LG had a policy in place to reward managers with
bonuses or even promotions if their features were
part of the final product. The result was a constant
feature bloat, as everyone tried to add on one more
thing.
Incentivizing the right behaviors is incredibly challenging.
I think avoiding behavioral incentivization is impossible. You have employees. They (hopefully) want to excel in order to get things like promotions, raises, bonuses, praise from the creator of Ruby on Rails, etc.
You're inevitably going to incentivize their behavior somehow. I think it ends up simply being a matter of mitigating the worst possible outcomes, while angling for something that seems reasonably decent.
* Incentivize number of bugs fixed, and you'll get shitty code up front
* Incentivize number of features shipped, and you'll get a hodgepodge of features jammed into a product
* Incentivize peer reviews, and maybe you'll end up with a culture of glad-handers and politicians (I don't actually know about this one...I've never been in a corporate culture that embraced this)
I'd be very surprised if this policy's effects (bonuses and promotions to managers whose features appear in a shipping product, or whatever the analogue of a shipping product is) aren't in place basically all over the world, even where they're not part of an official document. As such, it seems a little tricky to blame the feature bloat on the policy...
You're right - most organizations reward managers who ship. Hopefully they're tying the incentive not to the act of shipping, but the outcome of shipping. Revenue, users, really fun launch parties, etc.
Hopefully they're tying the incentive not
to the act of shipping, but the outcome
of shipping
I'd say this is true for someone who has ultimate P&L responsibility (a senior VP, for instance), but it's definitely not the case for someone multiple levels below them. If you're a software developer responsible for a single feature in a huge app with hundreds or thousands of developers, your boss isn't going to gauge your performance with how the app does in the marketplace. They're going to look at the relative "success" of your feature. No shipped feature, no success.
Agreed, but the example is talking about managers. Not every manager is working on features that are going to have an easy-to-measure market outcome, but work that isn't purely strategic should have some identifiable metric of success beyond whether or not it exists.
I used to work in the "smart device" space at a small company called "Orb Networks" (since acquired by Qualcomm). All the CE makers we talked to were both terrified of being left behind by the pace of change and extremely resistant to changing anything. Everyone we talked to would readily admit that the current streaming media options (DLNA, service-specific "apps" or Airplay) were limiting for them and for customers. DLNA suck, the apps were expensive to develop and would often cover only a few TVs and Airplay was extremely expensive BOM-wise and restricted you on hardware partners. They would also agree that their interface was cumbersome and old-fashioned.
However, when push came to shove, no one was really interested in changing anything. The systems that exist are there due to a complex interaction between the various stakeholders in the product, least of which are the actual customers. There are huge challenges in sourcing components that: run as advertised, are priced competitively and will continue to be available into the future. Software is generally an after-thought, even if it's what the public sees.
The story of the WebOS team fighting tooth and nail to avoid the awful old menu system rings very true. Good luck to the people to stayed.
DLNA is everywhere but seems never to have taken off. Anyone want to elaborate on how or why it's so terrible? Has it been tripped up by DRM or is it just bad UI?
There are a whole host of issues. DLNA was defined back in 2003 and makes some choices that don't make a lot of sense now. It was designed to be used by set top boxes and computers in a mostly static environment - it doesn't really take mobile use cases into account. For example, the concept of streaming media does not exist in DLNA (it assumes that you'll always have the full file at the start). It also imposes a lot of UI choices (all DLNA devices are presented as a hierarchy of folders).
It's a standard that all DLNA providers implement and everyone does a little bit differently. Between devices from the same company it can work alright, but any time you need to connect up devices between manufacturers it's a crap shoot.
It's not really a bad standard, it's just an old standard, designed for use cases that already have pretty ok solutions (plug your computer into your TV, copy the files to whatever device you want them on, etc). It doesn't address the use cases most people have for their media now (i.e. can I play spotify on my TV).
Acquire a company, then do everything you can to sabotage it or ignore their expertise
Remind them they are just little guys now in the might corp empire.
Demand they launch a product whilst micromanaging them from a distant location that is already filled with people proven to be incompetent in product design.
Despite all this the WebOS team managed to launch a great product. Why? Probably because they love the product and want to share great work with the world.
I agree, except for the part about people being incompetent in product design. My take is that it can be generalized to be...
Acquire a company, then do everything you can to ignore them. Integrate them technically, but not socially leaving them completely unaware of the rest of the company.
Demand they launch a product while decisions are made from a distant location filled with people that don't know anything about what they are doing, and don't care because they have enough of their own work to do.
Next Stage -
Technically the company is integrated with many hiccups, the servers are on the correct domain, and the network moves have happened. Still nothing feels different except that they know they have some decision making that feels almost random.
Next Stage - Product Release
Product is released, and doesn't match any of the assumed standards from big corp. Everything is ripped a part for not meeting unknown and unknownable objectives. It is easy to do because the other development teams HAD to follow the objectives, and they didn't, so it can't even be CONSIDERED!
The remote company also can't defend themselves in discussions as most of them happen without them physically there.
- Next Stage
Team starts losing people rapidly. They aren't rehired locally, and are instead backfilled at big corp. Since there are fewer people, they can't do the full thing, and are then integrated with other development teams. The ideas together help build a product that can launch and reach acceptance, because the teams from remote know how to do it.
- Next Stage
The remote teams start going to conferences meeting people, they've had enough meetings with people remote they start to know who to go for. The big corp has just acquired a new even bigger company, so now you start to feel like more a real part of the company than even they are.
Your product was fine, and you start to move through the normal processes, just with everything driven by people who have done it before remotely. Some of the team members even move on to other parts of remote corp because they did particularly well.
Next Step -
Total integration has happened, most of the teams are different people, but there are a few guys that remember the good old days. You're now just another random development unit, you might not even be working on what you initially were acquired for. You're now a remote office, a fully integrated part of remote corp. You're just a development group, and you're more expensive at that. But hey, you still have jobs.
Cultural differences might also be in play here. East Asians tend to have a much higher tolerance for complex interfaces and lots of content to be seen on the same screen. I'm still not sure whether complexity is actually preferred over simplicity, but the fact is that people are very much used to it. It might have to do with how their newspapers tend to look like [1]. It's the look of something for the common people, the economical choice, while simple things are being seen as something for the nobility - well thought through but expensive, a luxury item. As an example, have a look at how suntory markets their normal [2] whisky versus their luxury brand [3].
I developed an app for webOS and was pretty involved in the development community. It really was a pleasure to work with.
The main problem developers had, even up to the HP acquisition was the lack of direct hardware APIs (access to the camera, etc...) and a late arrival for native development.
This seemed to really cripple webOS and I imagine that there was something about the architecture that made it hard to work with and move to new platforms, but I don't know.
It's pretty sad that almost everything about webOS starts with: "webOS was supposed to..." :(
I miss my palm pre... Best phone user interface i ever used and it was actually less sluggish than my galaxy running jawah with twice the computing power.
But I admit the small screen, bad battery life and lack of apps was kinda shitty too...
After they replaced google- with bing-maps i had to put it down for good :(
I don't. Mine had a nifty "feature" whereby one times out of five, sliding it shut would actually turn off the phone itself. As in, it would lose power completely and die.
I went through probably a hundred power-on sequences on that thing during the two weeks I owned it. I finally returned it to the store and bought an iPhone. Haven't looked back since.
My iPhone 4 when I received it would constantly shut down at 50% battery. That started two months after I bought it. Granted, I got it repaired, etc. but damn near every consumer electronic product runs into issues for someone. I never owned a Pre, but I always wanted to. Always had a soft-spot for Palm, mainly because of my lovely Sony Clie PDA back in the day.
Smart TVs are useless. I want a good screen, and a bunch of HDMI and USB ports. The only "smart" feature I want is a way to name what device the HDMI port is connected to.
Let my cable box/chromecast/Blu Ray player/Playstation be smart
one, and most likely it's made by apple or roku, because they appear to be nearly the only companies that can make a remote with fewer than 20 buttons.
I like my LG remote for its simplicity actually. Simply designed, functions sort of like the Wii Remote, and controls my cable box as well. This is the one I have:
+1 ... I kind of like the MCE remotes too, but even then tend not to use half the buttons... my LG and Vizio remotes are horrible by even that comparison... For that matter Chromecast really appeals to me. If only I didn't have to cast the full screen with bsplayer to do media on the local network through it.
It's really weird to call LG's webOS "a failed experiment" considering that everybody loves it (it's universally though of as the best SmartTV interface out there) and that their webOS TVs are selling like hotcakes.
Sure, the road there may not have been pretty at all, but it's the end result that matters.
1/3 webOS team has already quit. webOS as it currently is only the result of the CES deadline forcing LG to go with webOS rather than LG team. Even after success of webOS TV, LG is still going with LG team. webOS team's morale is low. They got lucky with launch. With the way things are, it's only going to get worse.
Anyone know more of the story? This sounds fairly one sided.
I know nothing about this and I'm just guessing, but I'd imagine that after Palm sold to HP and then at various times under HP's reign, a lot of people left. Perhaps a few stuck around that were handcuffed, in fact I'm sure some did but I'd guess a lot of high quality probably left.
Then when LG stepped up, it seems like it must have made for a somewhat difficult situation, HP's handcuffs would normally be paid out, right? So it's up to LG to renew as part of the sale, right? So I'd have expected another exodus but I'd also expect maybe some nice reasons for key people to stick around, no idea what these numbers would look like but I'd expect bigger than HP offered. Then as things under LG went on maybe those incentives didn't seem as appealing or something. Perhaps HP paid too much and the new incentives weren't as appealing.
Ironically, I'd think as for putting the product in front of people, the LG situation would be as good as the WebOS team has ever had, LG sells a lot of well made hardware products, they're serious. What I'd really think happened is WebOS's core team was depleted under HP, they sold it to LG, never reloaded and now there are gigantic demands on them that they simply cannot satisfy. That's rough, LG should double down and help them get some new talent that's hungry.
The idea that WebOS was going to "change LG" seems interesting...
Sure, the greatness of LGs webOS may be, if this article is accurate, a result of pure luck.
However, from LGs advertising it seems like they are very aware that the simplicity is webOS' biggest asset. I don't see any reason why that focus would change, even with a Korean team.
I don't think any success LG has had selling TVs has anything to do with the SmartTV stuff though. Anecdotal evidence and all, but I have yet to meet anyone where the SmartTV UI was even remotely a factor in which TV they bought. Heck, I have yet to meet anyone where the presence of SmartTV features was a factor in which TV they bought.
I would think that anyone who cares at all about watching Internet video on their TV would just shell out the $35-$100 to get a Chromecast, Roku, or AppleTV, if they don't already get the same functionality from a game console that they already own. I have yet to see any SmartTV which is remotely competitive with these devices, and they have the added benefit of not being baked into your display so you can upgrade or replace them as needed.
I'm a happy owner of an LG SmartTV and would recommend and buy again. In fact I'm disappointed they don't sell them in TV's less than 28 inches because I want a small one for the kitchen.
There is something very satisfying in having the Internet video services naturally integrated into the remote and just one button away.
Not to say that LG can't screw it up, but what they have today is a great product.
In many ways this is true, and in many ways it wasn't, I think.
webOS as a concept, way ahead, as an implementation, it had lots of prickly bits. Mojo (the UI SDK) was great to work with but only went so far. Palm and then HP tried to move forward with Enyo but came way too late, and they never delivered on promises of hardware access APIs.
Once it started changing hands, it was a lost cause, you just lose a lot of knowledge and passion when entire code bases get handed around to new teams. For a mobile platform to really do something good, it needs to be a few years ahead of the hardware it lands on. webOS was until HP acquired it, they had video recording before the iPhone (just barely) and the gesture area was perfect. The stuff Palm was working on right when HP grabbed them was also really amazing (synergy between devices among other things). But that overhead of transferring ownership made all these projects basically obsolete and in turn the OS :(
I also do not feel surprised. LG is known for good hardware. Actually I'm typing this right now on a Nexus 5 from LG and I'm so thankful that the software is controlled by Google. The worst decision is to copy Samsung... really stop that LG. Samsung is not a ideal example how to do it right! Simplicity of usage without too much compromise on features is what the World wants. Samsungs software is also ugly IMHO. I'm guessing LG is not seeing the world market... in Asia people are obsessed by Samsung devices like USA is obsessed with iPhones. LG has much potential but I would never buy a LG product (which is controlled by LG) because of their bad software and bad software support. It seems they even do not support their engineers well. :(
I do own a Samsung 'Smart' TV. I connected it once to the network and won't ever do that again. That leads to
- a forced software update
- gazillion 'apps' being forcefully installed
All of these
- aren't on the machine when you buy it
- cannot be removed without a firmware reset after a disconnect [1]
- are SO. CRAPPY. Really. Like the scum of the web. The worst of the worst. Think yellow press newspaper app, but lower
- are prominently displayed on your TV, even if you choose to install 'other things' (YouTube? Yeah, less important than, say, BILD. A despicable and ugly illusion of a newspaper in Germany). You cannot even _hide_ the crap.
So .. anyone copying Samsung for TVs is a moron in my world. There's no worse way that first 'smart TV' experience could've gone that I could imagine. You cannot, even if you try, make that experience worse.
(Don't buy Samsung Smart TVs, unless you don't plan to use the so-called Smart feature. They suck [2])
1: As confirmed by their customer service. That's "by design" and there's nothing you can do about it. I learned that from the hotline and unfortunately too late to return the TV (I .. didn't connect it for the first 3 weeks due to cable issues/a lack of a wifi adapter)
2: Disclaimer: Lots of the "I force shit down your throat" behavior seems localized. So .. that I can actually enjoy the crappiest content that the German language can offer in this particular case. Maybe it's a little better elsewhere, but the attitude still supports that Samsung, as a TV manufacturer, sucks balls. That is all.
Just so you know, you could've still returned the television. If a software update changes functionality to the worse, the product is no longer as advertised, and you are free to return it - after you have given them a chance to correct the faults (following german laws). Restoring to the old firmware and thus not having updates does not count, as that lowers the quality as well (as compared to the advertized state). We had that discussion with the PS3 Linux removal feature.
Besides, showing BILD in a prominent place and making that unchangeable shows that they really have not the slightest idea of german society. You can do that with the three million (normally uneducated) people who can stand this crap, but for everyone else that will cause an allergic reaction -> they did not even bother to do the slightest user acceptance study.
I'm trying to popularise the term "value-subtracted software" for this kind of bloatware. The dead giveaway is that it can't be removed; that means a third party paid the manufacturer to put it there, and it reduces the value of your television. In your case to the point of near uselessness.
I'm on one of these Samsung LED 3D blah blah Smart Apps TV.
Often our kid would ask me: "Daddy when is this (update) going to finish? I'm gonna miss..."
Oh, and I'm still waiting for Netflix / captions on it. For now the workaround for us, either the PS3 (noise & heat) or the ChromeCast (much easier to control from the phone).
My solution was a Pi with OpenElec. That's all I use right now, connected via HDMI. The TV is unaware that a network exists.
I bought 'Yatse' on Android and I can only recommend it (if you're into xbmc). I can not only remotely control the xbmc stuff, I can stream a lot of content (video, pictures, music) to the xbmc/TV as well.
Totally agree. I have a Sony but I'm also happy I've bought a cheap Chromecast which really makes the TV "smart"(er). Best (and cheapest) thing I bought for my TV.
And everybody pretends to not understand why apple's customers are as loyal as they are.
Why yes, I did want the shitty antivirus software whose vendor placed the highest bid to be so tightly pseudo-integrated with windows that it gives you free file corruption and nearly requires a re-install to remove! What other things could you shovel into my new laptop?
Samsung engineer here. This sounds awfully familiar.
As mentioned by mirkules, the waterfall model coming from our hardware divisions is transposed to pretty much everything. And if it were like the old-school 3 year development cycle waterfall model, it could be fine, but it's obviously not. Software and services are just seen as value add to our product line, that is renewed every year (or even every six months).
This why a project like Tizen has been such a disaster so far. You can acquire and hire all the talent you want, in the end decisions are made by VPs who only care about not being fired next year. Building a platform is impossible in such conditions. Add some conflict of interest into the mix and you have a Tizen phone being constantly delayed for no technical reason.
Hard to comment, but I'll say that this is fairly common in the world of Global companies. Good decisions vs. Bad ones, or decisions at all can often happen by chance more so than choice. Location, there are many variables that come into it. If you end up having a ton of talent, it all works out no matter what, but if you would have told me that before I had experience in it, I'm not sure I could have believed it.
10 years ago in startups, it seemed a lot like bootstrapping. Paying newish guys to fill in the ranks to not spend money. Now, more and more enterprise PHD guys are being hired by startups draining the talent pool. Will be interesting to see 10 years from now if that continues to play out, or if it corrects itself in some way.
I'd assume that has to do with the influx of capitol in startups. I used to think startups couldn't pay for Enterprise guys, but in the 2 years that's changed. Would be interesting to hear more thoughts from VC perspective if they see this as well.
webOS is the #1 reason I am considering LG for future TV purchases. If they screw that up then forget it. They will never be more than a second-bit player. And here I was hoping they would eventually get webOS back on phones. How sadly myopic can corporations be?
This article actually makes it sound like webOS is the best thing to happen to LG, at least on the software side, in a long time. And not because of the software, but because the team understands how to build software, and so if they start having success despite LG's culture, some of those models might rub off on the larger LG software organization. Then again, knowing how silo'd and difficult it is to change large companies, it may be that LG destroys webOS instead (in terms of causing such a huge culture shift that the team entirely disbands, or at least those responsible for the culture do).
This is a great article and even better timing for me: I just bought one of these tvs last weekend. A power surge fried our living room tv so we went to best buy, looked around, and ended up going with LG.
Had the best picture, best reputation, and their simple and intuitive webOS was the selling point. If the Korean managers would have had their way, I wouldn't have bought an LG.
Side discussion: is this an eastern vs western culture difference? Every Samsung device I try to use seems bloated to me too. Maybe it's just coincidence.
I am not surprised. I have, never once in my life, felt that a piece of software from a hardware OEM was well written. They tend to be universally highly buggy, heavily bloated, have highly confusing UI, prone to crashes and full of security holes. This includes software from Sony, Asus, HP, Samsung, RealTek, Nvidia, AMD, Logitech etc. I guess software development just not part of their culture and is an afterthought. The worst is that they bundle this software as a value add that the other OEMs don't have, thus wasting money on something that people almost never use instead of just discounting the price with that money.
My favorite UI gripe is having to get the idea to click on the folder icon on this screen to disable the front panel audio detection for a RealTek sound chip.
I used to work for a primarily-hardware company, writing software, and we suffered from much the same politics and software quality problems you describe. There are really two issues at play:
1) Hardware companies have to employ the waterfall model. Agile is not even a word in their vocabulary. This is because once a product is on the shelves or in the customers' hands, it is infinitely more expensive to recall and fix products. When all you have is the waterfall hammer, everything looks like a nail.
2) Culture plays a huge part. Senior management "knows best" despite your best efforts to convince them otherwise.
My boss once described it as "a huge ship that sails down the river. Once the ship is on its way, it is really hard to change direction or stop it".
This is why the Internet of Things terrifies me. You think these clowns wanna be responsible for promptly releasing security updates for the lifetime of every piece of hardware they've ever shipped?
More likely the mobile industry: no, you can't upgrade your ancient Android. You'll have to buy new IoT devices every year and throw the ones with security holes in the landfill.
Given the build date of the kernel on my phone and the publicly disclosed security bugs in the kernel fixed in later releases, I'd be amazed if any Android version (yes, including current ones!) is free of known security holes.
This is because, the guys calling the shots are still the old telecommunication OEMs.
Although telecommunications always had a very close relationship with the software industry, they see the customers in a different way.
Since the early days they would rather ship new phones than offer upgrades. Nokia was probably the only exception, in the models that weren't tainted with mobile operator firmware.
It only works for Apple, because they managed to get those guys out of the way. But they got their lesson and surely will not let others get away with it.
I've found one exception: the software on Panasonic Toughbooks was good when I used it. Well, it wasn't buggy, didn't seem bloated, didn't have a confusing UI, and didn't crash. It was not the greatest in UI design in every way (it was a bit clunky in a Win32 sense), but it was the first time I thought that the OEM software on a laptop was being friendly to me.
