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Comment by robertlagrant | Hacker News Reader

Don't disagree. Hard bit is knowing how to find that info out!

>Hard bit is knowing how to find that info out!

You'd have loved trying it pre-Web :-) I was a product manager in the late 80s/90s and I needed to do competitive analysis for pricing and feature prioritization.

One of our sources of information was an analyst firm that basically collected faxes of product briefs from ourselves and everyone else and then basically charged us large sums of money to send us copies of the product briefs for relevant products because we couldn't ask for them directly.

There was another firm that shipped us basically their own datasheets in a standard format of the products in a space (computer systems), which were often considerably outdated/inaccurate.

I sometimes say if I had to go back to those days, I'd quit in a week as I basically wouldn't have the information to do my job.

>I was a product manager in the late 80s/90s and I needed to do competitive analysis for pricing and feature prioritization.

I've only worked at one company that really went all-out on this. Samples were bought of competitive products, tear-downs and estimates on manufacturing cost, use of ICE-machines (where practical) to understand the underlying software to some extent. All in addition to studying usage, manuals, etc. Mid 1980's.

I think it was really useful, but then they also had a QA department that was a peer to and practically as large as engineering.

There were some firms like IBM who, I'm told, had massive competitive analysis teams including doing tear-downs, etc. We were actually a fairly large company (Data General) and we still didn't do a lot beyond talking with analysts who had mostly never touched the physical product--and customers of course. This was also a period when people went to events like Comdex and returned with literally a box (or boxes) full of paper.

At least Tracey Kidder wasn't breathing down your neck.

I joined DG a few years later than that though I knew many people in "the book" including Tom West who I sort of dotted line reported to for a time when NUMA servers were coming out. (For those who don't know what we're talking about, "Soul of a New Machine" is still one of the best books about product development ever written.)

Not only do we have the web, we have app stores with public reviews! In addition to easily learning about the competition, we get to learn what their customers think of their own features. Pretty magical!

I'm coming at this more from a B2B perspective.

Certainly there were computer mag reviews of products and I'm honestly somewhat split on the transition from "expert" and theoretically unbiased reviews to a much more heavily crowdsourced set of reviewers. Not sure I'd call modern online crowdsourced reviews "magical."

Mag reviews are definitely not the same thing as user reviews which are prompted during usage. If anything, expert reviews are useless.

When magazine reviews were something that was a seriously paid occupation they were often pretty good. The problem today is that they're often essentially algorithmic. Reviews in e.g. the New York Times review of books insert were generally better than random Amazon reviewers (though not always).

Author's co-writer here – there are a few common ways to get this information from public sources. Public documentation, press releases, analyst reports from places like Gartner or G2crowd, field reports from a sales team in an enterprise business are some examples.

Thanks for reading!

Analyst reports are a whole subject themselves - good, bad, and ugly.

They occupy a really strange place in the industry – relied upon by many, but heavily conflicted in terms of their incentives. The ritual and strategy of participating in something like a Gartner magic quadrant is worth a whole post in and of itself.

Thanks for reading!

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