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Comment by gdevore | Hacker News Reader

I don't think they are the same. We used to provide training for high-end medical devices. The manufacturers would often have a lot of features that looked good on a spec sheet but they were so complicated to use that no doctors ever actually used them.

Technically, they had the feature but the feature didn't help the doctors be better doctors. Features don't automatically translate to outcomes.

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You are comparing Garage Band to A High End Medical device?

    Technically, they had the feature but the feature didn't help the doctors be better doctors. Features don't automatically translate to outcomes.

How can you determine utility of a feature before it is built? Well the answer is you cant! And surely not for a High End Medical device!

In fact your whole argument is based on incorrect assumptions, well if you are building something like a GarageBand or one of the Me Too To Do list/Collaboration apps, go ahead sure do whatever you want. But when you are creating an EMR software or an MRI machine which costs Millions of dollars you better make sure that it has all types of features and customization capability.

The problem is that you are confident in your skills as a developer to predict the needs, While your hunch might be correct with software that is used in daily life, it might be totally wrong while making something that is not

Also "What people can do with your software" is a subset of "What software can do". Thus its the software that is the limiting case.

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