<story><title>This Is All Your App Is: A Collection Of Tiny Details</title><url>http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/05/this-is-all-your-app-is-a-collection-of-tiny-details.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>danielmiller</author><text>Hold on a second, Jeff!&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;#62; Your software, your product, is nothing more than a collection of tiny details. If you don&apos;t obsess over all those details, if you think it&apos;s OK to concentrate on the &quot;important&quot; parts and continue to ignore the other umpteen dozen tiny little ways your product annoys the people who use it on a daily basis – you&apos;re not creating great software. Someone else is.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think the true moral of his story contradicts his conclusion.&lt;p&gt;He and his wife had a problem: They didn&apos;t like manually feeding their cats. So they bought a couple of automatic cat feeders and enjoyed owning them—despite several small, annoying flaws. In fact, he and his wife dutifully employed those feeders for &lt;i&gt;five years&lt;/i&gt; until he noticed (and purchased) the company&apos;s newer, improved version!&lt;p&gt;I liked the essay, but I suppose Jeff and I disagree on what the story teaches us.&lt;p&gt;This story is about a company that identified a pain point (manually feeding cats is annoying) and created a product that alleviated the pain (an automatic cat feeder) despite several flaws (a bad color, an annoying button guard, and a difficult to clean food bowl, to name a few). Over time, the company resolved those flaws, but they didn&apos;t wait until all of the flaws were resolved before initially shipping their product. Instead, they shipped a useful, albeit imperfect product, and earned themselves at least two repeat customers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nadam</author><text>I am not a marketing expert, but my reaction to this article was that it pretty much depends on what &apos;market phase&apos; we are in.&lt;p&gt;In a new market with no competitors what matters is that someone created an automatic cat feeder at all.&lt;p&gt;In a more mature market with several competitors those small details matter more.&lt;p&gt;In a very mature market maybe several competitors get the tiny details right, so maybe building a brand matters a lot...</text></comment>
<story><title>This Is All Your App Is: A Collection Of Tiny Details</title><url>http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/05/this-is-all-your-app-is-a-collection-of-tiny-details.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>danielmiller</author><text>Hold on a second, Jeff!&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;#62; Your software, your product, is nothing more than a collection of tiny details. If you don&apos;t obsess over all those details, if you think it&apos;s OK to concentrate on the &quot;important&quot; parts and continue to ignore the other umpteen dozen tiny little ways your product annoys the people who use it on a daily basis – you&apos;re not creating great software. Someone else is.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think the true moral of his story contradicts his conclusion.&lt;p&gt;He and his wife had a problem: They didn&apos;t like manually feeding their cats. So they bought a couple of automatic cat feeders and enjoyed owning them—despite several small, annoying flaws. In fact, he and his wife dutifully employed those feeders for &lt;i&gt;five years&lt;/i&gt; until he noticed (and purchased) the company&apos;s newer, improved version!&lt;p&gt;I liked the essay, but I suppose Jeff and I disagree on what the story teaches us.&lt;p&gt;This story is about a company that identified a pain point (manually feeding cats is annoying) and created a product that alleviated the pain (an automatic cat feeder) despite several flaws (a bad color, an annoying button guard, and a difficult to clean food bowl, to name a few). Over time, the company resolved those flaws, but they didn&apos;t wait until all of the flaws were resolved before initially shipping their product. Instead, they shipped a useful, albeit imperfect product, and earned themselves at least two repeat customers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hartror</author><text>Switching costs.&lt;p&gt;They already owned the old version, having paid for it and installed it in their home. The issues were a minor annoyance but the effort to find a new one and risk it being worse was far greater.&lt;p&gt;However software, especially web applications generally have a low switching cost. So while your application might fulfill a need if you don&apos;t fix the annoyances you make it all the easier for a competitor the sweep in a grab your business.&lt;p&gt;The history of the internet is littered with examples both large and small.</text></comment>