Comment by dahart
3 days ago
The dumbest and most obvious of realizations finally dawned on me after trying to build a software startup that was based on quality differentiation. We were sure that a better product would win people over and lead to viral success. It didn’t. Things grew, but so slowly that we ran out of money after a few years before reaching break even.
What I realized is that lower costs, and therefore lower quality, are a competitive advantage in a competitive market. Duh. I’m sure I knew and said that in college and for years before my own startup attempt, but this time I really felt it in my bones. It suddenly made me realize exactly why everything in the market is mediocre, and why high quality things always get worse when they get more popular. Pressure to reduce costs grows with the scale of a product. Duh. People want cheap, so if you sell something people want, someone will make it for less by cutting “costs” (quality). Duh. What companies do is pay the minimum they need in order to stay alive & profitable. I don’t mean it never happens, sometimes people get excited and spend for short bursts, young companies often try to make high quality stuff, but eventually there will be an inevitable slide toward minimal spending.
There’s probably another name for this, it’s not quite the Market for Lemons idea. I don’t think this leads to market collapse, I think it just leads to stable mediocrity everywhere, and that’s what we have.
This is also the exact reason why all the bright-eyed pieces that some technology would increase worker's productivity and therefore allow more leisure time for the worker (20 hour workweek etc) are either hopelessly naive or pure propaganda.
Increased productivity means that the company has a new option to either reduce costs or increase output at no additional cost, one of which it has to do to stay ahead in the rat-race of competitors. Investing the added productivity into employee leisure time would be in the best case foolish and in the worst case suicidal.
Which is why government regulations that set the boundaries for what companies can and can't get away with (such as but not limited to labor laws) are so important. In absence of guardrails, companies will do anything to get ahead of the competition. And once one company breaks a norm or does something underhanded, all their competitors must do the same thing or they risk ceding a competitive advantage. It becomes a race to the bottom.
Of course we learned this all before a century ago, it's why we have things like the FDA in the first place. But this new generation of techno-libertarians and DOGE folks who grew up in a "move fast and break things" era, who grew up in the cleanest and safest times the world has ever seen, have no understanding or care of the dangers here and are willing to throw it all away because of imagined inefficiencies. Regulations are written in blood, and those that remove them will have new blood on their hands.
Some regulations are written in blood, a huge chunk are not. Shower head flow rate regulations were not written in blood.
Your post started out talking about labor laws but then switched to the FDA, which is very different. This is one of the reasons that people like the DOGE employees are tearing things apart. There are so many false equivalences on the importance of literally everything the government does that they look at things that are clearly useless and start to pull apart things they think might be useless.
The good will has been burned on the “trust me, the government knows best”, so now we’re in an era of cuts that will absolutely go too far and cause damage.
Your post mentioning “imagined inefficiencies” is a shining example of the issue of why they are there. Thinking the government doesn’t have inefficiencies is as dumb as thinking it’s pointless. Politicians are about as corrupt of a group as you can get and budget bills are filled with so much excess waste it’s literally called “pork”.
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I don't think regulations are enough. They're just a band-aid on the gaping wound that is a capitalist, market based economy. No matter what regulations you make, some companies and individuals become winners and over time will grow rich enough to influence the government and the regulations. We need a better economic system, one that does not have these problems built in.
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> 20 hour workweek etc
We have that already. It's called part-time jobs. Usually they don't pay as much as full-time jobs, provide no health insurance or other benefits, etc.
> provide no health insurance
I am so glad to live in Germany...
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It's a bad deal as a developer. I receive 50% of the money but still provide 70-80% value to the company.
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Yes, this is an observation I've made about the illusion of choice in so-called free markets.
In actuality, everyone is doing the same thing and their decisions are already made for them. Companies don't just act evil because they are evil. They act evil because all they can ever be is evil. If they don't, then they lose. So what's left?
Facebook becoming an ad-ridden disaster was, in a way, predestined. Unavoidable.
Indeed, and I don't know why people keep saying that we ever thought the 20 hour workweek was feasible, because there is always more work to be done. Work expands to fill the constraints available, similar to Parkinson's Law.
Probably because the 40-hour workweek was feasible.
It became feasible because back when the workweek was "whenever you're not asleep", a lot of people set a lot of things on fire until it wasn't.
This misses a huge part of the story, increase in productive, means a large economy, means more efficient use of resources, means compensation goes up over time. If you want to live the live of somebody that did 40h a week 40 years ago and only work 20h, you can already have most of that, and still have many options somebody back then didn't have that is virtually free.
The actual realization is that most people simple rather work 40h a week (or more) and spend their money on whatever they want to spend their money on.
Specially many of us here, can do so easily. I personally work 80% and could reduce it further if my goal was maximum leisure.
By far the biggest reason it doesn't feel that way, is that housing polices in most of the Western world have been utterly and completely braindead. That and the ever increasing cost of health care as people get ever older and older.
You're on the right track, but missing an important aspect.
In most cases the company making the inferior product didn't spend less. But they did spend differently. As in, they spent a lot on marketing.
You were focused on quality, and hoped for viral word of mouth marketing. Your competitors spent the same as you, but half their budget went to marketing. Since people buy what they know, they won.
Back in the day MS made Windows 95. IBM made OS/2. MS spend a billion $ on marketing Windows 95. That's a billion back when a billion was a lot. Just for the launch.
Techies think that Quality leads to sales. If does not. Marketing leads to sales. There literally is no secret to business success other than internalizing that fact.
Quality can lead to sales - this was the premise behind the original Google (they never spent a dime on advertising their own product until the Parisian Love commercial [1] came out in 2009, a decade after founding), and a few other tech-heavy startups like Netscape or Stripe. Microsoft certainly didn't spend a billion $ marketing Altair Basic.
The key point to understand is the only effort that matters is that which makes the sale. Business is a series of transactions, and each individual transaction is binary: it either happens or it doesn't. Sometimes, you can make the sale by having a product which is so much better than alternatives that it's a complete no-brainer to use it, and then makes people so excited that they tell all their friends. Sometimes you make the sale by reaching out seven times to a prospect that's initially cold but warms up in the face of your persistence. Sometimes, you make the sale by associating your product with other experiences that your customers want to have, like showing a pretty woman drinking your beer on a beach. Sometimes, you make the sale by offering your product 80% off to people who will switch from competitors and then jacking up the price once they've become dependent on it.
You should know which category your product fits into, and how and why customers will buy it, because that's the only way you can make smart decisions about how to allocate your resources. Investing in engineering quality is pointless if there is no headroom to deliver experiences that will make a customer say "Wow, I need to have that." But if you are sitting on one of those gold mines, capitalizing on it effectively is orders of magnitude more efficient than trying to market a product that doesn't really work.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU
> Investing in engineering quality is pointless if there is no headroom to deliver experiences that will make a customer say "Wow, I need to have that."
This. Per your example, this is exactly what it was like when most of us first used Google after having used AltaVista for a few years. Or Google Maps after having used MapQuest for a few years. Google invested their resources correctly in building a product that was head and shoulders above the competition.
And yes, if you are planning to sell beer, you are going to need the help of scantily clad women on the beach much more than anything else.
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It's not just software -- My wife owns a restaurant. Operating a restaurant you quickly learn the sad fact that quality is just not that important to your success.
We're still trying to figure out the marketing. I'm convinced the high failure rate of restaurants is due largely to founders who know how to make good food and think their culinary skills plus word-of-mouth will get them sales.
My wife ran a restaurant that was relatively successful due to the quality of its food and service. She was able to establish it as an upper-tier experience, by both some word of mouth, but also by catering to right events, taking part in shows, and otherwise influencing the influencers of the town, without any massive ad campaigns. As a result, there were many praises in the restaurant's visitor book, left by people from many countries visiting the city.
It was not a huge commercial success though, even though it wasn't a failure either; it generated just enough money to stay afloat.
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> you quickly learn the sad fact that quality is just not that important to your success.
Doesn't that depend on your audience? Also, what do you mean by quality?
Where I live, the best food can lead to big success. New tiny restaurants open, they have great food, eventually they open their big successor (or their second restaurant, third restaurant, etc.).
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In the restaurant business, the keys are value and market fit.
There is a market for quality, but it's a niche. Several niches actually.
But you need to attract that customer. And the food needs to be interesting. And the drinks need to match. Because foodies care about quality but also want a certain experience.
Average Joe Blow who dines at McDonald's doesn't give a flying fuck about quality, that's true. Market quality to him and he'll probably think it tastes worse.
If you want to make quality food, everything else needs to match. And if you want to do it profitably, your business model needs to be very focused.
It can't just be the same as a chain restaurant but 20% more expensive...
Pure marketing doesn’t always win. There are counter examples.
Famously Toyota beat many companies that were basing their strategy on marketing rather than quality.
They were able to use quality as part of their marketing.
My father in law worked in a car showroom and talks about when they first installed carpet there.
No one did that previously. The subtle point to customers being that Toyotas didn’t leak oil.
IIRC, Microsoft was also charging Dell for a copy of Windows even if they didn't install it on the PC! And yeah OS/2 was ahead by miles.
How was that legal? They were charging dell for something they weren't using?
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This is a massive oversimplification of the Windows and OS/2 story. Anybody that has studied this understands that it wasn't just marketing. I can't actually believe that anybody who has read deeply about this believes it was just marketing.
And its also a cherry picked example. There are so many counter-examples, how Sun out-competed HP, IBM, Appollo and DEC. Or how AMD in the last 10 years out-competed Intel, sure its all marketing. I could go on with 100s of examples just in computer history.
Marketing is clearly an important aspect in business, nobody denies that. But there are many other things that are important as well. You can have the best marketing in the world, if you fuck up your production and your supply chain, your company is toast. You can have the best marketing in the world, if your product sucks, people will reject it (see the Blackbarry Strom as an nice example). You can have the best marketing in the world, if your finance people fuck up, the company might go to shit anyway.
Anybody that reaches for simple explanations like 'marketing always wins' is just talking nonsense.
> What I realized is that lower costs, and therefore lower quality,
This implication is the big question mark. It's often true but it's not at all clear that it's necessarily true. Choosing better languages, frameworks, tools and so on can all help with lowering costs without necessarily lowering quality. I don't think we're anywhere near the bottom of the cost barrel either.
I think the problem is focusing on improving the quality of the end products directly when the quality of the end product for a given cost is downstream of the quality of our tools. We need much better tools.
For instance, why are our languages still obsessed with manipulating pointers and references as a primary mode of operation, just so we can program yet another linked list? Why can't you declare something as a "Set with O(1) insert" and the language or its runtime chooses an implementation? Why isn't direct relational programming more common? I'm not talking programming in verbose SQL, but something more modern with type inference and proper composition, more like LINQ, eg. why can't I do:
These abstract over implementation details that we're constantly fiddling with in our end programs, often for little real benefit. Studies have repeatedly shown that humans can write less than 20 lines of correct code per day, so each of those lines should be as expressive and powerful as possible to drive down costs without sacrificing quality.
You can do this in Scala[0], and you'll get type inference and compile time type checking, informational messages (like the compiler prints an INFO message showing the SQL query that it generates), and optional schema checking against a database for the queries your app will run. e.g.
This integrates with a high-performance functional programming framework/library that has a bunch of other stuff like concurrent data structures, streams, an async runtime, and a webserver[1][2]. The tools already exist. People just need to use them.
[0] https://github.com/zio/zio-protoquill?tab=readme-ov-file#sha...
[1] https://github.com/zio
[2] https://github.com/zio/zio-http
Notice how you're still specifying List types? That's not what I'm describing.
You're also just describing a SQL mapping tool, which is also not really it either, though maybe that would be part of the runtime invisible to the user. Define a temporary table whose shape is inferred from another query, that's durable and garbage collected when it's no longer in use, and make it look like you're writing code against any other collection type, and declaratively specify the time complexity of insert, delete and lookup operations, then you're close to what I'm after.
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Hm, you could do that quite easily but there isn't much juice to be squeezed from runtime selected data structures. Set with O(1) insert:
Done. Don't need any fancy support for that. Or if you want to load from a database, using the repository pattern and Kotlin this time instead of Java:
That would turn into an efficient SQL query that does a WHERE ... AND ... clause. But you can also compose queries in a type safe way client side using something like jOOQ or Criteria API.
> Hm, you could do that quite easily but there isn't much juice to be squeezed from runtime selected data structures. Set with O(1) insert:
But now you've hard-coded this selection, why can't the performance characteristics also be easily parameterized and combined, eg. insert is O(1), delete is O(log(n)), or by defining indexes in SQL which can be changed at any time at runtime? Or maybe the performance characteristics can be inferred from the types of queries run on a collection elsewhere in the code.
> That would turn into an efficient SQL query that does a WHERE ... AND ... clause.
For a database you have to manually construct, with a schema you have to manually and poorly to an object model match, using a library or framework you have to painstakingly select from how many options?
You're still stuck in this mentality that you have to assemble a set of distinct tools to get a viable development environment for most general purpose programming, which is not what I'm talking about. Imagine the relational model built-in to the language, where you could parametrically specify whether collections need certain efficient operations, whether collections need to be durable, or atomically updatable, etc.
There's a whole space of possible languages that have relational or other data models built-in that would eliminate a lot of problems we have with standard programming.
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Your argument makes sense. I guess now it's your time to shine and to be the change you want to see in the world.
I wish I had the time... always "some day"...
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Isn't this comprehension in Python https://www.w3schools.com/python/python_lists_comprehension.... ?
Clojure, friend. Clojure.
Other functional languages, too, but Clojure. You get exactly this, minus all the <'s =>'s ;'s and other irregularities, and minus all the verbosity...
I consider functional thinking and ability to use list comprehensions/LINQ/lodash/etc. to be fundamental skills in today's software world. The what, not the how!
Agreed, but it doesn't go far enough IMO. Why not add language/runtime support for durable list comprehensions, and also atomically updatable ones so they can be concurrently shared, etc. Bring the database into the language in a way that's just as easily to use and query as any other value.
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> I don’t think this leads to market collapse
You must have read that the Market for Lemons is a type of market failure or collapse. Market failure (in macroeconomics) does not yet mean collapse. It describes a failure to allocate resources in the market such that the overall welfare of the market participants decreases. With this decrease may come a reduction in trade volume. When the trade volume decreases significantly, we call it a market collapse. Usually, some segment of the market that existed ceases to exist (example in a moment).
There is a demand for inferior goods and services, and a demand for superior goods. The demand for superior goods generally increases as the buyer becomes wealthier, and the demand for inferior goods generally increases as the buyer becomes less wealthy.
In this case, wealthier buyers cannot buy the superior relevant software previously available, even if they create demand for it. Therefore, we would say a market fault has developed as the market could not organize resources to meet this demand. Then, the volume of high-quality software sales drops dramatically. That market segment collapses, so you are describing a market collapse.
> There’s probably another name for this
You might be thinking about "regression to normal profits" or a "race to the bottom." The Market for Lemons is an adjacent scenario to both, where a collapse develops due to asymmetric information in the seller's favor. One note about macroecon — there's never just one market force or phenomenon affecting any real situation. It's always a mix of some established and obscure theories.
The Wikipedia page for Market for Lemons more or less summarizes it as a condition of defective products caused by information asymmetry, which can lead to adverse selection, which can lead to market collapse.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
The Market for Lemons idea seems like it has merit in general but is too strong and too binary to apply broadly, that’s where I was headed with the suggestion for another name. It’s not that people want low quality. Nobody actually wants defective products. People are just price sensitive, and often don’t know what high quality is or how to find it (or how to price it), so obviously market forces will find a balance somewhere. And that balance is extremely likely to be lower on the quality scale than what people who care about high quality prefer. This is why I think you’re right about the software market tolerating low quality; it’s because market forces push everything toward low quality.
Once upon a time, the price of a product was often a good indicator of its quality. If you saw two products side by side on the shelf and one was more expensive, then you might assume that it was less likely to break or wear out soon.
Now it seems that the price has very little to do with quality. Cheaply made products might be priced higher just to give the appearance of quality. Even well known brands will cut corners to save a buck or two.
I have purchased things at bargain prices that did everything I wanted and more. I have also paid a lot for things that disappointed me greatly.
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The papers results are only barley accounted for in reality, as it misses many real world tactics and heuristics people actually use to get around the problem. Let alone many other market mechanism that exist around that market.
The real effects are way smaller then claimed in the paper and market collapses don't or almost never happen for that reason.
And in real live many people drive reliable used cars. And may people buy used cars over and over again. Because its not about verification, only about picking one of the better options, and many heuristics can be applied to do that.
If market forces push everything towards lower quality. Why are cars (and everything else) today so much more energy efficient and more comfortable. Why are phones so much better? Why is pretty much every product today so much better then it was 50 years ago?
Somehow everything gets worse, yet my operating system on my computer crashes far less often. Despite many more features. My hardware fails less often to, harddisk, then and now, its a joke.
The food is better, both in quality and diversity when I go to restaurants.
I really don't understand how people can argue against this claiming quality is going down over time. Outside of very specific things very temporarily, like twitter, this isn't the case.
There are many reason for this, and only focusing on finding a list of as many 'market failures' as economist can come up with, misses so much about how in the real world people (including governments) deal with many of these things.
By the way, inferior goods are not necessarily poor-quality products, though there is a meaningful correlation, and I based my original comment on it. Still, a OnePlus Android phone is considered an inferior good; an iPhone (or a Samsung Galaxy Android phone) is considered superior. Both are of excellent quality and better than one another in key areas. It's more about how wealth, brand perception, and overall market sentiment affect their demand. OnePlus phones will be in more demand during recessions, and demand for iPhones and Samsung Galaxys will decrease.
No objection to your use/non-use of the Market for Lemons label. Just wanted to clarify a possible misconception.
P.S. Apologies for editing this comment late. I thought the original version wasn't very concise.
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My wife has a perfume business. She makes really high quality extrait de parfums [1] with expensive materials and great formulations. But the market is flooded with eau de parfums -- which are far more diluted than a extrait -- using cheaper ingredients, selling for about the same price. We've had so many conversations about whether she should dilute everything like the other companies do, but you lose so much of the beauty of the fragrance when you do that. She really doesn't want to go the route of mediocrity, but that does seem to be what the market demands.
[1] https://studiotanais.com/
> [1] https://studiotanais.com/
First, honest impression: At least on my phone (Android/Chromium) the typography and style of the website don't quite match that "high quality & expensive ingredients" vibe the parfums are supposed to convey. The banners (3 at once on the very first screen, one of them animated!), italic text, varying font sizes, and janky video header would be rather off-putting to me. Maybe it's also because I'm not a huge fan of flat designs, partially because I find they make it difficult to visually distinguish important and less important information, but also because I find them a bit… unrefined and inelegant. And, again, this is on mobile, so maybe on desktop it comes across differently.
Disclaimer: I'm not a designer (so please don't listen only to me and take everything with a grain of salt) but I did work as a frontend engineer for a luxury retailer for some time.
I am somewhat familiar with this market and would probably be turned off by this site mostly because it looks too slick and the ones I’ve seen that were this slick mostly weren’t for me (marketed to, and making perfume entirely or almost entirely for, women).
The ones for me usually look way shittier or just use Etsy.
[edit] the only exception I can come up with is Imaginary Authors, which is much slicker-looking than this, actually, but with a far darker palette—this one definitely says “this is feminine stuff” in the design. And actually I’d say IA leans far more feminine as far as overall vibe of their catalog than most others that’ve had at least one scent that worked out for me.
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I'm hesitant to reply because it sounds pejorative and snarky, and I will be downvoted, but... you are not the target market for this. End of story.
This design is very 2025 and the rules you're judging by have long-since been thrown out the window. Most brands run on Shopify now, marketing is via myriad social channels in ways that feel insane and unintuitive, aesthetics are all over the map.
What's old is new is old is different is the same is good is bad, and what is garish to you (strangely, honestly) isn't to most; you'll see if you hang out with some young people lol, promise.
P.S. I am not young, I'm figuring this out by watching from afar HAHAHA
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She should double the price so customers wonder why hers costs so much more. Then have a sales pitch explaining the difference.
Some customers WANT to pay a premium just so they know they’re getting the best product.
To he blunt
this website looks like a scam website redirecter the one where you have to click on 49 ads and wait for 3 days before you get to your link the video playing immediately makes me think that's a Google ad unrelated to what the website is about the different font styles reminds me of the middle school HTML projects we had to do with each line in a different size and font face to prove that we know how to use <font face> and <font size>. All its missing is a jokerman font
Offer an eau de parfum line for price anchoring, and market segmentation. Win win.
For sure. I suggested having an eau de parfum option, but it does make things smell totally different -- much weaker, doesn't last long on the body, and can get overpowered by the alcohol carrier. Plus as a small business it'd mean having a dozen new formulations, with the associated packaging changes, inventory, etc. which makes it harder as a totally bootstrapped business. It's definitely still something to think about though, as even fragrances like a Tom Ford or Le Labo selling for $300-400 are just eau de parfums.
Is that what the market demands, or is the market unable to differentiate?
From the site there's a huge assumption that potential customers are aware of what extrait de parfum is vs eau de parfum (or even eau de toilette!).
Might be worth a call out that these fragrances are in fact a standard above the norm.
"The highest quality fragrance money can buy" kind of thing.
> But the market is flooded with eau de parfums -- which are far more diluted than a extrait -- using cheaper ingredients, selling for about the same price.
Has she tried raising prices? To signal that her product is highly quality and thus more expensive than her competition?
She has, these prices are actually lower than they were before, as most customers don't seem to care about things like concentration. Likely it's just that most aren't that informed about the differences. They'll pay more because it's Chanel or because a European perfumer made it, not because the quality is higher.
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looks like they are trying native advertising first
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I had the same realization but with car mechanics. If you drive a beater you want to spend the least possible on maintenance. On the other hand, if the car mechanic cares about cars and their craftsmanship they want to get everything to tip-top shape at high cost. Some other mechanics are trying to scam you and get the most amount of money for the least amount of work. And most people looking for car mechanics want to pay the least amount possible, and don't quite understand if a repair should be expensive or not. This creates a downward pressure on price at the expense of quality and penalizes the mechanics that care about quality.
Luckily for mechanics, the shortage of actual blue collar Hands-On labor is so small, that good mechanics actually can charge more.
The issue is that you have to be able to distinguish a good mechanic from a bad mechanic cuz they all get to charge a lot because of the shortage. Same thing for plumbing, electrical, HVAC, etc etc etc
But I understand your point.
Here in Atlanta Georgia, we have a ToyoTechs business. They perform maintenance on only Toyota-family automobiles. They have 2 locations, one for large trucks, one for cars, hybrids, and SUV-looking cars. Both are always filled up with customers. Some of whom drive hundreds of miles out of state to bring their vehicles exclusively there, whether the beater is a customized off-roader or a simple econobox with sentimental value.
Why? Because they are on a different incentive structure: non-comissioned payments for employees. They buy OEM parts, give a good warranty, charge fair prices, and they are always busy.
If this computer fad goes away, I'm going to open my own Toyota-only auto shop, trying to emulate them. They have 30 years of lead time on my hypothetical business, but the point stands: when people discover that high quality in this market, they stick to it closely.
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Exactly. People on HN get angry and confused about low software quality, compute wastefulness, etc, but what's happening is not a moral crisis: the market has simply chosen the trade-off it wants, and industry has adapted to it
If you want to be rewarded for working on quality, you have to find a niche where quality has high economic value. If you want to put effort into quality regardless, that's a very noble thing and many of us take pleasure in doing so, but we shouldn't act surprised when we aren't economically rewarded for it
I actually disagree. I think that people will pay more for higher quality software, but only if they know the software is higher quality.
It's great to say your software is higher quality, but the question I have is whether or not is is higher quality with the same or similar features, and second, whether the better quality is known to the customers.
It's the same way that I will pay hundreds of dollars for Jetbrains tools each year even though ostensibly VS Code has most of the same features, but the quality of the implementation greatly differs.
If a new company made their IDE better than jetbrains though, it'd be hard to get me to fork over money. Free trials and so on can help spread awareness.
The Lemon Market exists specifically when customers cannot tell, prior to receipt and usage, whether they are buying high quality or low quality.
Wow, that's actually a good argument for some kind of trial or freemium setup. Interesting.
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That does not describe the current subscription-based software market, then, because we do try it, and we can always stop paying, transaction costs aside.
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> but only if they know the software is higher quality.
I assume all software is shit in some fashion because every single software license includes a clause that has "no fitness for any particular purpose" clause. Meaning, if your word processor doesn't process words, you can't sue them.
When we get consumer protection laws that require that software does what is says on the tin quality will start mattering.
It can depend on the application/niche.
I used to write signal processing software for land mobile radios. Those radios were used by emergency services. For the most part, our software was high quality in that it gave good quality audio and rarely had problems. If it did have a problem, it would recover quickly enough that the customer would not notice.
Our radios got a name for reliability: such as feedback from customers about skyscrapers in New York being on fire and the radios not skipping a beat during the emergency response. Word of mouth traveled in a relatively close knit community and the "quality" did win customers.
Oddly we didn't have explicit procedures to maintain that quality. The key in my mind was that we had enough time in the day to address the root cause of bugs, it was a small enough team that we knew what was going into the repository and its effect on the system, and we developed incrementally. A few years later, we got spread thinner onto more products and it didn't work so well.
Which skyscrapers (plural)? Fires in NYC high-rise buildings are incredibly rare in the last 20 years.
Don't know. The customer ran a radio network which was used by fire brigade(s?) in NY, so we weren't on the "coal face". It was about 15 years ago.
It was an interesting job. Among other things, our gear ran stage management for a couple of Olympic opening ceremonies. Reliability was key given the size of the audience. We also did gear for the USGC, covering the entire US coastline. If you placed an emergency call at sea, it was our radios that were receiving that signal and passing it into the USCG's network.
I kind of see this in action when I'm comparing products on Amazon. When comparing two products on Amazon that are substantially the same, the cheaper one will have way more reviews. I guess this implies that it has captured the majority of the market.
I think this honestly has more to do with moslty Chinese sellers engaging in review fraud, which is a rampant problem. I'm not saying non-Chinese sellers don't engage in review fraud, but I have noticed a trend that around 98% of fake or fraudulently advertised products are of Chinese origin.
If it was just because it was cheap, we'd also see similar fraud from Mexican or Vietnamese sellers, but I don't really see that.
You have to have bought the item om Amazon to review right? So these reviewers buy and return, or how does it work?
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Luxury items however seem to buck this trend, but this is all about conspicuous consumption.
There's an analogy with evolution. In that case, what survives might be the fittest, but it's not the fittest possible. It's the least fit that can possibly win. Anything else represents an energy expenditure that something else can avoid, and thus outcompete.
I had the exact same experience trying to build a startup. The thing that always puzzled me was Apple: they've grown into one of the most profitable companies in the world on the basis of high-quality stuff. How did they pull it off?
They focused heavily on the quality of things you can see, i.e. slick visuals, high build quality, even fancy cardboard boxes.
Their software quality itself is about average for the tech industry. It's not bad, but not amazing either. It's sufficient for the task and better than their primary competitor (Windows). But, their UI quality is much higher, and that's what people can check quickly with their own eyes and fingers in a shop.
This is one of the best descriptions I have seen of Apple, very well put
"Market comes first, marketing second, aesthetic third, and functionality a distant fourth" ― Rob Walling in "Start Small, Stay Small"
Apple's aesthetic is more important than the quality (which has been deteriorating lately)
Not on Macintosh. On iPod, iPhone and iPad.
All of those were marketed as just-barely-affordable consumer luxury goods. The physical design and the marketing were more important than the specs.
Its because the claim that many cynical people have where everything always gets worse are simply wrong. Quality matters very much for a lot of products and the results clearly show this. Apple provided something people liked and people bought it, are happy with it and buy it again. I'm myself am not a big fan but I can understand it, and it has a certain quality.
I simply don't understand how people can live in the real world, look around themselves and claim quality is getting worse. This is simply not the case for 99% of product I have consumed over my few decades of being an adult.
A typical day. I get up, mattress I have now is better. I brush my teeth with a powerful electric toothbrush that is much superior then the once a decade ago. I use a amazing induction stove that is far better then what I had a decade ago. I ride a beautiful electric bus to the train station. From there I take modern fast train to work, much better and faster then 10-20 years ago. I set on my desk that goes up and down, has a insanely large beautiful monitor on it, incredible. I turn on my laptop that 100x more powerful then my first one. I start a IDE that is much better then what I had when I started. I use a programming language better then the one I used when I started, and I have a much larger library ecosystem. I spin up VM and containers, both locally and if I need in a waste internet cloud. I go for launch, I have like 20 options, food from one end of the globe to the the other, much better then I had 20 years ago.
I could go on about almost every single product I tough on typical day. The only thing that is actually not much better are things like backed goods, and mostly because they were already amazing. At most its now faster to buy them and I can buy them at more places.
I really don't why so many people inhere are crying about how everything is getting worse all the time.
By being a luxury consumer company. There is no luxury (quality) enterprise software. There is lock-in-extortion enterprise software.
Apple's supposed high quality is mostly marketing.
They have constant, frequent, hardware design issues that they just don't even acknowledge and somehow people still treat their hardware as "high quality"
They once shipped a phone that lost signal if you held it with your hand. Their solution, after insisting that people hold their phone differently, was cheap plastic cases.
They shipped a new keyboard that would fail after singular grains of dust got into it, in order to save a millimeter of thickness on a product that was already quite thin. In order to repair or replace the keyboard, you have to replace half of the whole machine, for half the price of a brand new laptop.
Apple does not spend real effort on hardware quality.
This is a really succinct analysis, thanks.
I'm thinking out loud but it seems like there's some other factors at play. There's a lower threshold of quality that needs to happen (the thing needs to work) so there's at least two big factors, functionality and cost. In the extreme, all other things being equal, if two products were presented at the exact same cost but one was of superior quality, the expectation is that the better quality item would win.
There's always the "good, fast, cheap" triangle but with Moore's law (or Wright's law), cheap things get cheaper, things iterate faster and good things get better. Maybe there's an argument that when something provides an order of magnitude quality difference at nominal price difference, that's when disruption happens?
So, if the environment remains stable, then mediocrity wins as the price of superior quality can't justify the added expense. If the environment is growing (exponentially) then, at any given snapshot, mediocrity might win but will eventually be usurped by quality when the price to produce it drops below a critical threshold.
You're laying it out like it's universal, in my experience there are products where people will seek for the cheapest good enough but there are also other product that people know they want quality and are willing to pay more.
Take cars for instance, if all people wanted the cheapest one then Mercedes or even Volkswagen would be out of business.
Same for professional tools and products, you save more by buying quality product.
And then, even in computer and technology. Apple iPhone aren't cheap at all, MacBook come with soldered ram and storage, high price, yet a big part of people are willing to buy that instead of the usual windows bloated spyware laptop that run well enough and is cheap.
> the cheapest one then Mercedes or even Volkswagen would be out of business
I would argue this is a bad example - most luxury cars aren't really meaningfully "better", they just have status symbol value. A mid range Honda civic or Toyota corolla is not "worse" than a Mercedes for most objective measurements.
As someone who drove both, I vehemently disagree. Stripped of logos, one is delightful, the other just nominally gets the job done.
The Mercedes has superior suspension that feels plush and smooth. Wonderful materials in the cabin that feel pleasant to the touch. The buttons press with a deep, satisfying click. The seats hug you like a soft cloud.
All of that isn’t nothing. It is difficult to achieve, and it is valuable.
All of that make the Mercedes better than a Corolla, albeit at a higher cost.
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Not everyone wants the cheapest, but lemons fail and collapse the expensive part of the market with superior goods.
To borrow your example, it's as if Mercedes started giving every 4th customer a Lada instead (after the papers are signed). The expensive Mercedes market would quickly no longer meet the luxury demand of wealthy buyers and collapse. Not the least because Mercedes would start showing super-normal profits, and all other luxury brands would get in on the same business model. It's a race to the bottom. When one seller decreases the quality, so must others. Otherwise, they'll soon be bought out, and that's the best-case scenario compared to being outcompeted.
There is some evidence that the expensive software market has collapsed. In the 00s and 90s, we used to have expensive and cheap video games, expensive and cheap video editing software, and expensive and cheap office suites. Now, we have homogeneous software in every niche — similar features and similar (relatively cheap) prices. AAA game companies attempting to raise their prices back to 90s levels (which would make a AAA game $170+ in today's money) simply cannot operate in the expensive software market. First, there was consumer distrust due to broken software, then there were no more consumers in that expensive-end market segment.
Hardware you mention (iPhones, Androids, Macs, PCs) still have superior and inferior hardware options. Both ends of the market exist. The same applies to most consumer goods - groceries, clothes, shoes, jewelry, cars, fuel, etc. However, for software, the top end of the market is now non-existent. It's gone the way of expensive secondary market (resale) cars, thanks to how those with hidden defects undercut their price and destroyed consumer trust.
The issue here isn't absence, but misrecognition: the top end absolutely does exist -- it just doesn't always look like what people wish it looked like.
If by "top end" you mean "built to spec, hardened, and close to bug-free", it's alive and well in heavy manufacturing, telecommunication, automotive, aerospace, military, and medical industries. The technologies used there are not sexy (ask anyone working at Siemens or Nokia), the code wouldn't delight you, the processes are likely glacial, but there you will find software that works because it absolutely has to.
If by "top end" you mean "serves the implied user need in the best way imaginable", then modern LLMs systems are a good example. Despite the absolute mess and slop that those systems are built of, very few people come to ChatGPT and leave unsatisfied with its results.
If by "top end" you mean "beautifully engineered and maintained", think SQLite, LLVM and some OS kernels, like seL4. Those are well-written, foundational pieces of software that are not end-products in themselves, but they're built to last, studied by developers, and trusted everywhere. This is the current forefront in our knowledge of how to write software.
If by "top end" you mean "maximising profit through code", then the software in the top trading firms match this description. All those "hacker-friendly" and "tech-driven" firms run on the same sloppy code as everyone else, but they are ruthlessly optimised to make money. That's performance too.
You can carry on. For each definition of "top end", there is a real-life example of software matching it.
One can moan about the market rewarding mediocrity, but we, as technologists, all have better things to do instead of endless hand-wringing, really.
If you’re trying to sell a product to the masses, you either need to make it cheap or a fad.
You cannot make a cheap product with high margins and get away with it. Motorola tried with the RAZR. They had about five or six good quarters from it and then within three years of initial launch were hemorrhaging over a billion dollars a year.
You have to make premium products if you want high margins. And premium means you’re going for 10% market share, not dominant market share. And if you guess wrong and a recession happens, you might be fucked.
Yes, I was in this place too when I had a consulting company. We bid on projects with quotes for high quality work and guaranteed delivery within the agreed timeframe. More often than not we got rejected in favor of some students who submitted a quote for 4x less. I sometimes asked those clients how the project went, and they'd say, well, those guys missed the deadline and asked for more money several times
> We were sure that a better product would win people over and lead to viral success. It didn’t. Things grew, but so slowly that we ran out of money after a few years before reaching break even.
Relevant apocrypha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFcb-XF1RPQ
These economic forces exist in math too. Almost every mathematician publishes informal proofs. These contain just enough discussion in English (or other human language) to convince a few other mathematicians in the same field that they their idea is valid. But it is possible to make errors. There are other techniques: formal step-by-step proof presentations (e.g. by Leslie Lamport) or computer-checked proofs that would be more reliable. But almost no mathematician uses these.
I feel your realization and still hope my startup will have an competitive edge through quality.
In this case quality also means code quality which in my coding believe should lead to faster feature development
The problem with your thesis is that software isn't a physical good, so quality isn't tangible. If software does the advertised thing, it's good software. That's it.
With physical items, quality prevents deterioration over time. Or at least slows it. Improves function. That sort of thing.
Software just works or doesn't work. So you want to make something that works and iterate as quickly as possible. And yes, cost to produce it matters so you can actually bring it to market.
I'm a layman, but in my opinion building quality software can't really be a differentiator because anyone can build quality software given enough time and resources. You could take two car mechanics and with enough training, time, assistance from professional dev consultants, testing, rework, so and so forth, make a quality piece of software. But you'd have spent $6 million to make a quality alarm clock app.
A differentiator would be having the ability to have a higher than average quality per cost. Then maybe you're onto something.
It depends on who is paying versus using the product. If the buyer is the user, they tend value quality more so than otherwise.
Do you drive the cheapest car, eat the cheapest food, wear the cheapest clothes, etc.?
I see another dynamic "customer value" features get prioritized and eventually product reaches a point of crushing tech debt. It results in "customer value" features delivery velocity grinding to a halt. Obviously subject to other forces but it is not infrequent for someone to come in and disrupt the incumbents at this point.
> People want cheap
There is an exception: luxury goods. Some are expensive, but people don't mind them being overpriced because e.g. they are social status symbols. Is there such a thing like "luxury software"? I think Apple sort of has this reputation.
>lower costs, and therefore lower quality,
Many high-quality open-source designs suggest this is a false premise, and as a developer who writes high-quality and reliable software for much much lower rates than most, cost should not be seen as a reliable indicator of quality.
"Quality is free"[1], luxury isn't.
Also, one should not confuse the quality of the final product and the quality of the process.
[1] https://archive.org/details/qualityisfree00cros
There’s probably another name for this
Capitalism? Marx's core belief was that capitalists would always lean towards paying the absolute lowest price they could for labor and raw materials that would allow them to stay in production. If there's more profit in manufacturing mediocrity at scale than quality at a smaller scale, mediocrity it is.
Not all commerce is capitalistic. If a commercial venture is dedicated to quality, or maximizing value for its customers, or the wellbeing of its employees, then it's not solely driven by the goal of maximizing capital. This is easier for a private than a public company, in part because of a misplaced belief that maximizing shareholder return is the only legally valid business objective. I think it's the corporate equivalent of diabetes.
In the 50s and 60s, capitalism used to refer to stakeholder capitalism. It was dedicated to maximize value for stakeholders, such as customers, employees, society, etc.
But that shifted later, with Milton Friedman, who pushed the idea of shareholder capitalism in the 70s. Where companies switched to thinking the only goal is to maximize shareholder value.
In his theory, government would provide regulation and policies to address stakeholder's needs, and companies therefore needed focus on shareholders.
In practice, lobbying, propaganda and corruption made it so governments dropped the ball and also sided to maximize shareholder value, along with companies.
But do you think you could have started with a bug laden mess? Or is it just the natural progression down the quality and price curve that comes with scale
> People want cheap, so if you sell something people want, someone will make it for less by cutting “costs” (quality).
Sure, but what about the people who consider quality as part of their product evaluation? All else being equal everyone wants it cheaper, but all else isn't equal. When I was looking at smart lighting, I spent 3x as much on Philips Hue as I could have on Ikea bulbs: bought one Ikea bulb, tried it on next to a Hue one, and instantly returned the Ikea one. It was just that much worse. I'd happily pay similar premiums for most consumer products.
But companies keep enshittifying their products. I'm not going to pay significantly more for a product which is going to break after 16 months instead of 12 months. I'm not going to pay extra for some crappy AI cloud blockchain "feature". I'm not going to pay extra to have a gaudy "luxury" brand logo stapled all over it.
Companies are only interested in short-term shareholder value these days, which means selling absolute crap at premium prices. I want to pay extra to get a decent product, but more and more it turns out that I can't.
>There’s probably another name for this, it’s not quite the Market for Lemons idea. I don’t think this leads to market collapse, I think it just leads to stable mediocrity everywhere, and that’s what we have.
It's the same concept as the age old "only an engineer can build a bridge that just barely doesn't fall down" circle jerk but for a more diverse set of goods than just bridges.
Maybe you could compete by developing new and better products? Ford isn't selling the same car with lower and lower costs every year.
It's really hard to reconcile your comment with Silicon Valley, which was built by often expensive innovation, not by cutting costs. Were Apple, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft successful because they cut costs? The AI companies?
Microsoft yes, the PC market made it very hard for Apple to compete on price.
Meta and Alphabet had zero cost products (to consumers) that they leveraged to become near monopolies.
Aren’t all the AI companies believed to be providing their products below cost for now to grab market share?
> Apple
Apple's incredible innovation and attention to detail is what made them legendary and successful. Steve Jobs was legendary for both.
> Meta and Alphabet had zero cost products (to consumers) that they leveraged to become near monopolies.
What does zero cost have to do with it? The comment I responded to spoke of cutting the business's costs - quality inputs, labor, etc. - not their customers' costs. Google made a much better search engine than competitors and then better advertising engine; Facebook made the best social media network.
> Aren’t all the AI companies believed to be providing their products below cost for now to grab market share?
Again, what does that have to do with cutting costs rather than innovating to increase profit?
I'm proud of you, it often takes people multiple failures before they learn to accept their worldview that regulations aren't necessary and the tragedy of Commons is a myth are wrong.
I’d argue this exists for public companies, but there are many smaller, private businesses where there’s no doctrine of maximising shareholder value
These companies often place a greater emphasis on reputation and legacy Very few and far between, Robert McNeel & Associates (American) is one that comes to mind (Rhino3D), as his the Dutch company Victron (power hardware)
The former especially is not known for maximising their margins, they don’t even offer a subscription-model to their customers
Victron is an interesting case, where they deliberately offer few products, and instead of releasing more, they heavily optimise and update their existing models over many years in everything from documentation to firmware and even new features. They’re a hardware company mostly so very little revenue is from subscriptions
> There’s probably another name for this
Race to the bottom