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Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

> Winners seem to be randomly chosen, almost!

Winners are mostly chosen by effort put into marketing, not product quality.

My utterly cynical take is that the way to win with software is to put as much money and effort into marketing and sales as possible and as little as possible into the actual product. Especially B2B seems to do this a lot in practice because that software is bought based on checklist items and demos by salespeople.

I don't think this is a cynical take. I think it is the rational take. Anyone not doing this is going to be outcompeted by those who are.

I also like that we try to build 'ratings' sites that end up being coopted as yet another ad sales vector.

You're starting to realize why eng is a cost center.

The goal of the business it to make money, not make a great product.

They will make the product better if and only if it will lead to greater profits.

If you can make more money hiring more sales and marketing people to sell a broken product than hiring more engineers to fix the product, you're going to hire more sales and marketing people.

I...can't fault this, as much as I hate it. This explains so much.

More broadly: products are the way to make profits, but they aren't the purpose of the venture.

So don’t work at a company that sells a software product to other businesses. Work at a company that has a business of its own, which runs more efficiently when the software is better.

You're still in a cost center.

Larry Ellison has that cynical take too, and it made him rich.

It's a balancing act. You may or may not agree that Oracle products are a good value but they generally have some good engineering behind them. Oracle also puts a ton of money into sales and marketing.

I think it's been true for some time that Oracle Database has largely been in maintenance mode, with relatively little new engineering or refactoring being done and more resources devoted to sales, marketing, and of course license compliance enforcement. "More lawyers on staff than engineers", as the anecdote goes.

"Don't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison."

That's an observation opposite to mine. Having worked at several B2B and several B2C companies, I've found that the latter products were better and more interesting because they served an actual need. Sure, the B2C apps may have had better UX and design and maybe even more flashy tech, but they were frequently engaging in dark patterns and generally not that concerned about whether the users were actually benefiting (e.g. a language learning app with no research into how well users learn, but a big marketing budget and all sorts of conversion and retention metrics).

Have definitely someone say, "well I tried Drizzle because the creators are good at shitposting on X."

I do not understand that at all, but maybe my reality is just substantially less mediated by "the conversation" that I don't get it. (Drizzle is fine BTW)

I think that's actually not unusual or even wildly unreasonable shopping behavior in a market where:

1. Many if not most "customers" (JS devs) don't understand how to evaluate quality deeply (thus, quality signals aren't trustworthy, making evaluation more difficult and resulting in further acceptance of using unevaluated products)

2. There's an overwhelming number of choices, with deprecation, replacement, and eclipsing all being fairly common - potentially even year-to-year

You kinda just have to try stuff out and work with what you've got.

What I translate that to is: "Drizzle is top of mind for me". If they tried Drizzle and it was shit, they would likely look for something else.

Winners are chosen because they tend to solve a problem easily for the average person. 99% of people don't care if it's written in rust or has the proper abstractions. It's, "I need to do X" and the winner does X easily. People here are very out of touch.

It's a little worse than that. Given two products that seem to do the same job on paper, the one with glossier marketing will win even if it is an unreliable pile of crap in practice.

Counter-example: all the people that were using CentOS 6/7 instead of RHEL. Not that Red Hat did tons of marketing, but it was more than zero.

Not a fair example because one was free and the other came with a monetary cost and a lot of friction in addition to that.

People weren't choosing CentOS on technical merit. CentOS had glossier marketing than RHEL did.

One was free

If no one hears about something, no one will use or buy it. It doesn't matter how well it does by any metric. Marketing will always matter.

Cost as well. Most people don't want to invest in a high quality product unless it's something that is clearly miles above the competition (e.g. Vitamix, Herman Miller or Leap Chair, etc.)

sometimes having a higher quality product makes the marketing easier

Or someone paid someone $5 and got thousands of stars

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