An inconvenient truth

[Bruno Medeiros]

Walter Bright wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> How do I know this? I see it all the time. I won't use your product 
>> because of XYZ. So, I fix XYZ. Still no sale. Obviously, that was not 
>> the real reason.
> 
> I have an amusing anecdote on this. Many years ago back when DOS was 
> king and buffalo roamed the plains, I heard a rant from a C++ developer 
> that compile speed was the most important issue. He went on and on about 
> it. So what C++ compiler did he use? Glockenspiel's translator and MS's 
> C compiler. That combination was 4 times slower than other compilers.
> 
> Clearly, compile speed was not at all the issue that made him open his 
> checkbook, not even close.
> 
> -------
> 
> 10 years ago, a colleague made an impassioned pitch to me that what the 
> world needed was a native code Java compiler. I listened politely while 
> he told me what a killer compiler that would be, and that if I was smart 
> I'd listen to him and build it.
> 
> I told him I'd already built one a couple years previously (for 
> Symantec) and it did poorly. Nobody cared about it.
> 
> -------
> 
> Before I started on D, I was convinced by others that the world needed a 
> fast Javascript interpreter. I wrote one that was 20 times (yes, twenty 
> times) faster than Mozilla's. Nobody cared.
> 
> -------
> 
> The products I've done which were successful all, 100%, started out with 
> people laughing at me for doing them.

I don't know the details in all those stories, but it might be, in some 
of those cases, that although you fixed the rant issue people were 
complaining about, you introduced other flaws or shortcomings in your 
production/solution that the other product did not have, and that the 
ranting user might not even have noticed it as important issue unless it 
as missing.

That won't be the case for comments such as "I won't use your product 
because of XYZ.", as those are clear, but it could be for comments 
phrased as "XYZ is the most important issue.", in which the person is 
actually thinking more of "assuming ABC, XYZ is the most important issue."

This is not a perfect analogy, but when I initially met some of my 
programmer friends, I often ranted about Windows instability, lack of 
speed, and general crapness, where often the response was "use Linux" 
(or "use MacOS"). And yes they are all faster, more stable, and robust. 
But, behold, they're simply not Windows, lol! What I mean with this, 
concretely, is that they don't have things or behaviors that Windows 
has, that are not immediately noticeable but are important to me, and 
that due to their nature, hardly ever will have. I'm not even talking 
about the availability of applications or games, but, in the case of 
Linux, stuff like a simple, organized and terse, filesystem model. (and 
in the case of MacOS it's rather "An OS without the gay, please". :-P )


-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Developer, MSc. in CS/E graduate
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?BrunoMedeiros#D