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Comment by icecreampain | Hacker News Reader

That anecdote does nothing to lessen my dislike of marketers and other similarly worthless people that value form over function.

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But isn't a better sounding boot beep also form? Isn't this really just somebody choosing form over form? Just because the engineer was an engineer doesn't make his aesthetic preference (a better-sounding boot beep) any more empirical than Jobs' aesthetic preference (no extraneous holes in the case).

Also, calling marketers 'worthless people' is a callow statement. I'm an engineer, but we build the things we make for people to use, so the people who help other people understand the value in what we make are far from worthless.

the people who help other people understand the value in what we make

I thought the discussion was about marketers.

If you need people to explain to other people why the stuff you build is great, then maybe the stuff ain't that great after all and you need propaganda experts to lie to people and fool them into buying your products?

Neither an automobile, a bridge nor a fridge require people telling me how those two objects can ease my life. It is immediately obvious to me - as all good engineering projects should be.

Apple is full of propagandists, according to you? Steve Jobs was the Joseph Goebbels of technology in his day?

You think the automobile was an easy sell when it first hit the market? Maybe you should read some automotive history. Laws were very restrictive about the first cars in favor of horses, and people needed some major convincing that cars were better.

Not just subjected to restrictive laws, but also considered in popular culture as child-killing machines, and it was a marketing campaign that created the concept of "Jay Walking", putting the responsibility on people to get out of the way of the car.

The (great) podcast 99% Invisible has an episode about it: http://99percentinvisible.org/post/47063460311/episode-76-th...

Actually an automobile did require a lot of PR to convince people it was better than horses. You just live in a world where everyone uses automobiles already.

If it wasn't for PR people then we wouldn't be engineers working on computers today. People initially didn't like computers either.

In both cases it wasn't immediately obvious why people would want to use these products.

I'm curious as to what you developed that was so immediately obvious to customers that you didn't need a sales team to become so wealthy and popular.

All of the things you listed have had (from your perspective) the greatest marketing of all: ubiquity. When you have something new, you do in fact have to show people why it's useful.

The function was already established: it made a beep. The entire discussion was around form. It's not form over function, it's arguably exactly the right balance between the two.

I wouldn't say that only those who care solely about function are the only worthwhile people, either. Unless you wear only woven sackcloth and eat only nutrient pills.

If you can't sell the form it's not going to matter what the function is.

I wonder, what amount of money goes to making sure the sound of car door sounds just right. Is it form? Is it function?

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