Monthly Archives: April 2008

Coming soon

Lance highlights a problem that needs to be dealt with by all Apple aficionados.

Broadly speaking, Apple are a company that make amazing new products which will be released soon.

They often don’t announce release dates until they arrive. And, as I’ve mentioned previously, they don’t seem to have any issue with selling the old version of the products right up until that date. As a result there is a lively ecosystem of rumour sites which offer up various advice about which products to buy when and why.

This is an extreme version of Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice – not only do you have to choose between the various products and options that are available to buy now, you also need to consider what might (but also might not) be available to buy at some near point in the future.

What can you do?

For a while I subscribed to a few of the rumour sites and tried to keep up with it all, but that got too tiring. I’m obviously not a true fan-boy. I abandoned that when I culled my feeds. Life, surprisingly, has gone on.

Thankfully I didn’t labour the decision when I got my iPhone. I didn’t even have to choose between the 16GB and 8GB model, as they only had the 8GB model in stock the day I was at the Apple Store in San Francisco. As per the book referenced above, one choice means far less room for regret.

So, Lance, my advice …

Buy an iPhone. You’ll love it. There are lots of reasons for this, which I’ll save for a future post, but suffice to say it really kicks ass. You can afford it. What’s more, I doubt the 3G version if and when it’s released and available here will be so much better that you’ll wished you waited, and if it is, you can always sell the old one and upgrade then.

Paul Buchheit on Product/Market Fit

Here’s an interesting response to the great Marc Andreessen post on Product/Market Fit (which I can’t believe I haven’t linked to from here before now!)

“What’s the right attitude? Humility. It doesn’t matter how smart and successful and qualified you are, you simply don’t know what you’re doing. The good news is that nobody else does either, though some are foolish enough to think that they do (and that’s why you can beat them).

What is the humble approach to product design? Pay attention. Notice which things are working and which aren’t. Experiment and iterate. Question your assumptions. Remember that you are wrong about a lot of things. Watch for the signals. Lose your technical and design snobbery. Whatever works, works.”
– The most important thing to understand about new products

I like the idea of humble product design.

Paul used to work for Google and was the guy who wrote Gmail.

His own story is a goodie:

“I wrote the first version of Gmail in one day. It was not very impressive. All I did was stuff my own email into the Google Groups (Usenet) indexing engine. I sent it out to a few people for feedback, and they said that it was somewhat useful, but it would be better if it searched over their email instead of mine. That was version two. After I released that people started wanting the ability to respond to email as well. That was version three. That process went on for a couple of years inside of Google before we released to the world.”