Hacker News Reader

Comment by oneplane | Hacker News Reader

Does it matter? I often see 'our product is much faster than thing X at cloud Y!' and find myself asking why. Why would I want something less integrated for a performance change I don't need, a software change I'll have to write and an extra overhead for dealing with another source?

It's great that one individual thing is better than one other individual thing, but if you look at the bigger picture it generally isn't that individual thing by itself that you are using.

View on HN

Ok so you're not the target customer for this product. Do you believe people with this problem should be deprived of a solution just because you don't need it?

I don't think I suggest that a product should not exist. I suggest that targeting the competition instead of the use case is a bit silly.

Conflict generates more attention.

It does matter, because not every use case requires everything but the kitchen sink. If you're building things that only ever require the same mass produced components for every application, well that stifles the possibilities of what can be built.

So say you have a solution for your object storage and it is plenty. Then a different product pops up, solves the same problem in exactly the same way, and costs the same. Migrating isn't free and at the end you have two suppliers to manage. Does that make any sense at all? I think not.

There is a different case that makes sense: you have object storage and it's not sufficient, so you go look for object storage suppliers that deliver something different so it suits your need. Now it makes sense to look for a service that is relatively similar to what you are already using but is better in a factor that is significant for your application (i.e. speed of object key changes), now it does make sense.

Marketing just says: "Look at us, we are faster". I think that message is not going to matter unless that happens to be your exact problem in isolation, which isn't exactly common; systems don't tend to run in isolation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com