Comment by fudged | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fudged | Hacker News Reader

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Why would you ask that?

Did you hear about how Google dogfooded Google+ for months, and when it was released to the public, people used it entirely differently than they had used it internally?

It seems to me that Google is so stuck in the mindset of "Release a Beta, assess the adoption, iteratively improve" that they don't know how to make a product that people will actually want from the start.

Chrome took a while to be adopted because everyone was still stuck with useful extensions in other browsers. Wave had neat interaction, but failed the adoption hypothesis. Google+ correctly assumed the need for a sharing-centric network to replace Facebook, but botched the actual social aspect of it.

Google is the polar opposite of Apple in this regard. They need to learn to keep things under wraps and understand the userbase for the product before it actually reaches them. In the case of Google+, for instance, it's impossible to change the sharing mechanism that has been there from the start, as fundamentally flawed as it may be.

I don't see why everyone should seek to emulate Apple, it's the antithesis of the Valley mentality. Everyone else goes for openness, iteration, and lean mentality, not stealth and secrecy, it rarely works.

You can't always design products from the top down. Sometimes you have to run actual experiments and collect data. The Apple aura that they can sit in an ivory tower and perfectly craft things that everyone wants will fade away the first time they release a product that bombs.

Right now, they are successful, so everyone says go emulate them. That's a shortsighted MBA mentality, that there's this formula for success, and you just need to emulate the practices of others.

Apple creates bombs all the time: the G4 Cube, iPod Socks, iPod Hi-Fi, iAds. They create enough other things that don't bomb to make up for it.

But you're right that Apple's way is only one way, and it's non-obvious how to go about replicating their processes even if you wanted to.

If anything should be learned from Apple, it's every aspect of the experience should be considered part of the product, including anticipation and expectations. That can mean a big media event unveiling a top-secret project, or it can mean launching a developer wiki before the product is even finished. Either way, managing the experiences of your customers, even pre-purchase, is part of the job.

I think Apple's hype machine however can also lead to problems, because it can raise expectations so high that nothing they release can match it. You're already starting to see some of that. With both the iPad and iPhone, Apple is mostly just doing refinements now: change the radio, bump the screen res, bump the CPU clock. It's not disruptive or revolutionary anymore, it's just evolution.

You're already starting to see some of that now. Building excitement is great, but if you over do it, people will be disappointed.

Apple has no hype machine. The machine is created and operated by media, pundits and so-called experts and analysts. This probably helps Apple more than hurts, but the company gets some bad press just because someone dreamt up what will Cupertino release and then feel cheated when cancer-curing-iPhone-GazillionS does not show up.

And you are right about refinements. There is a nice piece just about that: http://tidbits.com/article/12856

This seems like a perfect example of overhype. Without tangible details about the device and it's actual capabilities, we are left to wonder what is possible, and many of us will be let down since you can't pack a thousand features into the glasses.

I highly doubt they will "pack features into the glasses". If I were to guess, they will pack them into a smartphone platform which communicates with the glasses over bluetooth. That is, the glasses will be a peripheral of the smartphone.

Also, nothing they showed was very exotic. Google already has walking navigation. Google already has Hangouts, Screen Sharing. Google already has Goggles image recognition. The only 'sci fi' element was the always-on microphone handling Siri-like queries. They could have showed a lot more crazy stuff: face detection, augmented reality tracking, augmented reality games. They didn't show anything that isn't technically possibly to achieve. It's rather mundane if you think about the features they showed as applications on your phone instead of displayed on your eye glasses. The only thing different is the input/output device.

Apple announced the iPhone 6 months before you could buy it. The initial version didn't do much beside fixed functions and Web browsing. It wasn't until the App Economy that it's potential was unlocked. People speculated for months about app development only to be told much much later that there was none. People speculated over flash. Over Java support. MMS messaging. In fact, I have an old post from 2007 exactly discussing all of this naysaying due to speculation: http://cromwellian.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_archive.html

I think Google has actually put forward a very pragmatic concept video that is fully realizable, albeit with latencies and delays and voice recognition accuracies that don't quite match up to the real world (but even Apple commercials show apps serving up answers faster than they do in reality)

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