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Comment by didibus | Hacker News Reader

There's a quote I forgot that says: "There is a Quality to Quantity".

I think it was from a Chinese person, as they took manufacturing of cheap things, low quality stuff, but managed to scale it to mass quantities.

I agree with that, it may not be reliable, full featured, well designed, ergonomic, etc. But quantity enables things and thus is a quality in itself. It allows use-cases that benefit from accessible cheap software. Those use-cases were not viable prior, because cost/time was prohibitive.

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> There's a quote I forgot that says: "There is a Quality to Quantity".

> I agree with that, it may not be reliable, full featured, well designed, ergonomic, etc. But quantity enables things and thus is a quality in itself. It allows use-cases that benefit from accessible cheap software.

The underlying assumption here is that the quantity delivered is acceptable and does not worsen the customer experience. To continue with the manufacturing domain example; if a company produced widgets quickest and for minimal cost, yet had more lawsuits stemming from their use, is that the kind of enabling an organization should pursue?

> Those use-cases were not viable prior, because cost/time was prohibitive.

Sometimes a cigar is a cigar and sometimes what is thought to be a desirable use-case is prohibitive because, once sufficiently vetted, it is neither cost nor time which disqualifies it.

You're just saying quantity is not always a desirable quality. That's true, and hence it's not every use-case that would favor quantity over other qualities. But there also exists those which do, and trading other qualities for quantity can be a good trade off.

> the quantity delivered is acceptable and does not worsen the customer experience

No, it will explicitly worsen the customer experience in other ways, but it will also give them a benefit: access to something they couldn't afford at all before.

Often attributed to Stalin in reference to the mass production focus of the Soviet war machine. https://quotees.co.uk/war/joseph-stalin-quantity-has-a-quali... When you treat scale as a design criteria, you get a different product

Ah interesting, it does say probably, so seems it's not fully confirmed. In any case, I guess my brain re-interpreted it in the context of manufacturing and making products and remembered it as that.

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