Getting noticed, corrollaries

I've picked up some web browsing via "planet" sites recently. Most notably, Planet Arslinux, but also Planet Debian and Planet Kernel. On Planet Arslinux today, I saw Jay Wren's post about products being noticed.. This got me to thinking - and especially, his points about iTunes and Google made me think about why I'm a user of those two things, and also, other things.

As I ponder this, I realize that the products I'm passionate about, all share a common trait. Mostly, I hate their competition because it sucks. I think this is just another way of saying the "10 times" rule Jay postulates.

With Google, I switched because it worked, and found me the information I needed. This was a rather remarkable feature at the time. Mostly because search engines just sucked. With iTunes, I started using it because I bought an iPod. On the other hand, it's actually a really good mp3 player. And CD ripper. ID3 tag editor..... etc. It does a good job at all these things. None of the other players I've used provided all these features in one spot and got more than one of them right. In fact, most failed to get even one right. So, it's not that iTunes is great. It's just that the rest suck. (My mp3 player of choice before I stumbled on iTunes was a hand-written Perl script that I called "weightedplay", that automatically noticed new mp3s and played more recently added stuff slightly more often than older things. It was really quite simple, and other than it's lack of GUI, it was better than anything else I'd found for just playing songs.)

So those are the things that come to mind immediately, and why I switched away from their competitors. I'll bring up another one, that's occurred to me as I write this. A long, long time ago, I switched from using RedHat as my Linux distro of choice, to using Debian. In this case, it wasn't because Debian was great. I had done some customizations to my RedHat installation in strange places (/etc/inetd.conf, IIRC), and doing an upgrade wiped out those changes without warning. In retrospect, after years of being away, I realize that my customizations *might* have been saved in .rpmsave files. But I was angry, so I found another distro that I was promised would tell me before it nuked my customizations. In the meantime, I've realized that apt actually works, and that I don't really mind my packages being a little bit old if they work, so I'm happy with Debian. But I think this proves that it's not how good the new choice is, but how much you dislike the old choice that sets these patterns in our minds.

This is the thing MicroSoft doesn't get on search. For a very long time they thought that it was OK to fool their users by sneaking in paid-for results in their search listings. That's bad, and hurts the accuracy of their results, in the user's minds. This is why they will be struggling to recover influence in search for a very long time. (Oddly, I've noticed that Google's advertisements are usually well targetted at my searches, which is pretty nice. I've even occassionally clicked on one. The beauty of relevance.)

So, I guess that's my take on the thought. It's not how good you are, but how bad you make your competitor look.