Comment by gyomu

Comment by gyomu 8 hours ago

Is there an example of a platform that serves almost 2 billion users, across 40+ languages and many more geographic locales, countless possible hardware configurations etc., introducing dozens/hundreds of new features a year, without falling into all those traps?

Of course I wholeheartedly agree with your critiques. But the original iPhone - or even macOS circa 2005 - were very different products, much more limited in scope and capability.

It's already hard enough to make a product a paragon of simplicity when the number of things it needs to do are so limited (as evidenced by all the products out there that are even more confusing than Apple products, doing even less), but I'm not sure it's even possible to do it when you reach such planetary scale.

Seems to me that the only way to have a product that's a paragon of simplicity is to have a product that does much, much less. But you don't become a trillion dollar company with 2 billion active users by doing less.

Groxx 7 hours ago

>Is there an example of a platform that [does this right]

no, because

>introducing dozens/hundreds of new features a year

is antithetical to "doing it right". doing that is sufficient to prove you are not doing it right.

Reply View 3 replies

gyomu 7 hours ago

Would love to read your manifesto of what "doing it right" entails.

Reply View | 2 replies
- Groxx 4 hours ago
  
  given this is in a thread about simplicity: I think "dozens/hundreds of new features a year" speaks for itself why it's a problem.
  but Apple (and Windows) nowadays reeks of promotion-driven development. ship a new feature and make sure people use it by making it as annoyingly in-your-face as possible, so you can show "impact". do that for just a few years and you're reliably left with a confusing, inconsistent, and extremely chaotic new user experience as each of those features jockeys for prime eyeball real estate.
  mobile games with tons of features to spend money on are often a prime example of this, where new users a year after it launched are stuck in hours of tutorials and broken UI due to dozens of notifications that barely fit on screen, and Windows is not far behind with some sellers' junkware. Apple hasn't reached that far yet (AFAICT), but it's clearly headed in the same direction.
  Linux has many, many flaws as a user-friendly desktop environment, but this is not one of them. take a clean install. boot up the first time. it's very likely you'll be greeted by a single "welcome" window (a normal one that you can just close) or nothing at all, just a working environment, regardless of the version you chose. that's unambiguously a more simple, less annoying, less spammy experience. Apple used to be almost this smooth.
  
  Reply View | 0 replies
- pasc1878 5 hours ago
  
  It doesn't matter.
  If there is a definition of doing it right then it is a better experience in following that rather than adding new features that don't match the definition no matter what it is.
  And if the definition changes then you should be changing everything which takes resources away from new features. Unfortunately new features grab the attention of media an influencers and so that is what gets you the money.
  
  Reply View | 0 replies

darkwater 5 hours ago

> countless possible hardware configurations

Are you talking about Apple? This sounds like the PC or Android world.

Reply View 0 replies