TED
5 HN mentions · mentioned in 5 months, 2009–2026
18:16 · 2M views · Jan 16, 2007
Malcolm Gladwell's TED talk on how Howard Moskowitz found that there is no single perfect spaghetti sauce. He draws a larger point about choice, preference and happiness.
Cited to argue that people do not know what they want and that markets should be segmented.
5 comments from Hacker News
Target a well-defined sub-market that Slack currently serves and serve it better by targeting it more precisely [1]. As demonstrated by the comments on this thread, there are a lot of people that all think that Slack needs to go in different directions , which agrees with my own personal observations of Slack's utility to different people on different teams. Slack is a simple, general solution that works well enough for a lot of teams and a lot of people. If you want to disrupt it, I doubt you're going to be able to improve it across the board point-for-point, so in stead you want to target a subgroup that's sort of well serviced by Slack but could stand to have tweaking done to fit it to their needs better. To collect some examples from this thread: * Some engineering teams need default UI that encourages larger message sizes so people aren't writing strings of tiny messages all the time. This _clearly_ isn't something that everybody wants or needs - a lot of brainstorming goes on in my Slack chats, for example, and that means tiny ideas have to go out quickly and easily - but it's a reasonable submarket to target. This would also lead to a larger emphasis on text formatting and composition, better controls on notification and addressing, better searching and filtering and quoting/reply/threading, and other tools that improve the power of an individual message at the expense of usability and speed - move it more toward the email/forum topic side of things. * Some teams feel
People have no idea what they want or need, or even what they like. Observe the following empirical evidence as presented by respected marketer Malcolm Gladwell: this video Also, that bit about a heart valve is a sly reference to a famous polymath-type who invented a revolutionary kind of heart valve as just one part of a long and incredibly varied career. Can anyone remember who this is? Google is giving me nothing.
Depending on your market size/slice it's possible in a good sized company to have folks that are so well entwined in that community that they can help give feedback about their favorite products. Part of the problem with marketing is that people don't know what they want. this video
> different people respond to different approaches Covered well by Malcolm Gladwell's spaghetti story. this video
I like postgres. I use it for lots of projects. I like other databases too. I think thats okay. Here's Malcom Gladwell discussing spagetti sauce which feels oddly relevant: this video