Thursday, January 18. 2007Ship or Shut UpLets have a look at a development trend that seems to be doing the rounds these days in both software and hardware. How a simple idea can gather momentum initially, and then some mould and fungii, and then a ton of other crap that no one wants as well. Of course all this crap slows the development down, which in turn leads to speculation that your idea is even more revolutionary than it appeared, which in turn makes the boss want to add the new hypothetical features, which makes the product late, which means more speculation, you get the idea... What arrives is a comical hybrid of every nerds predictions of what should have arrived, either that or you end up exactly like Duke Nukem Forever, 10 years in development, and nothing to show. January 2007
Meanwhile back at Crescendo Incorporated...
January 2008 - Slashdot gets in on the case
The nice guys at Digg.com
Slashdotted, again?
Advertising hits the airwaves
So goes that story anyways. 9 times from ten pre-announcing a product is setting yourself up for a fall. The only real escape is if you have the sort of iHard fans who will be happy no matter what you present. Unfortunately most companies don't create that sort of consumer loyalty. As a general rule, "Let the arrival of your product create the hype, Apple can do it differently, but you are not Apple.".* Linkage
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Glad you point to the article on Fibonacci numbers - since that is just about the worst use of recursion, changing an linear problem (almost, see below) into an exponential one.
It is actually instructive to look for ways to beat linear, such as memoization. On "almost": If the numbers get so big you start to use multiple precision, the additions start to take about log(N) time, so I suppose the iterative approach is really N log(N). Still better than 1.62**N.
champagne blog writing! this is brilliant des. best thing i've seen in ages.
excellent blog post. Must have taken you ages to get all the slashdot, digg, and reddit pages done up, so fair play.
You're the second person who said that
 In short, no. It's very easy to change text in an image. I did it using MS Paint, but in hindsight there is a far far easier way. Goto the webpage you want to edit. and put this in the url bar and press return... javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0;
"Let the arrival of your product create the hype, Apple can do it differently, but you are not Apple."
Huh? I really don't get the reference to Apple here. Apple is the absolute poster child for not announcing a product until it's finished and ready to ship. At just about every Macworld keynote, after Jobs demos a new product that no one had previously even heard of, he finishes with "and you can buy it starting today" (for software products) or "and you can buy it next month" (for hardware products). Apple is not the exception to your rule, they're the best example of your rule done right. The recent iPhone announcement is an exception to this, being announced a full five months before the planned ship date. But still, five months is not a long time; this is a product at the end of its development cycle, not the beginning.
I didn't say that Apple always break the rule, I say they can break the rule.
Apple is the poster child for not announcing things until they're ready, and for shipping on time too. I agree. iPhone, Apple TV, iLife 07, and iWork 07 and Leopard are exceptions. Apple can do it, and get away with it. The average Joe Soap can't. Thats all. Thanks for reading.
This is a bit rich coming from the guy who brought us NAKATOMI, don't you think?
Well Gus, you do have to remember that Nakatomi was a pisstake.
You can read more about it on the blog. (http://blog.nakatomiweb.com).
Gus, I would imagine that was the whole intent behind Nakatomi - to satirise this kind of thing.
By way of balance, I would point out that if you don't market your product at all before you launch it, you're not going to have a very good "opening weekend", so to speak. I don't know much about marketing, but I would imagine that's not always a desirable situation.
Well there is certainly nothing wrong with pre-annoucing a shipping date for a completed product.
It's one thing to say "I've developed excellent software that auto-detects peoples faces in photographs. Here is a demo of it in action. I will release it next month". It's another to say "I've developed some amazing software using IR techniques. Check back for the details". If you fill in the blanks, the bloggers won't do it for you. I wouldn't call the usual "We've done something amazing, check back for more" good marketing, or even marketing at all. For example, check this site... http://www.mockingboard.com Bad idea. Bad bad idea. Zero information results in tonnes of speculation. Thats the scenario I was rallying against. |
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My name is Des, I'm the UX Lead and COO of Intercom, a fantastic CRM & messaging tool for web sites and web software. Keep in touch
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Well it made me laugh . I've been here myself a few times with internal projects and "Real Actual Shipping
Tracked: Jan 20, 01:46
A quick tip for website designers. No matter how cool your website or web application is, if a visitor can't work out what the hell is going on in 3 seconds, they will leave. There are very few exceptions. There's something to think about before you add
Tracked: Jan 26, 01:15