product

If you ever think you have to be perfect with a product or service in its first release, I encourage you to watch the Match Game tv series on Amazon Video. The first episodes of Match Game 73 were horrible; Gene Rayburn wasn’t comfortable, the writing was extremely poor, and all the celebrities (except for Jack Klugman) seemed uncomfortable. Then flash forward to Match Game 75 (or 78) and you’ll see a much better show.

For another example, take a look at the original iPhone and compare it to what’s available now. It was revolutionary, but it was also a minimum viable product.

“Deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.”

~ Charlie Munger

A note from this long article about Google’s Rick Osterloh:

Former CEO Eric Schmidt calls this system “Ship and Iterate,” and in his book How Google Works he makes a consistent case for not even trying to get things right the first time. “Create a product, ship it, see how it does, design and implement improvements, and push it back out,” Schmidt writes. “Ship and iterate. The companies that are the fastest at this process will win.”

“To do the best design you have to live and breathe the product.”

~ from the book, Jony Ive, The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products

Here’s a long read about something most techies know: At Facebook, you are the product.

One lesson learned from Apple recently is that if your products stagnate people will start to look around, and when they do that they may spend their money elsewhere.

As just one small example of this, iOS got boring for me, so I started looking around and bought an Android tablet instead of a new iPad. These days the Mac and macOS feel stagnant — or worse than that, moving in the wrong direction by removing features like Spaces — so I’m looking at desktop alternatives as well.

2018 Update: As a result of macOS moving in the wrong direction (IMHO), I now have have a laptop and desktop that run Linux Mint.