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Comment by pmorici | Hacker News Reader

This is an urban legend or folk tale or whatever you want to call it. I've seen this exact same story before only it was a soap factory in Japan or something like that. It's presents a good lesson but isn't a true story at least this re telling of it isn't.

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Like many of the stories on The Daily WTF, I consider this to be in the genre of stories that are impossible to determine if they're literally exactly true as told, because there are so many things like that that happen all the time, so by the time you factor in just a bit of distortion it matches too many things.

If it isn't literally true, and I have no idea, many many things just like it are.

Heck, I could probably collect a few dozen stories from HN folk right here about projects they've done where they've wasted tens of thousands of dollars (and up to arbitrary amounts of money) delivering something that their customer didn't want and anybody could have found that out with a single question in 10 seconds, if anybody had thought to ask OR if management had taken the answer seriously.

If we’re swimming in relevant anecdotes, why is it always this same apocryphal crap version which is always spread? Maybe the difference between the stories you would collect and this story, is that the stories you would collect would have more than one side to them...

"why is it always this same apocryphal crap version which is always spread?"

It's the winner of the memetic evolutionary war. No sarcasm. It doesn't mean much. I think that you're likely correct that the more complicated and nuanced versions don't survive, because they transmit less well. It's still not exactly a stretch to say that lots of money gets wasted all the time for very, very similar reasons.

Because the apocryphal crap version makes a nice story. It's like the space pen story, or the radio exchange between a U.S. battleship and a Canadian lighthouse.

For most of the anecdotes I have, they are all covered under a NDA. This one is a good one to repeat as I don't have to worry about someone complaining that I gave away their trade secrets.

Most of them leave the $20 solution in place as they can then save $$$ over paying for a 'proper' solution (someone typically comes up with the $20 solution before the $8m solution makes it to the RFQ stage).

I feel there is a more recent upgrade to this type of story where Elon Musk ramps up production of one of the early Tesla vehicles by talking to factory workers and swapping out lines or parts about 10x+ faster.

It's a parable.

There's a similar anecdote out there, also involving toothpaste. In this one the toothpaste company spends millions on a new marketing campaign to sell more toothpaste and then someone suggests that they make the hole in the tube bigger so people use more.

Freshy Fresh+ for YOUR health

Ever noticed how tooth paste ads always show the entire brush covered in paste, even though a lil' dib is already enough?

A real example of this would be Alka-Seltzer(dissolvable antacid/pain medicine). An ad showed two tablets in the glass, and they saw a large increase in sales. Nowadays they simply come in packets of two.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alka-Seltzer#Marketing http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/alka-seltzer.asp

there's a similar one too about NASA researching a pen that works in space.

At least that’s a real pen, albeit not developed by NASA.

The lesson of cost vs. benefit is what's important here, IMHO.

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