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Comment by sanderjd | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't resonate with me at all.

First of all, all the most successful software products have had very high quality. Google search won because it was good and fast. All the successful web browsers work incredibly well. Ditto the big operating systems. The iPhone is an amazing product. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok; whatever else you think, these are not buggy or sluggish products, (especially in their prime). Stripe grew by making a great product. The successful B2B products are also very high quality. I don't have much love for Databricks, but it works well. I have found Okta to be extremely impressive. Notion works really well. (There are some counterexamples: I'm not too impressed by Rippling, for instance.)

Where are all these examples of products that have succeeded despite not valuing quality?

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> Where are all these examples of products that have succeeded despite not valuing quality?

Windows products since the 2000s. They may have won on quality early on but today succeed mainly via compliance controls and switching costs IMO.

Also big legacy B2B digital systems of record. Pretty much any ERP. Can’t say firsthand but this is my impression of SAP products and Oracle products. Also Encompass, the system of record for a large majority of the U.S. mortgage market. Most medical software.

There are a lot of recordkeeping systems that have a massive moat from handling decades worth of nuance. Their “quality” by modern UX and performance standards is very poor but they handle all the nooks and crannies of their industry.

You're correct, so maybe there's a caveat. You need to have quality in the beginning during market capture mode. Once the customer is entrenched, you can then slack or even enshittify your product to some point. You're playing with friction that may lose the business, but comfortable customers can tolerate quite a bit for the familiar.

Yep, this version of the argument does resonate.

The vague "prime" does a lot here, but iPhone is buggy, Facebook is buggy, the OS continue to fail at basics like window management or text editing, definitely plenty buggy and sluggish (the notorious Settings app on a Mac) But sure, which such low quality standards everything is peachy.

Thanks for calling out Rippling. Pretty poor experience for me as well.

>> Where are all these examples of products that have succeeded despite not valuing quality?

Salesforce. Quickbooks. Any Oracle product.

Blackboard's software and systems.

Fucking Windows.

Virtually every microsoft product is proof that quality has close to nothing to do with success in software.

Ryanair flights.

Sorry but facebook a "high quality product"? It was a bug infested shitshow from beginning to this day, across multiple computers, spanning more than decade and a half. Not just me. Literally their only value is social graph, which they have by luck of being first, nothing more.

These days when site crashes I welcome it as a gentle reminder to not spend there even that 1 minute I sometimes do. Anyway its now mostly fake ai generated ads to obscure groups I have 0 interest in, I keep reporting them to FB but even for outrighr fraud or scams FB comes back to me with resolution in maybe 2% of the cases. EU on you you cheap scammers.

But in the past I used it for ie photo sharing with family and friends, since I was super active in adventuring and travelling around the world. Up to 10k photos over a decade.

Photo albums uploads randomly failed, or uploaded some subset, some photos twice. On stable fiber optic, while flickr or google photos never ever had such issue. Cannot comment, some internal gibberish error. Comment posted twice. Page reloads to error. Links to profiles or photos go to empty page. Sometimes even main page just empty feed or some internal error. I saw the sentence "Something went wrong" hundreds or maybe even thousands of times, it became such a classic 500 variant. And so on and on, I dont keep list around. Always on Firefox and ublock origin.

I would be properly ashamed to be ever profesionally linked with such, by huge margin, worst technical product that I ever came across. That is, if I could somehow ignore what a cancer to society I would be helping to build, but that would require advanced sociopathical mental tricks on myself I am simply neither capable nor willing to do.

Nah, FB doesnt deserve to be mentioned in same category as the rest, on any reasonable basis.

Fair enough, but note that they weren't first.

I agree that my impression of facebook when I started using it (around '04) I think, was "what is this, like seven php files? I could make this!", but by the time of their IPO I thought it was pretty well polished. It's accumulated a lot of cruft since then.

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