> The biggest commercial success is not the best technical design: Nokia N95 versus the first generation iPhone
That’s not a good example. Neither is Beta vs VHS. The most they illustrate is a different law I am coining right here:
Canyon’s Law of Design Optimization: you will inevitably choose to optimize for different metrics than your customers would wish. Don’t try to convince them they are wrong.
"Ignore all the advise above and do the right thing
Subtext: This will take multiple lifetimes to accomplish"
This is particularly important considering that some of the advice is at odds with each other and engineering is an unending juggling of tradeoffs. It's also by far the hardest to achieve both technically and socially but worth striving for.
I like systems that are maintence free and easily replaceable. My experience so far in software engineering is that technologies die, so it should also be easy to replace the tecnology, like the hardware it runs on, the platform/os, the programming language and the framework.
I can think of a few SaaS products in the document scanning and OCR space whose UIs are not efficient or simple, while being time consuming and, to my mind, chaotic.
There should be an Akin Exit Clause from said 3-year contracts. They have zero incentives to fix or improve _anything_ during those years of servitude.
That’s not a good example. Neither is Beta vs VHS. The most they illustrate is a different law I am coining right here:
Canyon’s Law of Design Optimization: you will inevitably choose to optimize for different metrics than your customers would wish. Don’t try to convince them they are wrong.
> "A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately."
https://web.archive.org/web/20031101212246/https://spacecraf...
"Ignore all the advise above and do the right thing Subtext: This will take multiple lifetimes to accomplish"
This is particularly important considering that some of the advice is at odds with each other and engineering is an unending juggling of tradeoffs. It's also by far the hardest to achieve both technically and socially but worth striving for.
It's a nice reflection, but what is the origin of this? Can't find another reference to this "law" online.
Minimize negative(painful) notions as much as possible, ideally approaching zero, while maximizing positive (pleasurable) notions.
Minimize negative(painful) notions: Uncertainty, Risk, Chaotic behavior, Randomness, Non-deterministic, Instability, Cost, Energy losses, Time consumption, Resource usage, Excessive complexity, Failure modes, Noise
Maximize positive(Pleasure) notions: Reliability, Efficiency, Deterministic, Predictability, Precision, Accuracy, Verification, Validation, Safety, Stability, Simplicity (lower complexity), Robustness, Redundancy
There should be an Akin Exit Clause from said 3-year contracts. They have zero incentives to fix or improve _anything_ during those years of servitude.