Comment by mk89 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mk89 | Hacker News Reader

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> ... it doesn't matter if a competitor ships buggy RoR-based systems a few months earlier.

You hit the nail on the head! However, I would like to mention that competition is only one very important factor.

I'd add that IT is a cost as it is a baker for a bakery, a cook for a restaurant, a mechanic for a repair shop. Do you want to be the n.1 restaurant? Then you must pay, so that your business is good food, not marketing - notice: the best restaurants don't even have good websites, as the food speaks for them. Yes, you must pay a lot to get the best cook, who will take all the time and require all the staff he wants/needs to prepare the best recipes, and so forth. We think we are in a better business just because IT is something relatively new, which not everyone fully understands, so we think that we are the best in everything we do, because we bring innovation. Sadly, we are not.

The current reality is that most companies are average or below-average with no great plans to further develop or to become the next IBM, NASA, Intel, or whatever. Most of them want to survive, some want to get a lot of money fast, and who knows, maybe in 5-10 years sell the company for 1,2,10 mln USD. As long as the mentality is driven by the idea of the acquisition, not by ambition, things won't change - the most efforts will be spent in hiding the pile of s* that employees do, trying to draw the right numbers on the right graphs. And even IBM, Nasa, Intel fail. They do. The difference lies in the ability to stand up and get on their feet again - learn from failures. They have also wasted huge amounts of money - it's documented everywhere, every time one of their projects gets shut down. However, they have a goal in their mind: to be the n.1 whatever they do.

> Do you want to be the n.1 restaurant?

Depends on what you mean by "n.1". The "n.1" restaurant in terms of monetary value is McDonalds. They do market (heavily). They don't pay for the best cook (not anywhere near). And they don't have the best recipes. But they are wildly successful. Conversely, michelin star restaurants go bankrupt all the time.

There's nothing wrong with aspiring to produce michelin star code. But as McDonalds shows, you can be incredibly ambitious and long-lasting with quality being at best a secondary priority.

> The "n.1" restaurant in terms of monetary value is McDonalds.

No, the No. 1 franchised chain of restaurants is McDonald's; there's a pretty big difference between the No. 1 restaurant and the No. 1 chain of restaurants.

> But they are wildly successful.

The chain has, over its lifetime, been wildly successful, a success initially fueled by a reputation for extremely high quality, consistency, and efficient service compared to the greasy-spoon diners that were the mainstay of low-cost restaurant food at the time of their initial growth; the recent history is something a bit different (they have, IIRC, recently ended a period of year-over-year drops in same-restaurant sales by, among other things, significantly cutting the number of restaurants, particularly the corporate-owned rather than franchised ones.)

> Conversely, michelin star restaurants go bankrupt all the time.

So do individual (independently owned and operated) McDonald's restaurants.

> But the goal of most companies isn't critical accolades, it's to make money.

Yeah, but McDonald's didn't make more money than other restaurants by skimping on quality, they made more money by being successful based on quality, and moving quickly with that success to branch out to other locations rather than merely saturated a single market, and by offloading much of the risk (and some of the rewards) of expansion to fee-paying franchisees, which is what differentiates them from single-location restaurants that are trying to extract maximum value from a particular local market.

Trying to generalize from this to say anything about succeeding in the software market is probably pointless, mostly resulting in very bad analogies.

McDonals is the Ford of restaurants. Automation (using procedures and equipment) to reduce cost and keep a consistent relatively high level of quality.

Aside from marketing, which you mentioned, the quality McDonald's pays for is standardization.

Standardization is why chain restaurants exist at all. They give people a way to get a meal they know is going to be of a certain quality at a certain price with a sufficiently low probability of being surprised. Surprises are, on the whole, generally negative: Good restaurants are few and far between, especially at the fast food price point, and a sufficiently bad surprise can have health implications. There's a reason one of the first chains was White Castle: White implies purity and a standard of cleanliness, as opposed to the local greasy spoon cafe where the only assurance of quality is that it hasn't been shut down yet.

So McDonald's pays for processes and materials that it can blast out into a million little restaurants, all the same, secure in the knowledge that minimum-wage workers can be sufficiently skilled and motivated to carry out those processes and use those materials the right way. Doing anything better might lead to a much improved experience in some restaurants but it will reliably lead to total disaster in others, which is utterly contrary to the business model.

By that standard, McDonald's is fairly high quality.

McDonalds has an executive chef with a high-end restaurant background.[1] He heads a team of other chefs. Their job is to design and test recipes that can reliably be implemented by following the directions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Coudreaut

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