Agreed, it’s about understanding the problem they have or the thing they are trying to accomplish so you can invent a new or better way to solve it (or eliminate the need for it in the first place).
Depends on so many things, and there are so many providers out there. What industry are you in and what are you aiming to accomplish? Who are your email recipients / targets?
Gall’s law: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”
Your theory of premature architecture reinforces Gall’s law.
This is from the book Systemantics: How systems work and especially how they fail (1977).
Not sure it'll work. I think half the advantage comes from the integration across all these tools (maps, search, etc). Have you ever tried to use duckduckgo? It surprised me what I take for granted in Google's user experience.
I wholeheatedly agree with you. The GMaps experience is vastly superior. Additionally, when I'm referring to Gmaps, I think one of the critical features that I would love to replace with Open Source is Places. With due respect, I find both Google and Yelp a*holes in this area. While OpenStreetMap is really good for mapping, I'm still looking to find(or create) somethign that can supplement OSM with Places/Business data.
Agree you have to mix qualitative with the quantitative, but the best metrics systems don't just measure one quantity metric. They should be paired with a quality metric.
Example: User Growth & Customer Engagement
Have to have user growth and retention. If you looked at just one or the other, you'd be missing half the equation.
I think that a good portion of the problem is that there are groups involved in metrics:
1) People setting the metrics
2) People implementing/calculating the metrics
3) People working on improving the metrics (ie product work)
2 is specially complicated for a lot of software products because it can some times be really hard to measure and can be tweaked/manipulated. For example, the MAU twitter figures from the buyout that Musk keeps complaining about, or Blizzard constantly switching their MAU definition.
Often 2 and 3 are the same people and 1 is almost always upper management. I argue that 1 and 2 should be a single group of people (that doesn't work on the product at all) and not directly subject to upper management and not tracked by the same metrics they implement (or tracked by any metrics at all).
Absurdity, unfairness, and failure often result from selective blindness to reality, whether willful or unintentional. Hyperlogical people sometimes lack empathy or an ability to conceive of, to understand, or prefer to trivialize ambiguous situations, politics, biases, human factors, or nonfunctional requirements. Always keep looking for one's own and organizational blind spots.
I don't disagree, but two reasons we don't see them (yet):
(1) much harder to launch as some amorphous vertical AI - like, what would a 'Transportation AI' look like? Versus targeting a specific workflow within it - "AI copilot for truck drivers".
(2) The large incumbent software platforms that already are powering the day-to-day workflows are THE companies to implement AI first and most accessibly. So the likely winner of the vertical AI race is whatever incumbent platform is already in the highest % of companies or powering the highest % of workflows.
It's startling how much transportation has already been optimized, and agriculture + AI is a natural pairing, but John Deere isn't a startup in the traditional sense. They've said they will have fully autonomous fleets by 2030.
JD has been doing "AI" since a significant portion of the HN readership was even born. Integration of digital info tech into farming was something I was reading about in the '80s and is now just standard on most farms. These days in things like crop fertilization your equipment 'learns' from maps and other tests the quality of the soil and increases/decreases the amount it outputs based on a pretty fine grid system.
