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Comment by saimiam | Hacker News Reader

I disagree with your entire comment and here’s why - in my view, saying that the reason something failed because it relieved no itch or there was insufficient utility is at par with suggesting that trading is simple because you have to “Buy Low and Sell High, d’oh”. It teaches no one anything they don’t instinctively know.

Everything the article says - be it about influencers not picking up and promoting the Spectacles to difficulties with porting content without cropping - is extremely useful to anyone else looking to launch a Spectacles type device.

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>Everything the article says - [...] - is extremely useful to anyone else

The post you replied to tried to explain why it's actually not useful. The journalist uses a style of seductive writing (some call it "narrative fallacy"[1]) which connects plausible-sounding causes to its supposedly logical effects. That style of explanation can actually make readers dumber about what happened because it leaves out counterexamples.

That "narrative fallacy" is common in writings from Harvard Business Review, histories, biographies, newspapers & pundits trying to explain why the Dow Jones Index went up/down, why startups/products failed/succeeded, etc. All of those suffer the omission of counterexamples.

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

> That style of explanation can actually make readers dumber about what happened because it leaves out counterexamples.

Thank you for writing this

Of course it would be tautological to say "what's useful is useful" but that's not what the parent is saying.

The parent is saying that usefulness is the main, if not only, cause of success, and that other factors are in fact irrelevant (namely, fashionableness, launch strategy, celebrity endorsements, etc.)

You can agree or disagree with that thesis, but here you're misrepresenting it.

“Usefulness” is not a metric that can measured or sought in isolation. Usefulness needs an actor trying to perform an action desiring a result.

When OP says something failed because it isn’t useful, they are deliberately ignoring the subject and object of the equation.

When the article says that influencers didn’t glom on to Spectacles, they are making a statement about influencers not finding it useful but if you read the parent comment, this observation is useless because it obfuscates the true problem - that Spectacles is “useless”.

> is extremely useful to anyone else looking to launch a Spectacles type device.

Earth has limited resources. I wish people wouldn't feel the need to buy / produce hypster "Spectacles type devices".

>extremely useful to anyone else looking to launch a Spectacles type device.

That audience is tiny and has budgets to hire marketers with much better analysis than this article.

I don't use Snapchat, but take a look at all the anti-Snapchat posts in his Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/joshconstine

It feels more like someone shorting stocks than providing thoughtful analysis.

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