeping up with the latest tweaks to wifi router tech.

Myself, CS degree and a fair amount of digital electronics knowledge.

me too, CS degree and now a software engineer.. choosing over 24 different types of routers is just crazy.

Choice is good. It is the _presentation_ of products on the site you referenced that sucks. They should be grouped by speed, etc.

"Sort By -> Customer Rating" is a very helpful filter I usually start with.

BestBuy is one of the biggest electronics retailers in the world. If they can't sort products properly, then it's not reasonable for a vendor to expect anybody to do it. Hell, if I look for Apple Routers, they dont' even list the Airport Extreme - they don't even have the Apple routers tagged consistently - they have both Apple and Apple(R).

And then you get this view:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/searchpage.jsp?browsedCategory=a...

"BestBuy is one of the biggest electronics retailers in the world. If they can't sort products properly, then it's not reasonable for a vendor to expect anybody to do it."

Lots of enormous corporations are desperately incompetent at various things; that doesn't mean it's unreasonable to ask for competence. In this case, perhaps Best Buy was very good at selling electronics before the Web became a primary way to shop for products, and never managed to make the transition effectively. It happens all the times.

The point is that if you're selling widgets, you have to sell them through the stores you have and not the stores you wish you had.

Well, unless you're apple and you can make your own stores, but still - they sell through Best Buy too.

As someone who works in e-commerce, this is a pretty hard problem to solve. There are so many products, so many categories, so much freaking data for each one that our small company had to hire someone just to help with wrangling all the data. I can only imagine how big Best Buy's merchandising team is.

You'd need to get all hands on deck, every month or so, to manually go through the whole store and look for data defects. And have them rotate who looks at which parts every time. You can't automate it, because the failure case is essentially, "It looks wrong." In theory, it's worth the effort, in practice, nobody does it.

Size does not automatically imply competency

I think it's the issue of the fact that they're selling so many different brands of products across so many different product lines (from fryers to washing machines to routers to laptops). So building the optimal sorting algorithm becomes an exercise for each and every line, and also involves standardizing the fields you receive from a variety of different manufacturers and distributors.

Certainly not an easy game, and definitely a tedious one. I know I'd hate to be on the team tasked with figuring that one out.

Agreed. I think this is one part that the author misses in his article. Overall, choice is not bad, but the feeling of uncertainty caused by an unorganized selection is the problem here.

A similar thing happens in video games. Many developers get feedback from users and UX people that too many options are bad. THey then remove the COMPLETELY, which should not make any sense. Even a small submenu somewhere to enable advanced settings is fine, but removing them? Why?

Apple doesn't always compete the same way other businesses do in other markets. I know plenty of people who would never even look at Apple computers because they're Windows users, but Windows users have hundreds of options that Microsoft doesn't even make. Apple has much more control over its brand than its competitors do (in some categories.)

Nobody goes out to buy an Asus router. They just go out to buy a router, and Asus can't stop them from being flooded with options. By some stroke of fate, Apple can.

Here in NYC where there are restaurants on every corner, one of the best ways to figure out which restaurants are the best to eat at is to look at the menus. If they have a lot of choice they'll probably attract people and be able to stay in business even if their food is mediocre. But if they only have 6-8 items on the menu, you know that menu is filled with 6-8 delicious items, because they couldn't stay in business any other way.

When the market's large enough, you can get by by offering so many options that a bunch of people naturally take you up on some of them enough to maintain a profit, or you can offer a small selection of very quality items that continually please. I know which one I prefer.

Downside is that the "6-8 items on the menu" often means "vegetarians have 1 option" and similar problems for people who have restricted diets.

At the other end are the Vietnamese restaurants with 2 pages of soup where English-language names are "soup with noodles and pork" for like 4 different items.

I always look for restaurants for a limited menu for precisely this reason, and am rarely disappointed by them. on the flip side I find it a turn off when a place has a 3-4 page menu, and the food is often (but not always) mediocre.

I use this method for everything. If I see a restaurant with pages and pages of options, I know that it's extremely rare for a kitchen to be able to properly manage all those dishes and make them well. Unfortunately, it leaves little room for an amazing dish because the kitchen is so busy with all the other random dishes. And it usually means they are freezing things or otherwise not using very fresh ingredients.

If you have a single page menu, it usually means some very careful thought went into what went on that menu. And like others have said, those places are turning people away due to lack of choice, so if they continue to be in business with a small menu, it's usually a sign of good food. Or really great marketing/atmosphere ;)

Note that these are mostly benefits for Apple, not for the consumer.

As a consumer, I need a 256GB SSD and 16GB ram. My only choice is to spend $2000 on other macbook pro features I don't need. When I went with a custom PC builder instead (lots of choices - first pick the chassis, then pick the CPU, then pick the RAM, then pick the disk), I got what I needed for $1300.

I don't often bill out at $700/hour (probably the total time I spent on this choice), so Apple's lack of choice certainly wouldn't have helped me.

Other companies swamp you with choice. Hotpoint washing machines come in loads of different forms. And I'm sure for most people, they don't really care. I'm not quite sure about the logic behind this. Have you a better chance of getting more products on the shop floor?

A complicating factor is big box retailers' wish to offer a 'price match guarantee' (particularly to persuade you to bother to come in rather than to buy from Amazon), but never have to pay up on it, which leads them to carry 'retailer exclusive' models from each manufacturer, which might have a suspiciously similar specification to a model sold elsewhere, but in fact have a different model number.

Chernev 2003 distinguishes 3 types of consumers

- Consumer A already chose what she wants, and she just needs to find it out. - Consumer B knows her preferences, but she needs to make the choice. - Consumer C is not aware of which attributes are important in the decision process.

You are a consumer A, so this simplification did not help YOU. It did help consumers B and consumer C.

http://www.hyperlabs.net/ergonomia/presentazioni/euroia11/ the slides of my presentation at Euro IA 2011: Designing Interactions that Help Customers in Decision Making

Did it help B and C? Or did it simply funnel B and C into buying a lot more computer than they needed?

It did when the alternative was the entire educational process behind knowing what they need, what tradeoffs are inherent, what the price should be, what vendors provide it at the acceptable price, what drawbacks come with those other vendors, living with those drawbacks, etc.

Technical people like to pretend it's the easiest thing in the world to "know" how much computer someone needs and to buy it. But if you're non-technical, all you hear is technical people saying "trust me". Which is precisely the same thing Apple is saying.

And, yes, we show them lower sticker prices. But Apple has a far better track record of delivering customer satisfaction than technical people recommending beige boxes. So, for anyone with the money, why in the world would they care for two seconds about "too much computer"?

"Aww shucks. I bought too much computer and loved it, instead of listening to the geeks, getting just enough, and hating it."

I'm sure that some of that is true, but part of B and C's problem is that they might underestimate their own needs, too. There's also a bit of Dunner-Kruger effect there.

The difference between a $500 laptop and a $1000 laptop can be astounding. I suspect many purchasers of the cheaper laptop will regret it, where the purchasers of a $1000 laptop will have a more powerful, better built computer that might last them longer.

(And in fact, with laptops at least, some cheaper laptops are "more powerful" because they're thicker and heavier; and the expense of the faster components further contributes to their poor build quality. Many more-expensive laptops put more money into thoughtful design, rather than "Spec competitions" and you get a slightly-slower, longer-lasting one. Compare cheap Android phones to flagship ones, for example.

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"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness."

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-ri...

How are we to read those slides on mobile if navigation requires a keyboard? (iPhone Safari here)

you are right :( it's not mobile friendly, sorry

Therein is the problem with all of these prescriptive theoreticians who say we would be happier with fewer choices. As someone who is routinely "Consumer A" in nearly all walks of life, I would find it inordinately frustrating and harmful for society to offer fewer—potentially no—choices. It would be stifling, and I think worse still, such a monoculture would encourage shunning of those who want something other than the singular option.

I'm all for assisting Consumer C by way of tools like Consumer Reports, and modern evolutions of the same notion of helping fill information gaps. But I rail against the idea that choices should be eliminated to curtail the stress of Consumer C.

No surprise: I am not an Apple consumer. In fact, I routinely write about how every technology company is not yet making the devices and technologies I want in my life (e.g., [1]). Choice is absolutely not hurting progress toward my ideal, though. Choice is, along with purchasing power and my (small) voice, among the few forces that allow me to exert a proportionate "steering" effect on the industry.

Studying the purported satisfaction gap of Consumer C versus the free market and concluding—as the very title of the article does—that it is definitely "stressing us [all] out" rings of thinly-veiled authoritarianism. And that is bad. Luckily for me, for the time being, many manufacturers and vendors have elected to (mostly) ignore these researchers. For example, most of the US food industry continues to give me a broad spectrum of choices from everything from breakfast cereal, to iced tea, to ice cream. I hope their own market research has revealed the combined voices of Consumer A & B are too loud to suppress in an ill-advised effort to satisfy C. Help guide C, but don't assume A & B do not exist.

[1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao

@bhauer, I agree. My point is: give the user the opportunity to decide how much effort to put in the process. In a digital environment, this means giving her millions of alternatives, but helping her to prune them based on some principles that derive from the cognitive sciences. For instance, the faceted navigation allows the consumer to eliminate the alternatives she is not interested in. This is the B consumer, who knows what is important for her (e.g. "a 256GB SSD and 16GB ram"). If you are the consumer C (and everybody of us is in such situation when we have to buy something and we are not expert at all) can be helped using the best sellers (see Amazon.com), the suggested for you, the ratings of other consumers, and so on. In a physical environment, however, you can not filter, and cutting the less selling products helps the majority of customers in the decision making effort, even if this means giving less choice.

The other point that this sort of thinking misses is that first time buyers are often just not educated. For instance, I don't know how many times in my life I decided I needed X. I bough X thinking it would fulfill my needs. After talking to the X owners group, I realize that my variation of X doesn't do this other thing that I now find would be very useful. Now I want X' that has this feature.

This goes on and on. However, unless a company makes X''' that has every feature available in the known universe, I have no shot of finding what I really want/need.

This also boils down to good advice I got long ago. Buy once, cry once. Meaning: do you research, determine what you need and buy that thing, not the entry level thing.

You're attacking a straw man. There's a difference between a limited choice offered by a particular company and a limited choice in the marketplace. No one is arguing for the latter.

OP used Apple as an example so let's stick with it. If someone wants to buy a laptop to browse the internet, use e-mail, organize photos etc. they learn very quickly that MacBook Air is for them. Then they need to pick a screen size (11" or 13"), decide if they need more storage than in the base model and they're done. Apple is essentially a curator, which is a very valuable service. But we would be much worse off if we only had Apple clones on the market.

People around here know much more about computers and smartphones than an average consumer so these examples are not convincing. But consider microwave ovens. Recently I had a displeasure to look for a new one. If some company decided to scrap their entire line and settle on two or three base models with clear differences between each, it would be a great benefit to many costumers.

There's a difference between a limited choice offered by a particular company and a limited choice in the marketplace. No one is arguing for the latter.

From the article:

"...too many options create anxiety and leave us less satisfied. Could one answer lie in a return to the state monopolies of old?"

"consider jeans. Once there was only one kind, says Schwartz – the ill-fitting sort that, fingers-crossed, would get less ill-fitting once he wore and washed them repeatedly. Now, what with all the options (stone-washed, straight-leg, boot-fit, distressed, zip fly, button fly, slightly distressed, very distressed, knee-holed, thigh-holed, knee and thigh-holed, pretty much all holes and negligible denim), Schwartz feels entitled to expect that there is a perfect pair of jeans for him. Inevitably, though, when he leaves the store, he is likely to be less satisfied now than when there were hardly any options."

"Corbyn’s political philosophy suggests, what we need is not more choice, but less; not more competition but more monopolies."

Not to defend Apple, but the flip side is trying to figure out which of Dell's 30 or so monitors are current (and which have which connectors). Apple has one monitor (a bit obsolete and a bit overpriced), but you can quickly decide for or against it.

Too many choices may be stressing, but I think you lose out with too few choices too. If you need a specific size monitor to fit a space and the one monitor Apple has does not fit that space, you are SOL.

As other commenters have noted, this benefits Apple more than the average consumer. They can offer one or a couple of options, overprice them, and make a lot of money. Ideally, on such a big purchase (although for mobile devices a lot of the cost is not immediately apparent because you pay comparatively little upfront), someone would seek to reduce their choices by doing research on the various options available and deciding which would work best for them. For the monitor example, first filter by screen size, then filter by resolution, then connectors available, etc. for all the features that are important in that case. The options that are left are the best options available in the judgement of the person making the purchase, and then the decision between a handful of options becomes much easier. They can save money by getting only what they want.

Quickly deciding for or against just the one option benefits Apple the most. You end up trading money for ease of choice. I for one would rather keep my money in exchange for extra research, but it seems today's culture has an extreme phobia of stress (which is a whole other dicussion in itself).

Sorry to pick out one tiny point from your post, but, I truly don't think that much of anything they sell is "overpriced". It's more expensive than competitors stuff, but their stuff...sucks.

When I think about the quality of a shitty Dell, HP, ASUS (enter your choice of brand here) laptop computer that can be bought at 1/2 the price of an Apple product, and how it will probably have a totally dead battery in a year. And that half the keys on the keyboard won't work. And the hinges for the monitor will be close to severing. And that I will have had to hack together a *NIX environment that sort of functions 50% of the time. And that the trackpad will suck. And it goes on.

I will gladly pay for Apple doing the work for me, giving me a machine that will last for literally years without fail, getting me a solid dev environment from day 1 with little to none of my time and effort spent.

RAM, disk, and flash upgrades are overpriced. Other than that their kit is competitively priced.

I guess my position is in the middle.

Apple has only one monitor, and it is clearly out of date (not ultra resolution, not of same body type as current Apple products). So I quickly figure out I don't want it with no stress.

I am more likely to buy a Dell monitor. But I would be even more likely if the website was more oriented to the task of telling me which monitors are current in each class.

I don't think it was so much choice, but complexity in an organization and the associated costs. He (rightly IMO) focused on Apple's strengths and fought the bureaucratic malaise that plagues so many large organizations.

“This gave us the iBook and iMac machines (consumer), and the Powerbook and Mac Pro machines (professional)”

Small nitpick: the Mac Pro series didn’t exist until Apple switched over from PowerPC processors to Intel in 2006. What you meant were the PowerBook and Power Mac machines.

Also Rails' success, and any other tools that simplify decisions by an order of magnitude or more.

You forgot the iPod!

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