This reminds me of the infamous comparisons between the M16 and the AK47 assault rifles. The M16 is a superior weapon by almost every standard - it's crafted out of lighter, aeronautical materials, it has a beautiful, elegant design, it's far more precise and has far less recoil.
Except nobody cares. What people want is to pull their weapon out of a muddy hole after it's been there for a week, and have it reliably shoot thirty rounds.
That's what some people want. Some of the time.
Which I believe is the point of the article.
Unless you know all the circumstances of what someone needs a weapon for, you can't say the M16 is better or worse than the AK47. (People who don't have to store their weapon in a muddy hole or go weeks without resupply may and do prefer the M16 for its characteristics)
Simply: there is no universal measurement of quality for any designed product.
Even hammers have trade-offs in their design that prevent absolute quality measurements.
I disagree. That's what most people want most of the time. There are specialized situations where M16 is a better choice, but for the most part people want the AK47. The numbers speak for themselves - more AK47s were sold in the world than all other assault rifles combined.
There is no universal scale of quality, but if you're trying to hit it big you have to keep in mind what most people want most of the time, and it's usually not what first comes to mind.
more AK47s were sold in the world than all other assault rifles combined.
Don't you think that that is more due to price and availability than anything else. I imagine buying a case of M16s can be quite tricky in the middle of the mountains in North Pakistan, while you probably have at least two people in your circle of friends who knows I guy who makes AK47s in his workshop.
So to draw the AK47 analogy to its logical conclusion, If you want your product to hit it big make it easy to build give away plans on how to built it to everybody without any sort patent, copyright or royalty claims. Remember that the vast majority or AK47s bought are knockoffs and that the original company doesn't see a dime from those sales.
But you're already talking about two very fine guns. Just because you have to consider trade-offs at that level doesn't mean there's no qualitative scale at all, does it?
Yes and No. Sure, there are guns objectively worse than both the M16 and AK47 in any context. But beyond trivial examples of almost implausibly bad knockoffs, a universal qualitative scale remains impossible to define.
Perhaps it would seem less wild a concept if framed as:
you can't build a truly useful qualitative scale until you know the context.
You can trivially sort things into 'good' and 'crap' - it just won't get you very far.
Reminds me of the bit in Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance where he asks the Indian guy what sort of dog it is, and he says "its a good dog". Value judgment, not brand awareness.
I have an important chunk of video stuck on a Flip. The Flip's insidious custom format and the software it needs to install in order to do video transfers is keeping me from retrieving the video that I took.
I hate the Flip for this.
People keep confusing quality and simplicity. I didn't get a Flip because I'm fond of mediocre products, and if I knew it wasn't even going to work, then I wouldn't have gotten at all. I got it because it's simple, and simplicity has its own quality.
Some of the points in the article were good, but in the end, it sounded like it was starting to migrate over to the camp that believes that mediocrity is a good business strategy.
Fine. You might even be financially successful producing mediocre products and services, things that barely work, services that frustrate people but not quite enough that they actually decide to wage a crusade against your business.
But I'd rather see more companies offering excellent products and services, and including simplicity in their equation for quality.
I say that people still care about 'quality' and know what high-quality products are (from a designer's POV). But consumers care about products which produce high quality FOR THEIR USES. Flip phones produce good YouTube videos for instance with great form factor - if that's what a consumer cares about, they should go for it!
I think the great majority of people wouldn't know real quality if you showed them an example side-by-side with the thing they know. I think we often use price queues to figure that out.
And I think people have different needs at different times. I listen almost entirely to MP3s and Internet radio, except when I go to the symphony. I watch a lot of videos on YouTube and Hulu, except when I go to the movies.
High quality isn't something everyone wants all the time.
Reminds me of Negroponte's observation (in his book Being Digital from sometime in the mid 1990s). At the time, digital television was hung up in debates about what high-definition standard to use. He said that for most people most of the time, standard def was fine and that in focusing on a level of "quality" that most people did not care about, a lot of other potentially interesting and useful things you could do in the same bandwidth were not being developed. At least, that's what I recall now. It's been at least 10 years since I looked at that book.
Although it seems now that for most people HD is something they notice and care about. So perhaps that hints at the need for people to be trained to appreciate quality?
In other words, do they like HD because it's better or because they've been told that it's better?
I noticed a difference immediately when I saw an HD demo. It was in 1999, and I saw it at a science center (COSI, Columbus, OH). But some of the people I was with literally could not figure out which TV was which.
Except nobody cares. What people want is to pull their weapon out of a muddy hole after it's been there for a week, and have it reliably shoot thirty rounds.