Comment by ericmay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ericmay | Hacker News Reader

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Maybe that narrative and story is overly-simplistic, feel-good stuff for engineers who think they're smarter than they are and the explanations for why these companies fail can be rather nuanced and completely unrelated to whatever decision some database developer thinks they would make? Maybe you're seeing patterns because your brain which is set by default to recognize patterns is deceiving you?

Nike specifically looks like the opposite of what you are asserting where the spreadsheet people take over. Here's the innovative kind of shoes that Nike is making that you are asserting is being killed in step 2: https://www.nike.com/t/jordan-trunner-o-s-mens-shoes-tC5xlGT...

This looks idiotic. I'm not buying it. And you want me to scroll through 700+ pairs of shoes where most look like that? Give me a break. This is what happens when "innovation" culture takes over without adults in the room.

Here's a Hoka shoe: https://www.hoka.com/en/us/mens-everyday-running-gear/clifto...

Here's an ON shoe: https://www.on.com/en-us/products/cloud-6-coast-3mf1003/mens...

Here's a New Balance shoe: https://www.newbalance.com/pd/574-core/ML574V3-40377.html?dw...

Maybe they should let the boring spreadsheet people take over?

https://andrewdremin.com/nike-dtc-strategy-failure-2026/ talks about how they changed their approach to product development to rehash old designs for a more fashion led approach.

A failure of design rehash is still an engineering failure in this industry. I don't think you can cleanly separate the two like you are more able to, though imperfectly, in software.

I don't mean to suggest that there aren't other problems or that spreadsheet people aren't dragging the company down. Changing to a more D2C business model was likely a bad idea, for example, which has influence/influenced by engineering/design as well. But I do mean to challenge this notion of "if only the engineers got to make the decisions" because from my point of view with respect to Nike and its clothing line, those are the engineers being unleashed to build whatever futuristic/fashionable products that they want to.

It was during covid, during a time when people were starting to think retail would never go back to normal and everyone would switch to exclusively online buying.

It was a bet that was unsupported by data (there wasn't any) and turned out to be wrong.

the only comparable shoe in terms of sales to the overall sales of the company you listed would be the on cloud 6 coast as id say the jordan trunner you listed doesnt even count for a tenth of a percentile of nikes models. The New balance 574 is the bread and butter shoe of new balance, followed by the 990 or newly the 530. There are some more lifestyle models mixed in like the 878, 2002 or 1906, but the 574 is THE new balance shoe, just like an Air Force 1 is THE nike shoe. So i dont really think your comparison holds true, as you could find those "atrocious" models also from ON, Hoka and New balance. The difference is, those brands dont have literally thousands of models, not colorways but models, to choose from, so a singular hit or miss hurts much more.

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