Hacker News Reader

Comment by duncanj | Hacker News Reader

Cuban's title is wrong for his post. Obviously, if your customers think a new product sucks, you should listen, right? Apple didn't sink billions of dollars into AppleTV.

View on HN

No, it's bang on. The customer needs a Labrador retriever for the fall duck hunt, but if you ask them what they want, you'll get a general sense of water, weeds, fur, four legs and a bill -- you know, like, those, whadayacallem birds you hunt have -- and no matter how carefully you try to clarify things, the best they can actually describe is a platypus. I say that as the builder of many platypii over the years. Customers always come up with a platypus until you show them a Lab -- and it's our job to know what a Lab is in their world.

On the other hand, a domesticated platypus would be pretty awesome. You know, if they weren't poisonous.

Which is to say, a platypus isn't always the wrong choice, despite being goofy and seemingly impractical.

Sure. We just build way more of them than people need :-)

Seems pretty clear he's speaking within the context of features/functionality.

It's clear after you start reading the post. It's not clear from the title. Hence dunacnj's point that the title is "wrong."

I guess it comes down to how you approach it.

I had no reason to expect a statement trivially-falsifiable when held to the standard of universal truth was meant to be taken as such. So I assumed there was a particular context relevant to the assertion and was unsurprised to find that there was.

If you approach article titles expecting to find absolute logical precision, I'd imagine this is but one of many 'wrong' titles.

I knew the title couldn't mean what it literally meant. But I find that style of title if not "wrong" at least "bad." That the literal interpretation is obviously wrong is the intent; it lures you into reading the post to find out what exactly the author means by it. This is in opposition to a good title, which succinctly states the main point and lures you into reading by being an interesting idea.

I consider this technique linkbaiting.

I absolutely agree with that. On the axis of truth vs marketing, this is definitely out toward marketing. I don't think this is quite as bad as linkbaiting, but it's surely kin.

I guess I just misunderstood what you'd meant by 'wrong'.

That's why I said "wrong," to make sure it was clear I was using someone else's word. I probably would have said "misleading." And that was my first thought after reading through enough of the post to understand what he was really saying. I don't like posts where someone makes a provocative statement, then jumps through hoops to redefine words or attach different semantics to make it fit.

Yeah, sometimes it's not that you have to add more capability (features) to a product, it's that you have to make the features that exist easier to use.

Maybe a better title would be: Why you should never listen to your customers until after they've tried out your new product.

It's still far too easy to ask the wrong questions. One of my favorite podcasts, popSiren over at Revision3[0], had a great first season. But then they had a survey and asked viewers what they wanted to see more of. The second season turned into just another "cool websites" podcast, and completely stopped being interesting or entertaining. Viewership fell through the floor, and the show was dropped.

[0] http://revision3.com/popsiren/launch

Reply on news.ycombinator.com