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Comment by mumblemumble | Hacker News Reader

Sort of the New Coke theory of CPUs. I like it.

For anyone who wasn't there: In the 80s, Coca-Cola had lost its crown. Pepsi was the most popular soft drink, at least in the USA. Coca-Cola responded by changing their recipe, to great fanfare.

It's often held up as one of American business's greatest failures. People hated New Coke, and later that year they brought back the old formula, under the name Coca-Cola Classic.

I think that that summary of the story misses an important point, though. After the dust had settled. Coke had regained its crown, and has held it ever since. So, while New Coke itself failed on the market, the event's long-term influence on the company's financial outcomes was overwhelmingly positive. To the extent that some people have claimed that the whole thing was just an exceptionally clever PR stunt.

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New Coke is a great example of design biases. Pepsi in the 80s was beating Coke year after year in 80s double blind taste tests of 2oz or so sample pours. Pepsi was hugely proud of this and it was a big part of their advertising.

Coke wanted to beat those tests, so they designed a soda that people loved much more than Pepsi under those same double blind studies. In an 2oz or so sample people adored New Coke over Pepsi.

In a 2oz pour (shot) the sweetness is a big differentiator, the one that stands out is pretty much always going to be the sweetest. (Like the Loudness Wars in music, there's a dumb human psychological bias in small samples for sweeter in taste or louder in volume as "better", despite both being awful for your health in quantity.) What Pepsi and Coke both seemed to forget in the 80s that focusing on these 2oz "micro-benchmark" test studies was that most people don't drink just 2oz at a time, the unit is generally closer to the 12oz can or more. When drinking more than say 2oz overly-sweet becomes a problem in how it lingers and you want a more balanced palette, which Coke Classic always delivered better than Pepsi.

The failure of New Coke will always be a great illustrated story of make sure you are designing for the right benchmarks (and sometimes micro-benchmarks especially are a trap).

I believe that deeper extension of this metaphor likely also applies to Itanium, they designed it for 2oz pour benchmarks where it sometimes got fantastic numbers, but most compilers got awful numbers in realistic real world workflows.

Hey, thanks for a new take on an old story. That makes much more sense than any other version I have heard over the decades.

FWIW, both New Coke and Coke "Classic" (aka new coke 1.1) both use high fructose corn syrup, which is substantially cheaper in the USA in industrial quantities due to huge tax-funded agricultural subsidies for corn (maize) farmers. These remain in place today (which is why everything in the US is sweetened with corn syrup instead of sugar).

"Old coke", as well as what is now known as "mexican coke" in the USA, used/use sugar.

New coke was the flag day for switching to a cheaper sweetener in the US market. When they switched "back" to coke "classic", they kept the new sweetener.

This article claims that Coca Cola switched to high fructose corn syrup in 1984 which was a year before the debut of New Coke

https://www.motherjones.com/food/2019/07/the-secret-history-...

When I first moved to USA from Denmark, back in the late 90s, the chemical, sickly syrupy taste of Coca Cola made me gag and I was very surprised in terms of how different it was from the European version. Then I found out that in Europe, they use sugar rather than corn syrup. It's amazing what the Americans will put up with.

Two things here.

First, people have done triangle tests on sugar- vs. HFCS- formulations of Coke (Serious Eats has a good one) and, while there is definitely a perceptible difference, the preferences aren't what you'd expect. People who go into these tests saying they prefer cane sugar Coke tend actually to reveal an HFCS preference in the test.

Second, formulations in different parts of the world vary in ways other than which sweetener they use. It's possible that regardless of the sugar involved, there might just be more of it in the formulation (or in the way it's delivered, since concentration systems also vary) in your least-preferred Coke instances.

Thomas' knowledge-dropping in a sibling comment is more in depth, but anecdotally: I prefer sugar coke after drinking HFCS coke in the USA for a few months, then prefer HFCS coke after drinking sugar coke in europe for a few months.

Non-lite/diet/zero coke is always sickly syrupy oversweet regardless of whether it's sugar or corn syrup. It's sort of what people are going for. I can't believe I used to drink liters of it a day growing up; I limit myself to a dozen servings a year or so (of the full sweet stuff) these days.

Might be a novelty effect there. We all tend to like new foods if we eat one food too much.

Well is the same with Carlsberg, they taste "different" around the world.

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