Letter from the Carnation Company (1987)
pleacher.com
pleacher.com
So the next time you see an article on hacker news where the solution to some problem seems overly complicated, and you want to say, “Why not just do X?” Think about the ratio between height and width of a cat food can and evaluate whether you might be missing something.
https://asq.org/quality-resources/fishbone
I’m not an expert by any means. Just offering a suggestion.
I think the next hurdle would be coming up with a solution that sufficiently addresses these root causes.
I don’t understand your takeaway. This is an example of someone asking the obvious question and getting an interesting answer, which is what happens on HN. It sounds like you’re asking people to withhold asking these questions.
Versus the very common “Thats stupid, just do it like X”.
One meaning is "Obviously X is the better solution, and you're dumb for not doing X". The other meaning is "Naively, X would seem to be a solution, but I assume you have good reasons for not doing X. Could you please elaborate why you didn't do X, so I can learn something?"
I can't speak for other people, but when I ask a question like that, my intention is to learn something. However, many people seem to interpret it in the "you're dumb" way. I've also trained myself to receive that kind of questions in the kindest way possible - i.e. in the "learn something" interpretation. It tends to lead to much more civil conversations and less drama.
Look at it this way : if mr. Pleacher hadn't written the Carnation company "why don't you use a 1:1 ratio?", you and I wouldn't have learned these interesting things about cat food canning.
So my advice : when somebody asks "why don't you just do X", assume they understand you have good reasons, and want to learn. On the other hand, when asking a question like that, realise most people won't have that interpretation. Make it clear you understand there are probably good reasons, and you'd just like to understand them.
One half is that first-order reasoning seldom leads to the "right" answer, and that optimization opportunities don't tend to be the obvious ones. Context matters, and optimizing for one thing almost always comes at the cost of other things. The "I can find the right answer without data because I'm smart and I have calculus/bayes theorem/whatever" folks are seldom right.
The other half is that there's a lot of waste in industry because of missed opportunities for optimization, and companies that are good at going back to first principles and looking for those opportunities tend to be more successful in the long term. "We do it because of X" is often wrong, both because the initial reasons weren't always clearly analyzed (and often not quantified at all), and because the assumptions, underlying costs, etc have changed over time. We see this a lot in tech because the underlying costs change so much, but its true everywhere.
These things are in tension, because first-order reasoning or "entitlement reasoning" is both often wrong, and often a great way to discover opportunities for large optimizations and new ways of thinking about problems. There's great value in rising above the context and complexity and reasoning things through using broader principles and simplified models.
I suspect this dynamic will be with us forever. Falling too far in either direction leads to failure. If you ignore context, you'll be wrong on the specifics. If you get too lost in context, you'll miss big opportunities for optimization.
The Internet has made clear the sheer number of economists who are also epidemiologists, constitutional scholars and military affairs scholars. This carnation letter could be considered a more whimsical and innocent example.
Tesla is a chief offender at this. Automakers have known for decades that touch screens and center gauges are usability nightmares. But then Tesla made it cool and now everyone has to do it. Or the over-engineered nightmare that is the gull-wing doors.
In OP example even the 1:1 request is based on cost of goods, not consumer utility
Steve Jobs’ mythologized demands were in service of the consumer, while shouldering the manufacturing burden inherent in them
Please keep in mind that the same Steve Jobs championed the abomination that was the hockey-puck mouse.
He had absolute power, so he was able to create fairly “pure” renditions of his vision; for good or ill.
Of course they could have used a different shape from a hockey puck. The most important thing was that the mouse be new and fun-looking, to match the novel case design.
The iMac's design was important because it declared that Apple was on a new trajectory (no more boring beige boxes), and thus promised more new and wonderful things were on the way.
I think a citation is needed for this - my opinion is that in most cases Apple's design choices focused on doing things differently, whether that was an upgrade, sidegrade or downgrade. They tried to make sure their design choices were positive but there are enough examples of Apple changing things for seemingly no reason because they weren't broken. And a lot of other manufacturers followed suit because Apple remains a trend setter and consumers then started to demand the feature. It's less like leading a horse to water and more like leading a horse to a craps table and then assuming that because the horse likes you they'll consider that playing craps in the middle of the desert is a natural state.
All that said, being different and being innovators was Apple's brand, so failing to deliver strange design decisions actually would fail to meet consumer expectations... the consumer didn't demand hockey puck mice, but they demanded something different from regular mice and delighted in the new shape (for a while, until the ergonomics of the mouse became clear - but for quite some time people really celebrated those mice, at least where I grew up)
Apple has surely never engaged in change-for-change's-sake as you are asserting. If you step back and consider all the factors in the changes they make - developing high quality materials, reducing size and weight, optimizing yields, durability, integration of technical advances like bus speeds, resolution and energy density, thermal characteristics... on and on, there are probably a thousands more factors that inform the changes they make to any given product.
Not whatever hand-wavey dismissal you are asserting here. Sometimes their industrial design misses the mark, such as with the hockey puck mouse, or the charge port on the current mouse, but these are fairly rare when contrasted against the full spectrum of their ever evolving products.
And that's the whole point of that letter from Carnation. There is a lot more going on behind the scenes that drive these engineering decisions. Simply writing them off with a simple take totally misses the mark.
Or the glued-shut, unrepairable gadgets?
Or "Maybe you're holding it wrong"? Or firing the antenna guy after?
Or trying to eliminate cursor arrow keys so users would have to always use the mouse?
The mouse charge port that makes it unusable while charging is far from an isolated example. Apple changing something to actually benefit the customer at the expense of Apple is almost unheard of.
Same with the touch screen, I do think old-school buttons are pretty good but they were already on their way out before Tesla showed up. With a few exceptions, most car companies had already started pushing more and more things into a shitty touch-screen interface well before Tesla's implementation. I'd say that Tesla's implementation is significantly higher quality than any competitors by a long shot.
This is a lesson for anyone interested in shipping product; as opposed to just writing code.
Nothing spoils a good "first-order binge" like a nasty old speed bump of Second-Order Reality.
I am actually going through exactly that kind of stuff, right this very minute, on a project that is approaching ship.
Disruption is still possible, but it's not as easy as you might think.
Perhaps it's kind of a corollary to Chesterton's Fence; if everyone in an industry is doing something in a certain way, perhaps there's a reason you don't see.
1. Possibly due to complexity alone, or possibly due to the employee power that confers, please break out tinfoil hats as appropriate.
They are missing all the details and nuance that get them to where they are today.
Of course this isn’t always the case. Sometimes an application is just terribly designed.
An absolute gem of a statement.
These are just a few of the factors which must be taken into consideration when designing a can.
We get five things covered but -- Wait! --there's more.