But they're also the people that feel that making a better product at a lower price should bring commercial success.
And to be honest, it took me watching products I loved and could make a case were objectively better fail against products that had better "curb appeal" and marketing smarts to realize that assuming consumers were logical was utterly illogical, given the evidence.
The real challenge is to make a product that appeals to people who know nothing about the product (but will be making purchasing decisions) that also doesn't alienate too many of the people who actually have to use the thing. Most of the UI/UX people I've worked with were more marketing than anything else. And *that* was what made them valuable to the product as a whole.
I suspect he's saying that "UX", as measured by number of people who are using the term, is no longer statistically real.
Sort of like the how the number of people who use the term "agile" correctly (with respect to programming) has grown by a factor of 3. Unfortunately, the number of people who use the term "agile" because it's hot and it sounds cool has grown by 300. Thus at this point, the odds of hearing "agile" in conversation, and it not being marketing buzz-speak, now approaches zero.
It's not that it grown less important - it's just the term has been eaten by the buzzword seekers.
Whenever Islam does something reprehensible, of course.
Because Islam doesn't do *anything*. It's a belief. And among the billion *people* who hold that belief, a few of them are reprehensible.
And if we're talking about deaths of Westerners, then why don't we point fingers at some of the most efficient killers of Europeans: Europeans who initiated two world wars.
Compared to us, the feeble attempts by fundamentalists are laughable. If you really want to kill nearly 100 million Europeans/North Americans, you know who the real dangers are.
And if we're going to look at raw numbers killed in the current Middle East conflict, still no contest - we have ISIS beat 100:1 in civilian casualties. Now of course, we don't deliberately target civilians, they are just an *inevitable* outcome from prosecuting a war/blockade, so that let's us off the hook for literally any number of civilian casualties we cause.
At least this leftist doesn't go after Islam because Islam doesn't do anything - people do. And I don't pretend that the policies that I support to contain ISIS don't cause far more civilian casualties than ISIS has ever inflicted on the West.
If you cannot see the massive in-your-face crimes of your own culture, how on earth would you see yourself as fit to judge the crimes of another?
Does it mean ignore terrorism and terrorists? Of course not, but let's put it in proper perspective.
You can play an infinite game of whack-a-mole with these sites.
My wife's an author, and while she had the good grace to just ignore it, I was irritated enough to write polite letters to the first half-dozen sites when pirate book sites started to appear. One actually wrote an apology and took it down. Another replied in broken English to indicate what would happen if I tried to further interfere with his revenue stream (most pirate sites generate revenue in the form of ads). When another half-dozen new sites popped up in the next week, I realized my wife was right.
All you can do is hope that not *too* many young adults have adopted the motto "Only stupid people pay when they don't have to."
It certainly doesn't help when (as I witnessed) a salesman tried to persuade someone to drop the iPhone they were considering buying and buy a Samsung using the sales line "With iPhone, you have to buy your apps. With Android, everyone gets them for free.."
There's an eye-opening amount of piracy on iPhone (I was amazed at the numbers), but from what I've read from developers and the numbers in general, it pales in comparison with the piracy rates on Android.
The idea that a large number of people pirate at 0.99 puts lie to the old canard "if you make it cheap and convenient enough, people will buy instead of pirate".
Even fewer banks will lend you money when you say "I want to manufacture 10,000 of these, and *if* I can, I can pay you back."
Agreed. It is why you already need to have the manufacturing contracts in hand. Thus you know the costs, the delivery dates, etc.
Kickstarter/IndieGoGo are for projects so speculative that they can't even attract venture capital.
The problem with that is that is not how they're seen at this point in time by the vast majority of the customers and many of the sponsors. The howls of outrage when projects fail to ship make it clear that the majority of customers do not distinguish between simple order fulfillment and a speculative venture. Nor does KS et al make any great effort to make the difference between such projects clear to the customer.
Perhaps KS could calve off another company for the majority of sponsors who in fact are only using KS to accumulate a minimum order for their product, but have manufacturing contracts, delivery contracts, etc. in hand. That way the truly speculative ventures aren't gaining supporters through customer misperception. After all, I'm happy to gamble, but I want to know when I'm doing so and the crowd-funders aren't making it easy to tell the difference.
My proposal was simply an idea to clearly differentiate the two. One has guaranteed delivery or a full refund, the other most certainly does not.
If someone were able to personally obtain a loan for the product anyway, why would they approach Kickstarter/Indiegogo?
The problem is that very few banks will lend you money when you say "I want to manufacture 10,000 of these, and *if* I can sell them, I can pay you back." The service that "OF" provides is that it already has all the funds in escrow. "If I manufacture 10,000 of these, I have a guaranteed payment of $500K" is something that specialized banks finance on a fairly regular basis.
How is a product supposed to be developed and manufactured when the owners don't have the money they raised from the crowd funding?
I guess my point wasn't clear - Call the new company "OF" for "Order Fulfillment". You see something on the OF page and you order, then you get charged if minimum order size is made (and there's probably a maximum order size as well). The money is collected by "OF" and held in escrow. It will be paid once the customer receives the product within a specified time. If the customer doesn't, then he or she is refunded the whole amount.
The project sponsor now has a guaranteed sales. If he has contracts in hand with the manufacturers to make the stuff, and minimal reputation, he then goes to the bank to get a loan. (Loans for this sort of thing are common in business.) Of course, if he fails, then he is *personally* on the hook for the loan. The bank will only loan money if everything is in place for simple order fulfillment.
The consumer then has real transparency - order from "OF" - you only pay if minimum orders reached, and you get full refund if no product within the time specified.
Otherwise, you can still fund KS projects and accept a 50-75% failure rate (because most 'safe' projects go "OF" route), and maybe get neat stuff. If you aren't willing to take the risk, then you don't fund.
The whole point is to make *what* you are funding transparent and to strip away the ambiguity from both the project runners and the funders ("I'm funding development, but without any risk!").
I think KickStarter, et al, have perhaps unintentionally blurred the lines between research, development, and order fulfillment.
Ostensibly these organizations are supporting development, but by essentially treating projects as order fulfillment, they ignore the fact that development can fail.
Now in this case it appears that, whether they knew it or not, people were funding research, and of course research can (and in fact usually does) fail.
Obviously greater transparency would help, but I'm not sure that crowd-funding would survive that reality. I suspect the majority of crowd-funding participants want the feeling of actually investing/participating in development, but they don't want any of the associated risks - they just want order fulfillment.
Personally, I'm waiting for someone like Amazon or Alibaba to optimize the order fulfillment part of they system by holding the money in escrow. The manufacturers have to get a loan based on the money held in escrow, which should be doable if (1) they have the manufacturing contracts in hand, (2) some reputation, and (3) guaranteed payment by a reputable company. Probably means there's a minimum and maximum order size, but the option of guaranteed deliverable or 100% refund would probably cause mass migration, leaving KS and others doing actual crowd-funding, with all the risks it implies.
Location and weather matters. We're close to a school and had mild weather this year, so we got a little over 500 (normally it's closer to 400). Currently we're in a young kid boom, and because there are lots of munchkins about, lots of families with young kids move in, so the kid density does perpetuate.
Still, neighbourhoods also age out. I remember that my parents got about 150 when I was a kid, but it had dropped to half that by the time my sister, who was 5 years younger, was doing the rounds. It then moved back up about a decade later.
because the mob can gang up and kidnap and kill any singular individual.
Welcome to reality. The only morality that exists in any meaningful way is the morality shared by those with enough power to enforce it. In our society, neither you nor I have that power.
In which case, your only hope is to influence enough people by persuasion to make your morality the dominant one.
Given the way of government growth, you've failed in that task.
Once ad blocking becomes truly ubiquitous (I give it a year) and most of the independent web sites die, how are we block ads once the Internet = Facebook?
Facebook hosts all the content and all the ads (and it gets 30% of any hosted site's revenue for its trouble).
The rise of Ad-Blocking was inevitable, but boy, I'm not looking forward to having a Facebook account just to surf the remaining sites that keep trying to make a go of it.
As usual, Europe is way ahead of the curve for this. Widespread adoption (along with the mechanism to allow merchants to use this in the same way as the Visa and MC "verified" service) would pretty much kill card-not-present fraud dead.
As EMV chip card readers get cheaper, I keep waiting for banks to offer an on-line verification service where they supply a chip card reader to the card owner, which can then be used to verify on-line transactions. After all, the system is already designed to survive the POS terminal being compromised, so the same should apply to what is effectively a home POS terminal.
It's likely that your card was used at a location for which an abnormal number of cards were found to have been skimmed. This is usually the reason that a whole batch of cards get cancelled. ("Kill every card used at Joe's Gas Station between Monday and Thursday.")
Ten years ago, the US banks didn't want the expense of switching to EMV. The cost would be that Americans would have to expect to have several cards declined at any one time because of fraud-fighting measures. The banks knew this was the future.
As it was, as all the world's bank card fraud organizations migrated to the US, the US was compelled to switch anyway. (You never want to be the last vulnerable man standing.) They'd have been far better going a decade ago.
However, should those without children be ineligible to vote on the issue?
Or perhaps look at the legal system. We *know* that innocents may be injured or killed in pursuance of justice. Are we obligated to have police officer's lives at risk? (To be honest, I think it's good policy - if we had robo-cops, I think the numbers of innocents getting killed would go up, but I don't think we have a moral obligation to do so.)
You're comment is absolutely accurate, and why politicians I respect are in short supply.
Success as a politician almost requires you suppress facts that would harm your favored policies, such as "innocents will suffer".
And in fact, as a leader, you could argue that if you are a "good" person (and who among us thinks of ourselves otherwise) and *you* have carefully evaluated both sides and deemed a policy desirable, then aren't you committing evil by spending effort to admit the costs of that policy and thus make it less likely to pass? If you truly think that war is required to reduce suffering in the end, isn't your moral obligation and your duty to suppress (or at the very least, not promulgate) the facts that might diminish support for war?
(And this applies to any policy - healthcare, justice, etc.)
It's a reason that I could never be a politician. I'm selfish enough that I value my morality more than the benefits to the populace that compromising that morality might bring. As a non-entity, my words, harmful though they might be to my own side, are inconsequential.
So, I suppose I came on strong because the disclosure of costs is what I feel morality requires. However, you are quite correct, what we can expect, and what indeed, in some circumstances, may constitute good leadership is quite different. Assumptions of complete rationality are both factually incorrect, and probably make bad policy.
Indeed, I might often disagree with his choices (I personally lean left), but in this he has my respect.
My scorn is reserved for those on any side who refuse to admit the costs of their favored policies. Every policy has cost, and the unwillingness to explicitly admit those costs exists is either ignorance (unforgivable in a leader) or evidence of a profound disrespect for the people you lead (also unforgivable).
But then I've never been a big believer of the idea that the people are too stupid to be given all the facts.
I'll be satisfied the first time I hear a politician who approves military action say that "I personally accept that my decision to approve this action will kill innocent men, women and children. This is a price that I am willing to pay for this action."
I have yet to hear a politician acknowledging the lives it will cost *in advance* and then approving it anyway. This isn't a "oh, a terrible mistake has happened." This is "we know what the costs are, and we're willing to pay them." If you can't publicly acknowledge the reality of your command, you have no business giving the command.
Slashdot Mirror
An insightful point. The trouble is that many of the open source products also covet what the mainstream has - market share.
Very apt.
But they're also the people that feel that making a better product at a lower price should bring commercial success.
And to be honest, it took me watching products I loved and could make a case were objectively better fail against products that had better "curb appeal" and marketing smarts to realize that assuming consumers were logical was utterly illogical, given the evidence.
The real challenge is to make a product that appeals to people who know nothing about the product (but will be making purchasing decisions) that also doesn't alienate too many of the people who actually have to use the thing. Most of the UI/UX people I've worked with were more marketing than anything else. And *that* was what made them valuable to the product as a whole.
I suspect he's saying that "UX", as measured by number of people who are using the term, is no longer statistically real.
Sort of like the how the number of people who use the term "agile" correctly (with respect to programming) has grown by a factor of 3. Unfortunately, the number of people who use the term "agile" because it's hot and it sounds cool has grown by 300. Thus at this point, the odds of hearing "agile" in conversation, and it not being marketing buzz-speak, now approaches zero.
It's not that it grown less important - it's just the term has been eaten by the buzzword seekers.
Whenever Islam does something reprehensible, of course.
Because Islam doesn't do *anything*. It's a belief. And among the billion *people* who hold that belief, a few of them are reprehensible.
And if we're talking about deaths of Westerners, then why don't we point fingers at some of the most efficient killers of Europeans: Europeans who initiated two world wars.
Compared to us, the feeble attempts by fundamentalists are laughable. If you really want to kill nearly 100 million Europeans/North Americans, you know who the real dangers are.
And if we're going to look at raw numbers killed in the current Middle East conflict, still no contest - we have ISIS beat 100:1 in civilian casualties. Now of course, we don't deliberately target civilians, they are just an *inevitable* outcome from prosecuting a war/blockade, so that let's us off the hook for literally any number of civilian casualties we cause.
At least this leftist doesn't go after Islam because Islam doesn't do anything - people do. And I don't pretend that the policies that I support to contain ISIS don't cause far more civilian casualties than ISIS has ever inflicted on the West.
If you cannot see the massive in-your-face crimes of your own culture, how on earth would you see yourself as fit to judge the crimes of another?
Does it mean ignore terrorism and terrorists? Of course not, but let's put it in proper perspective.
Have you tried reporting the pirate links...
You can play an infinite game of whack-a-mole with these sites.
My wife's an author, and while she had the good grace to just ignore it, I was irritated enough to write polite letters to the first half-dozen sites when pirate book sites started to appear. One actually wrote an apology and took it down. Another replied in broken English to indicate what would happen if I tried to further interfere with his revenue stream (most pirate sites generate revenue in the form of ads). When another half-dozen new sites popped up in the next week, I realized my wife was right.
All you can do is hope that not *too* many young adults have adopted the motto "Only stupid people pay when they don't have to."
It certainly doesn't help when (as I witnessed) a salesman tried to persuade someone to drop the iPhone they were considering buying and buy a Samsung using the sales line "With iPhone, you have to buy your apps. With Android, everyone gets them for free.."
There's an eye-opening amount of piracy on iPhone (I was amazed at the numbers), but from what I've read from developers and the numbers in general, it pales in comparison with the piracy rates on Android.
The idea that a large number of people pirate at 0.99 puts lie to the old canard "if you make it cheap and convenient enough, people will buy instead of pirate".
Even fewer banks will lend you money when you say "I want to manufacture 10,000 of these, and *if* I can, I can pay you back."
Agreed. It is why you already need to have the manufacturing contracts in hand. Thus you know the costs, the delivery dates, etc.
Kickstarter/IndieGoGo are for projects so speculative that they can't even attract venture capital.
The problem with that is that is not how they're seen at this point in time by the vast majority of the customers and many of the sponsors. The howls of outrage when projects fail to ship make it clear that the majority of customers do not distinguish between simple order fulfillment and a speculative venture. Nor does KS et al make any great effort to make the difference between such projects clear to the customer.
Perhaps KS could calve off another company for the majority of sponsors who in fact are only using KS to accumulate a minimum order for their product, but have manufacturing contracts, delivery contracts, etc. in hand. That way the truly speculative ventures aren't gaining supporters through customer misperception. After all, I'm happy to gamble, but I want to know when I'm doing so and the crowd-funders aren't making it easy to tell the difference.
My proposal was simply an idea to clearly differentiate the two. One has guaranteed delivery or a full refund, the other most certainly does not.
If someone were able to personally obtain a loan for the product anyway, why would they approach Kickstarter/Indiegogo?
The problem is that very few banks will lend you money when you say "I want to manufacture 10,000 of these, and *if* I can sell them, I can pay you back." The service that "OF" provides is that it already has all the funds in escrow. "If I manufacture 10,000 of these, I have a guaranteed payment of $500K" is something that specialized banks finance on a fairly regular basis.
How is a product supposed to be developed and manufactured when the owners don't have the money they raised from the crowd funding?
I guess my point wasn't clear - Call the new company "OF" for "Order Fulfillment". You see something on the OF page and you order, then you get charged if minimum order size is made (and there's probably a maximum order size as well). The money is collected by "OF" and held in escrow. It will be paid once the customer receives the product within a specified time. If the customer doesn't, then he or she is refunded the whole amount.
The project sponsor now has a guaranteed sales. If he has contracts in hand with the manufacturers to make the stuff, and minimal reputation, he then goes to the bank to get a loan. (Loans for this sort of thing are common in business.) Of course, if he fails, then he is *personally* on the hook for the loan. The bank will only loan money if everything is in place for simple order fulfillment.
The consumer then has real transparency - order from "OF" - you only pay if minimum orders reached, and you get full refund if no product within the time specified.
Otherwise, you can still fund KS projects and accept a 50-75% failure rate (because most 'safe' projects go "OF" route), and maybe get neat stuff. If you aren't willing to take the risk, then you don't fund.
The whole point is to make *what* you are funding transparent and to strip away the ambiguity from both the project runners and the funders ("I'm funding development, but without any risk!").
I think KickStarter, et al, have perhaps unintentionally blurred the lines between research, development, and order fulfillment.
Ostensibly these organizations are supporting development, but by essentially treating projects as order fulfillment, they ignore the fact that development can fail.
Now in this case it appears that, whether they knew it or not, people were funding research, and of course research can (and in fact usually does) fail.
Obviously greater transparency would help, but I'm not sure that crowd-funding would survive that reality. I suspect the majority of crowd-funding participants want the feeling of actually investing/participating in development, but they don't want any of the associated risks - they just want order fulfillment.
Personally, I'm waiting for someone like Amazon or Alibaba to optimize the order fulfillment part of they system by holding the money in escrow. The manufacturers have to get a loan based on the money held in escrow, which should be doable if (1) they have the manufacturing contracts in hand, (2) some reputation, and (3) guaranteed payment by a reputable company. Probably means there's a minimum and maximum order size, but the option of guaranteed deliverable or 100% refund would probably cause mass migration, leaving KS and others doing actual crowd-funding, with all the risks it implies.
And even easier still if you never stopped trick or treating.
Location and weather matters. We're close to a school and had mild weather this year, so we got a little over 500 (normally it's closer to 400). Currently we're in a young kid boom, and because there are lots of munchkins about, lots of families with young kids move in, so the kid density does perpetuate.
Still, neighbourhoods also age out. I remember that my parents got about 150 when I was a kid, but it had dropped to half that by the time my sister, who was 5 years younger, was doing the rounds. It then moved back up about a decade later.
Often into adulthood.
Absolutely true. I can still point out the house in our neighbourhood that in 1973 (and only for one year) gave out full-size chocolate bars.
because the mob can gang up and kidnap and kill any singular individual.
Welcome to reality. The only morality that exists in any meaningful way is the morality shared by those with enough power to enforce it. In our society, neither you nor I have that power.
In which case, your only hope is to influence enough people by persuasion to make your morality the dominant one.
Given the way of government growth, you've failed in that task.
Persuade harder.
I'd be happy with one breakthrough battery for all the battery breakthrough stories I've seen on Slashdot for the last ten years...
My suspicion is that there just wasn't enough profit in the non-Mac PC world to motivate PC makers into taking the risks that innovation requires.
Kind of sad, really. The fact that PCs are affordable means they're doomed to be... kind of boring. (At least until Microsoft's money shakes it up.)
Once ad blocking becomes truly ubiquitous (I give it a year) and most of the independent web sites die, how are we block ads once the Internet = Facebook?
Facebook hosts all the content and all the ads (and it gets 30% of any hosted site's revenue for its trouble).
The rise of Ad-Blocking was inevitable, but boy, I'm not looking forward to having a Facebook account just to surf the remaining sites that keep trying to make a go of it.
If you want your products sold, then make a good product! The forums and people will take care of the rest.
I'm going to take a wild guess here, and guess that you've never been within a 100 miles of running a real business :-).
As usual, Europe is way ahead of the curve for this. Widespread adoption (along with the mechanism to allow merchants to use this in the same way as the Visa and MC "verified" service) would pretty much kill card-not-present fraud dead.
As EMV chip card readers get cheaper, I keep waiting for banks to offer an on-line verification service where they supply a chip card reader to the card owner, which can then be used to verify on-line transactions. After all, the system is already designed to survive the POS terminal being compromised, so the same should apply to what is effectively a home POS terminal.
It's likely that your card was used at a location for which an abnormal number of cards were found to have been skimmed. This is usually the reason that a whole batch of cards get cancelled. ("Kill every card used at Joe's Gas Station between Monday and Thursday.")
Ten years ago, the US banks didn't want the expense of switching to EMV. The cost would be that Americans would have to expect to have several cards declined at any one time because of fraud-fighting measures. The banks knew this was the future.
As it was, as all the world's bank card fraud organizations migrated to the US, the US was compelled to switch anyway. (You never want to be the last vulnerable man standing.) They'd have been far better going a decade ago.
I *knew* someone would call me on that :-).
However, should those without children be ineligible to vote on the issue?
Or perhaps look at the legal system. We *know* that innocents may be injured or killed in pursuance of justice. Are we obligated to have police officer's lives at risk? (To be honest, I think it's good policy - if we had robo-cops, I think the numbers of innocents getting killed would go up, but I don't think we have a moral obligation to do so.)
You're comment is absolutely accurate, and why politicians I respect are in short supply.
Success as a politician almost requires you suppress facts that would harm your favored policies, such as "innocents will suffer".
And in fact, as a leader, you could argue that if you are a "good" person (and who among us thinks of ourselves otherwise) and *you* have carefully evaluated both sides and deemed a policy desirable, then aren't you committing evil by spending effort to admit the costs of that policy and thus make it less likely to pass? If you truly think that war is required to reduce suffering in the end, isn't your moral obligation and your duty to suppress (or at the very least, not promulgate) the facts that might diminish support for war?
(And this applies to any policy - healthcare, justice, etc.)
It's a reason that I could never be a politician. I'm selfish enough that I value my morality more than the benefits to the populace that compromising that morality might bring. As a non-entity, my words, harmful though they might be to my own side, are inconsequential.
So, I suppose I came on strong because the disclosure of costs is what I feel morality requires. However, you are quite correct, what we can expect, and what indeed, in some circumstances, may constitute good leadership is quite different. Assumptions of complete rationality are both factually incorrect, and probably make bad policy.
Indeed, I might often disagree with his choices (I personally lean left), but in this he has my respect.
My scorn is reserved for those on any side who refuse to admit the costs of their favored policies. Every policy has cost, and the unwillingness to explicitly admit those costs exists is either ignorance (unforgivable in a leader) or evidence of a profound disrespect for the people you lead (also unforgivable).
But then I've never been a big believer of the idea that the people are too stupid to be given all the facts.
I'll be satisfied the first time I hear a politician who approves military action say that "I personally accept that my decision to approve this action will kill innocent men, women and children. This is a price that I am willing to pay for this action."
I have yet to hear a politician acknowledging the lives it will cost *in advance* and then approving it anyway. This isn't a "oh, a terrible mistake has happened." This is "we know what the costs are, and we're willing to pay them." If you can't publicly acknowledge the reality of your command, you have no business giving the command.
It's why leadership is a crushing responsibility.