Andrew Chen: Are you a product fanatic?

On never using popular products:

If you refuse to use certain tools because of religious or ideological reasons then you're just narrow-minded.

If you're an start-up entrepreneur, you're in the situation of having to efficiently allocate scarce resources, ideally you should be using the best tools for the job without arbitrarily limiting yourself, no?

Luckily for them, the guys at Google decided to go ahead using boring uncool commodity hardware instead of the 'better' fancy machines.

Andrew, all of your points are basically a slam in the face of this site's readers. You obviously read HN a lot so you took some headlines that hit top spots here and turned them against HN users.

Are you saying HN readers are wrong?!

Why is it if you're a lawyer, accountant, banker, or surgeon who insists on precision and correctness, you're called "skilled" or "competent"?

But if you're a hacker who insists on precision and correctness, you're called a "fanatic"?

I think the author is omiting one important fact in those successful businesses : Time. Yes buddy, when Microsoft and walmart first launched they were only cool to a small group, but quite lame to the vast majority. They could not understand the value of home pc or super sized stores that cuts the local shop business in half. Maybe not so much for walmart since it provided instant gratification through cheap prices. It took time to educate the users, and the masses before getting significant traction. Google was the cool product a few years ago, today it is becoming more and more lame, but more and more attractive to users. Therefore, if you are product fanatic and you got techcrunched now you have earned the respect of the small smart crowd, but you need to educate the bigger crowd. Explain them that their vision has been imperfect and you are here to change that and this is how.... Now Personaly I don't like to work on something revolutionary (unless it could involve redistribution of wealth, world hunger or something similar), I don't want to pay for someone else's r&d, but I encourage anyone who is working on something cool to keep going, because I may sell for 5 millions in 9 months, but you will sell for 10 billions in a few years and you will be more likely to finance research for mental disease such as (greed).

i like the part where you put numbered lists with bullets, it really accentuates the point.