Comment by cainxinth
3 months ago
It also only works if your product is quite good. I think we can assume a fairly normal distribution for the quality of products where the vast majority are neither very good or bad. An average company with average products will be more inclined to try aggressive sales and marketing tactics because they don't have a great product to help motivate sales.
I'd disagree - at the ends of the curve, there are a lot of products that are effectively identical, at which point it's a race to the bottom on price (often meaning a slow decline in features until things are "cost-optimised") unless they can bring another value-add to the table which is where salespeople come in. Some of the best companies with the best products have extensive sales teams because they don't race to the bottom on price - they outcompete on getting first to market of features that they only get to because they understand their customer pain points deeply and find out when the value add is.
I work in the semiconductor industry. A new chip might be designed to run 500+ different protocols, if not more. Coincidentally I had a meeting with one of our senior fellow lead architects the other day, who said a good 60% of those protocols came from suggestions by the sales team. These were requests by customers with super niche requirements you couldn't even imagine, even if you had an army of postgraduate architects who spend all day reading papers (which would be prohibitively expensive). Sure, a chip designer might know to put the latest USB standard on it. They might not know about some obscure broadcast protocol used by only 4 or 5 companies but is the backbone for almost every Premier League football game you watch on TV.
Good products are often only good because the sales team was out there trying their hardest to start a dialogue with a customer to win business, and in doing so listened to them and acted on that.
Love this anecdote. Having a really capable sales team that actually listens to customers unique needs, and feeds that back into a better product can be such a huge asset. Your sales team is usually a huge repository of unique customer pain and problems (opportunities!)
I disagree, almost all products are intentionally bad and only continue to get worse. Ironically, it's due to the free market.
There's too much competition in virtually all product spaces and so these products have to compete on price. The idealized free market philosophy is that consumers will buy higher quality products, but they don't, they almost always buy cheaper products. Any "quality" improvement is therefore used to make the product cheaper, not better. For example, if you design a new material that's 20% stronger then your product does not become 20% stronger, rather you use 20% less material.
But even that is just a break even approach, which doesn't actually work for very long. Your competitors are actively cutting quality, so if you're just breaking even then you're on your way out. So why don't customers buy from you?
Because of the limitations of humans. Humans can't perceive small differences and humans are forgetful. It's safe to cut quality by, say, 1% every year forever. Nobody notices from point A to B, and then by the time they're comparing Z to A they don't really remember A.
There exists a short period of time, perhaps a couple decades maximum, where a product category is getting better and higher quality. From then on until the absolute end of that product, they can only get worse in quality. The exception is products that are exempt from the free market for one reason or another.
> I think we can assume a fairly normal distribution
Sturgeons law applies more to enterprise software and products than any other space
"ninety percent of everything is crap" is just insufficient in describing how bad the solutions in this space are.
Five nines?