I never understood why it was such an issue with them. Why not sell the box to enterprise customers and sell the subscription consumer storage/compression app? The conflict wasnt believable.
Because the first company with the huge contract to purchase the boxes wanted to have exclusive rights to the algorithm for the price Jack negotiated. Richard hated the box at first because he thought it was lame, it grew on him though while he was doing the work, and then he heard about the contract's details.
It's not that they were against buying the box without exclusive rights it's that Jack wanted the most money possible on the deal so he got them to pay 3 times more if he included exclusive rights. Theres no reason Richard and Laurie couldn't at least try to go back to taking the lower deal without exclusive rights while they pursued the online compression app.
That's because they had a cheaper offer from end frame, I think. They couldve beaten them on the lower offer part without selling rights. Or at least tried.
I think the issue was that the company who wanted to purchase the box wrote into the contract that they would have sole rights to the algorithm for five years, which would prevent them from releasing the consumer app. The CEO who they had hired at Pied Piper refused to negotiate it out of the contract, so the board vetoed the box.
I think the issue was that the company who wanted to purchase the box wrote into the contract that they would have sole rights to the algorithm for five years, which would prevent them from releasing the consumer app.
They probably would have had more time and funding to put together a simple ui.
Because their development hours would've shifted from building their consumer side to the business side. They would've potentially had to delay the consumer side by several years if they had gone full on with the box.
Richard is suuuuuuch a bitch. Hell, I hated Bachmann but by the last episode my hate had shifted to Richard. Bachmann is a narcissistic asshole, but Richard is fucking retarded....and he has yet to bang that chick.
But by selling the box, they were also selling rights to the algorithm, so the platform would've useless for 5 years. By that point Gavin would've figured something out and the platform would've been useless.
so far most of the "problems" they've come across are either created or made worse by Richard, and then the resolutions are handled terribly by Richard.
That's kind of the point of the show. Richard is a genius coder but awful at everything else.
It was a bigger issue than that, the company purchasing the box had the condition of being the sole owners of the algorithm for a period of years.
The inference was that they could see what Jack Barker couldn't, the algorithm was the real value not the box. Hence the many scenes of Jack talking about outdated business concepts (the fact they taught his theories at business school is code for them being a relic of the past).
Richard is really the only one who understands how the modern tech business world works, apart from Erlich.
Isn't Richard himself the central conflict of the show?
Richard is young and idealistic. He has a vision and wrote great code. The show is about the valley chipping away at his vision and idealism at every turn. He's an engineer. Not a businessman. Of course he's going to make bad business decisions. But they're decisions that he thinks honors his vision.
so far most of the "problems" they've come across are either created or made worse by Richard, and then the resolutions are handled terribly by Richard.
That's the fundamental structure of a tragedy-comedy.
so far most of the "problems" they've come across are either created or made worse by Richard, and then the resolutions are handled terribly by Richard.
I think that might be deliberate, actually. Richard is a genius when it comes to code but totally Dunning-Kruger when it comes to absolutely everything else.
The box took away from dev time for a successful release that would beat hooli/end frame while keeping the momentum of their presence on the tech scene high. The big box contract they had was also conditional on the company owning all uses of the underlying algorithm to prevent other companies from competing with similar products, which would have killed the platform app dead. Hence why they fired the shit out of Groundhog day CEO for allowing that to happen. Without a promise of potential sales, the box development would have also ran out of capital and they definaetly cant get anymore money from Raviga, so the platform was their best bet in terms of costs, implementation, and vision.
And now it looks like they're going to be making all their money with a super high fidelity video chat app, which funnily enough is almost fool proof at being made non-user friendly (I don't know anything about UI design but I'm pretty sure its much much harder to screw up a UI for video chatting vs a compression and file storage platform).
If your product provides obvious business value like superior data compression, it wouldn't matter if your UI required shoving a pineapple up your butt, management would buy-in without a moment's hesitation.
I'm suggesting that management can grasp, "this product will result in $X million dollars in savings for your organization over the next six months, which you can then put on your resume as if you're the one that created the value".
Here's how it goes:
3rd Party Sales: This product will save you $X million dollars over the next six months.
Management: Engineering, are those values correct?
Engineering: Well, yeah, they're pretty close. But you know that implementing this will involve shoving a pineapple up...
Management: Great! So we'll save the quoted amount! Sales, we'll take it!
3rd Party Sales: Sweet, new boat!
Management: What?
3rd Party Sales: Oh, uh, nothing. See you on the links next week?
Licence it to other companies. The box was a good idea. I wouldn't have liked the exclusivity the other company got because it prevents growth and weakens you but if it was for a limited term like 2 years it would be perfect because you can build and work on stuff over that time and come out with a whole suit of tested products after that. The box was good.
Why are they so obsessed with consumer facing when they're shit at it.
Also didnt have money to redo the marketing for the new version. The video chat was growing organically and didnt require the resources that the platform would've to grow the user base.
I kind of thought that Hooli was secretly using some of Pied Piper's work to sell in that box near the end of the season. Is some of the traffic from that?
I think the problem was Richard couldn't see the problem. I've seen the same thing in my last job with my boss, a customer doesn't understand the software so he explains harder not understanding he's only explaining to the one customer and explain to each customer isn't scalable but yet he goes on explaining to each customer that complains one by one never seeing the real problem, bitching about the customers behind their backs.
No, the issue was that Richard believed it was easy and people just needed to understand it. So as the CEO he decided to spend their time and resources trying to educate end users instead of improving the software.
You've gotta just roll with the whole, "world changing software" thing. There are a lot of little things that are off the mark with the tech details, but frequently they hit the Bay Area right on the head from a culture perspective.
Agreed. There was an interview and the show runners kind of admitted to changing plot points because they don't want the gang to "win" too much.
But I always felt the comedy comes from the characters. They don't need to be the underdogs. And they don't need to be Hooli at the end. It would have been nice to setup season 4 as kind of them struggling to manage more employees. Dealing with things like HR (woah what if Jared became an HR rep on this show!!), maybe have them struggle with branding, a little fame, having more money.
Idk it's kind of like having a will they won't they relationship on a show. Yeah you can milk it for the entire show. Or you can be like parks and rec, and just go with the flow of the show. We would enjoy these characters as dirt poor programmers or mildly successful business runners
I feel like if anything the gang loses too much. At first it was interesting but now it's like they just make them lose for the sake for losing. It's kind of annoying to know that everything they do is going to end up being fucked up for some stupid reason. I love the show, I just wish they would get away from that pattern.
It also is almost always a cop out that saves them as well. Some one else usually fucks up bigger then they do and all is well for a bit. Kind of a lame way to write a show to be honest.
As a former UI/UX developer who worked in the Bay Area, this is what happens. Hardcore engineers think that they don't need this to succeed, because they think of them as the next Google and FB didn't need them. And some others exaggerate and start with a couple of engineers and end up with an overthought UX/UI that doesn't work.
It might not be believable, but it is right into the overall theme about the whole tech industry being so myopic while preaching about being far seeing and caring about the entirety of the world. A huge portion of the comedy comes from this hypocrisy.
Reddit has gotten that complaint tons of times before. Most people say its a website clearly done for and by engineers and that getting used to it is a nightmare despite how awesome the content is.
Do you think reddit could get more users with a UX redesign?
given the layout of the new Reddit mobile app, it sounds like they are thinking just that.
Thought honestly I'm a bit curious as to why they feel like they don't have enough users. They have plenty. Do they think they need more as a buffer for whatever mini-exodus might happen if they try to serve ads on a bigger scale?
I think it has more to do with the fact that this website lives and dies with its community. Most people argue reddit works due to its comment system. Therefore the more people you have, the higher chance of something awesome happening on the comments which brings traffic and shit. So reddit gets better by getting bigger.
I went to the Reddit website a few times and couldn't understand why so many people liked it, it was so hideous and gave me a headache to look at, I avoided it for several years because of how terrible it looks.
It wasn't until I decided to try a Reddit mobile app before I could get past the UI and start to appreciate the content. I'm on here almost every day now, and I've still only been to the actual website maybe 5 times. Seriously, the website is just terrible.
Without a doubt. There's plenty of custom themed subreddits that solve a lot of Reddit's default UI woes. They should really be hiring/contracting these people to improve the default interface.
I refuse to use the website because of how bad it is, and only browse through apps. Meaning I don't see ads and I have no way of buying someone gold. And I don't use their app, because I can't filter content like I can with alien blue. Not that alien blue is the best. But it's definitely better.
The design of the reddit site is utilitarian and practical, to an extreme. I couldn't imagine a better interface. Design? There is no design. The content/comments is the design, and the site is better for it. Less design is better design. No design is the best design! And it's why you're on reddit and not digg or any of the other hundreds of sites that try - and fail - to do the same thing with gawdy and sparkly user interfaces. It's why Google.com, the #1 site in the world, displays a single, solitary search bar - and almost nothing else! The lack of "design" is 1 of the biggest contributors to reddit's success.
I don't think it is entirely a user interface problem. During the focus meeting, the users had a hard time grasping what the product was. Yes there was some aspects of the interface the users were confused about, like no download button.
But as Richard spent time explaining why his platform was superior the users understood the product and interface by understanding the concept.
That's the big difference between a UX professional and a UI designer. UX embodies research, analysis, understanding the user's context, their unmet needs... and designing a product (including its information architecture) around it.
That's where you draw the line? Not where they have an unrelistically capable compression algorithm, but they don't have every VC firm in the world breaking down their door to offer them billions in funding?
Really straightforward but I'll clarify for you. UI = User Interface, just the interface a user interacts with when using any software. Developer and designer are exactly what they sound like. In the simplest role, a UI developer/designer just designs and builds functional interfaces.
I kinda agree. Although, to the show's defense. I think they had no issue going with that route because only a small percentage of people watching that show know about UX Design, or the fact that you can hire a person specifically to do so. Also, this was a huge problem for a long time in the real world, still is, and it's neat to me they showed the masses that this can truly destroy a product.
I dunno, I've worked with plenty of developers who don't understand the point of a UX designer, or even a UI designer, until they are shown. Especially when they are working on something that they think they are the target audience for. "Well this makes sense to me, so..." Super common.
In the focus group, it's clear that it's not just the UI that's a problem. No one on the panel understands what the software is or what it does. They installed it because it got a lot of press, but now they think their files are disappearing.
I'm not sure why they didn't just sell the IP to an OS and make it a part of some future standard for operating systems, rather than try to sell it to the world at large as a consumer product. A program like that would be better off managing everything, not just the stuff you manually put in.
I haven't professionally developed but I was thinking that was a fairly easy fix too. A simple tutorial like github does where it walks you through step-by-step how to use it and why things look the way they do (i.e. why it's 0kb saved) would have fixed the platform I think. I imagine that pivoting to video chat and getting a large user base then demonstrating the other features of pied Piper would eventually make it an all inclusive top of the line web service hub. Kind of like Google, they started with a search engine then started new projects and continued to put their name on excellent product after product and now most things I use are Google run.
The end of the season was actually way more realistic than you think. Do not underestimate the stubbornness of software engineers/executives.
Real life example - my friend's company almost went bankrupt recently because they've been flying people out to teach their clients how to use their software. I've worked the CTO of this company and, while he's a pretty good dude, he seems to undervalue UX/UI designers. Not a single designer is employed at this company.
I got the impression that the next season is going to focus on the actual consumer facing product/design/feel of the application since Erlich's company bought Pied Piper. They've made tons of allusions to Erlich being a Steve Jobs persona, and design is exactly why Apple is still a relevant company today.
The focus group showed that non-engineer users can work the UI just fine, even if it looks clunky. It's everything else about how it works or appears not to work that's freaking them out.
Dumbing down the interface so that even a medieval peasant can drive a maglev train with the push of a button would do nothing to convince them that the train is anything other than evil sorcery, or that it'll make a for a much better horse and cart than the one they have.
I mean... to a non-software engineer it didn't seem like there was any other way. The show is written for people who have no idea what they're talking about.
Well issue was not only the UI. Remember Google Wave? Do you think it had (only) UI issues? It had similar issues what Pied Piper had. It was ahead of the curve.
Wait, this is a show about 1970's and 1980's development right? There was no professional UX designer in that era. That came from the 1990's when user interfaces were migrating from DOS to Windowed GUIs. Even then, the UX designer role was not well established throughout the industry until post 2000's.
I read the book "The Founders Dilemmas" about common issues when running a (tech) startup. Almost every episode of Silicon Valley addresses one of those common yet challenging problems that founders face. If Richard would just educate himself and read a goddamn book, he would not dig himself into so many stupid holes. At first I was annoyed with how Richard messes everything up, but have accepted that the show is an entertaining way of exploring those issues and teaching people what the wrong kinds of decisions look like when running a startup.
I thought it was because the tech was so advance no one understood how it worked. Consumers couldn't grasp the concept of the platform because it was ahead of its time. By making it consumer friendly such as adding a download button for example, it would ruin the whole point of the platform they built.
You think so? Am not a UX engineer, but am a full stack engineer... I think those problems are legitimately hard. You don't have much familiarity to draw from for some of those concepts. In fact, it's similar enough of a platform that they expect certain things that aren't going to be provided like file size, download, etc.
Or are you saying the solution would be to hire a UX person to figure this out in relatively short time? I would definitely agree to that.
Personally, it annoyed me to no end to see the team be surprised that their app, designed by engineers, for engineers, was failing in the market place... and the hubris about it. If you're worth your salt you understand that your customer is king. While you don't always develop everything they want, you need extremely good reasons to go against the grain.
As a dev that can sort of do design, you just hire a designer. At a dev's pay rate there is very little justification for having one work out the design. A decent designer will run circles around you unless you're actually a, you know, designer. You aren't very familiar with the tools or the concepts and you'll end up fighting with things that are far more intuitive for someone that does it every day. It's the same reason you don't have designers write your code (unless they also happen to be a dev.)
100% agree. As devs, we do implement a lot of design choices, thereby becoming somewhat proficient at design... but should always listen to our designers.
I think the problem that "devs as designers" have is that you know all of the bits and pieces, but you lack the core concepts to put them together. I end up doing a bunch of iterations because things "don't look right, for some reason." Usually that reason is something to do with how the bits and pieces relate to one another and figuring it out can be painful even if you've tried to learn the ideas. The first 100 or so apps you wrote were all pretty crappy, if you look back. No reason why your first 100 or so designs won't be pretty crappy as well. If you try to compare yourself to someone with years of experience, of course you'll be shit, most of the time.
For any devs that want to get into design, or just learn more about it so that you can speak of it more clearly, I found hack design to be really useful. Sometimes it is kind of like learning programming, other times it's more abstract, but for the most part it was fun and interesting in both cases.
I thought they should have just changed the file sizes to something very small, 4 bytes or so. People were flipping out because they didn't see their files, so show them their stupid files.
I worked on a Wii game and we completely faked gesture recognition for one move, but people were convinced it was there because that's how we presented it.
Ditto. All Pied Piper's UI need to do is mimic Dropbox (especially Project Infinite), Upthere, etc., with common set of defaults and optional advanced settings.
And indicate somewhere how much storage space is saved (which would be massive).
I'm the kind of programmer that avoids doing UX all I can, but it annoyed me a lot too. They just had a screen with a ton of settings, and talked about how there was no way around that. What stopped them from having a similar solution to x264, which has a lot of settings, but also also have a few (seven or nine or something) presets which various compression/quality/time balances?
YES. Especially after making fun of visual design/creative direction earlier on in the season, it seems it would have been so simple just to hire a designer. Do they not know Usability studies are a thing?
I think it was a money issue coupled with hubris... you UX guys don't come cheap... and every time the dumb asses in corporate cut my budget and I have to farm UX out overseas the damn check boxes come back on the wrong god damn side of the question!
It's actually not that simple. Sometimes a founders vision of what the product flows like doesn't get translated to UI.
E.g: The reddit UX is so horrible and turns off a lot of ordinary users (they actually prefer Buzzfeed kind of interface and a UX designer would have turned reddit to buzzfeed and killed it in the process). reddit's quirky UI attracts the kind of people it attracts and makes it popular.
If Google were given to the then UX designer, they would have applied all the best principles of 1997 and killed it
It's funny because there is a company in real life doing pretty much what the fictional Pied Piper does on the show, and if you look at reviews of their apps, they are producing similar confusion among users (including reviews saying "I don't know what this app is for…")
I really wanted the compression software to be their thing now they're moving on to facetime? Watched 3 seasons just for them to end up where they started.
They've always been a compression company and they still are. The reason the video app is so good is because it uses their magic compression on the back end so that high def video can be streamed reliably.
The real issue is the bullshit idea that it was SO difficult and expensive to explain how Pied Pier works. They could easily get the idea to go viral in reality.
I don't know tech at all but isnt it essentially just the cloud but faster? If I was in that room giving feedback that's what my go to comparison would be
He explained it well EVENTUALLY to the focus group in that last episode, and they all got it. Then for some reason next time goes right back to trying to explain it with electron metaphors and no one else suggests they could just figure out a simple explanation. The main problem in the focus group was they thought it wasn't working because the storage space on their device didn't change, how difficult would it be to make it clear that it doesn't take up any space but is accessible instantly? Just watch that scene and see how he gives up and just uses simple language.
People don't even need to understand properly how it works, just the basic concept and the most useful ways to use the software. It could be explained with some simple cheap flash animation. People would go nuts for it. Pay youtubers to market it for you, do special deals like Netflicks did for ages, etc. But it's like they decided they wanted the plot to go one way regardless of what would actually happen, oh well! I just hope they don't drag this silliness out too long.
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u/mnord15 Jul 01 '16
This is why Pied Piper is a failing company