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Comment by jaclaz | Hacker News Reader

I may be wrong, but cherry picking a number of successful products and an equal number of unsuccessful products and then attribute to the one that "price first" tag and to the second ones the "not price first" tag doesn't seem to me a valid method of demonstrating anything, at best is anecdotal data (and with some major oversimplifying of both the reasons for market success or failure).

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Besides that, they keep saying things like "price first" but then talking about focusing on what customers actually want, like bigger cup holders. As far as I can tell bigger cup holders don't have much influence on the price of a luxury SUV.

It goes beyond what customers want to the intersection of want & willing to pay for. I find that in a lot of companies, there's a lot of "customers said they want x, so let's build it" vs. "customers said they want x and we've validated that they are willing to pay for that feature." If your customers are not willing to pay, how important was that feature in the first place?

This is what bothers me about many business books. It’s easy to look at the winners and say, in hindsight, that the key to their success was X, then find a few failures and, again in hindsight, say they failed because they didn’t have X. See: “Good to Great.” I’ll be impressed when any of these experts could predict the winners and losers in advance.

In Italy we say "con il senno di poi ..." that translates to "in hindsight" or "in retrospect" but that literally means "with the wits (or wisdom) of afterwards" that somehow is more expressive.

These experts are very good to pick good examples and make "vague" predictions - not entirely unlike economists and astrologists (not exactly the same category, but seemingly very, very similar in accuracy) - the key problem remains the oversimplification in attributing the success (or failure) of anything (particularly such a complex item as a car or a computer product) to a single (or a handful of) reason(s).

JFYI, here is Armand Gracious' take on the Internet, Linux and security:

https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/experts.html

His example for Asus sounds particularly off. According to him they outsold $299 product leaving money on the table. In reality in a hyper competitive market that is incredibly price sensitive the price point and the matching features were likely the main reason for it selling like hotcakes. Increasing the price even $25-50 could completely wreck that equation.

Yeah, as soon as I read that I assumed it was the EEE PC. The fact that it was $299 was the reason it sold so well. It wasn't a great machine, but it was pretty cool and good enough for a $299 laptop. Within the framework of the article, I'd argue that Asus nailed the "price first" idea and instead failed to predict just how popular a $299 laptop would be.

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