1.0 Is The Loneliest Number | Hacker News Reader

1.0 Is The Loneliest Number

ma.tt

142 pointspowdahound27 comments

This is going to sound fanboyish, which I hate, but there's a valid point in here:

At least as far as major new product categories go, Apple doesn't ship a Minimum Viable Product. They ship a Minimum Earthshaking Product. Anything that's strictly necessary for their new product to be earthshaking (multitouch, the little touches on the iPhone UI like the rubber band inertial scrolling) they will spend years to perfect; anything that's a niggling little feature (copy and paste) they'll leave for the next version.

In the Kano Model this is called an exciter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kano_model

The greatest problem with Customer Development and the concept of the Minimum Viable Product is that there is no rigorous classification for quality and value.

A great book to read with respect to product management is Agile Product Management with Scrum. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321605780

There are also slides here: http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/system/presentation/file...

The trouble with this analysis is that the 1.0 iPod wasn't "rudimentary", it was simple. Likewise the original iPhone, which was so rudimentary that a year later, the only competitive devices looked just like it.

If you're going to ship a great product and then improve on it at a terrifying pace, then yes, your original version is going to look dated pretty quickly. But using Apple as his exemplar gives weirdly short shrift to the incidental detail of first shipping a great product, regardless of how it looks in hindsight.

I think rudimentary is a good descriptor in this instance.

It can mean "being in the earliest stages of development" or "basic; minimal"

No product which cleans its competitors' clocks from the word go can be fairly described as rudimentary, regardless of the competitive landscape a decade later. If the motion picture cameras Chaplin was using ninety years ago seem rudimentary now, it's because our context is different. At the time, they were bleeding edge.

I sympathize with trying to motivate people to ship sooner and faster, but he's painting his examples as if they weren't world-beating hits, which only took time to go from solidly profitable to gargantuanly profitable.

In the original essay I used the word "basic" there which is probably closer to what I meant. Simple, but not simplistic.

I might be missing the timeline but wasn't it until iPod worked with Windows that it really took off?

Another way to look at Apple's initial 1.0 tablet and phone are that they got it right.

This will be more obvious in about three years, but at the time of the 1.0 release other phones and tablets looked like a lot of things but nothing like the iPhone 1.0 and the iPad 1.0. Already, the competing phones look a lot like the iPhone 1.0 and the competing tablets will look a lot like the iPad 1.0.

That is what Apple is doing that no one seems to be able to, getting 1.0 so on-the-money right that competitors have no choice but to follow as best they can.

"How painful it must have been to have everyone criticizing them for all the flaws they had already fixed "

I can so see that. Any established hardware company is working 2-3 iterations ahead when they launch a product. It has always boggled me that Sony is working on a PS4 while I'm playing a brand-new PS3. Or that intel is working on a chip 2 generations more advanced than the one I just bought the first day it was released.

I mean, I understand -why-, but it still seems like the world is slightly crazy for it.

They're already working on Gran Turismo 6 when GT5 hasn't been released yet... a victim of the "just one more thing" syndrome.

Quite possibly the best analogy you have ever read:

"Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there. That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it’s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world."

Other reasons to ship early:

- Users love to see products continuously improving. They'll often think more highly of you for adding requested features if you already had them in development.

- You can use releases to generate buzz.

- It's easier to track the effect individual features have on your metrics.

- Scaling :)

It is often mentioned that it is good to ship early. And all the points obviously stand since we have so many working examples. However, my question is: How many products have failed because they were shipped to early? And does this happen often? Is there a way to found the ratio?

Could it be possible that we only notice the examples of success, and fail to recognize the cases where the product failed because it wasn't polished enough?

Is it even possible for a product to fail because it was released to early, or are there other (hidden?) reasons?

It happens with videogames all the time. Developers get pushed to hit an unrealistic ship date, the game gets panned by critics, fans revolt, when 6 more months could have fixed it.

"A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever." -Shigeru Miyamoto http://www.iwise.com/PW9YU

That said, this attitude is coming from an era when it was difficult to update games after release, so I'm not sure to what extent it still applies.

Yes but if they reduced the feature set and focussed on getting those right (maybe even producing a different game for 1.0) then they wouldn't have a bad game, they'd just have a different game.

when 6 more months could have fixed it.

Only if you have enough cash to pay everybody for 6 more month.

It depends if you have an existing customer base. If you are starting out with nothing releasing early is part of your marketing strategy. It turns some of your earliest users into your evangelists and gives you real feedback. If you have a large existing base releasing early needs to be weighed against how your customers perceive the quality of your product.

The release early and release often is an often repeated mantra, the problem is that it's only about half true and mostly misunderstood.

The reason for releasing early is often stated as that the user feedback will guide your product and design. The problem is that user-driven development is a crapshot, as Henrik Ford famously being quoted: "If I'd given people what they asked for I'd built a faster horse".

The core idea of your product needs to be in place and well implemented when you release, you don't need all the features but first impressions do matter. The main reason for releasing early is that most people can't recognize a good idea so it's better to release early than toil on some idea for years before realizing that you're the only one finding it useful

First mover advantage is highly overrated, after all, apple didn't build the first touch-screen smartphone, they simply built the "first" one offering a great experience.

So find a balance between polish, features and time to release, don't just release something half crappy to see how people react. The road to success is paved by ideas that were basically good but were implemented poorly and then discarded before given another chance.

"if you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long"

Fantastic quote. I'm going to put it on my wall ...

I was going to post that here too. What a great quote.

Yep, it sure is a great quote, shame he didn't attribute it to Reid Hoffman, who has been saying it since at least 2006: http://www.cambrianhouse.com/blog/startups-entrepreneurship/...

"if you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version, you waited too long."

We're about to ship our site and this couldn't have come at a better time, very poignant post.

There's still a part of me that wants to wait for feature X before going live but I've started to realise this is just fear. Fear that it won't get the response we'd like but that's all it is, fear.

We're going to ship the product we've got and if it doesn't take then we'll keep doing what we love and iterating.

Release early and often is a highly useful mantra. It's too bad the message is so bogged down in one infinite loop religious zeal. You don't have to follow apple closely at all to know that they clearly plan and break launch dates regularly, sometimes for years on end. No question that a fair amount of that is caused by scope creep and its-not-ready-yet syndrome.

I love the design of the comments section. Is this a common wordpress theme on handrolled?

It's handrolled. Matt's themes are designed by Nicolò Volpato: http://ma.tt/2010/06/new-summer-design/

After each redesign, he releases his previous theme in the wordpress.org themes directory: http://ma.tt/themes/

I loved reading this in Do More Faster but I preferred the original chapter title: "Usage is like oxygen for ideas." If you enjoyed this post, the book is full of similar goodness. This was the best though :) Nice job, photomatt!

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