{"id":669926,"date":"2010-02-19T16:39:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-19T21:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/37signals.com\/svn\/posts\/2174-the-cost-of-being-everything-to-everyone"},"modified":"2026-10-04T10:47:42","modified_gmt":"2026-10-04T14:47:42","slug":"the-cost-of-being-everything-to-everyone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/669926","title":{"rendered":"The cost of being everything to everyone"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As long as we&#8217;re doubling up, Marco Ament is chiming in at the comment thread of <a href=\"http:\/\/37signals.com\/svn\/posts\/2165-instapaper-developer-i-try-to-minimize-ways-for-my-customers-to-shoot-themselves-in-the-foot\">yesterday&#8217;s &#8220;shoot themselves in the foot&#8221; post<\/a> with some more great thoughts.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Success, as measured by installed base or revenue, doesn\u2019t strongly corrolate to quality. A lot of mediocre products are extremely successful, and a lot of extremely successful products are mediocre.<\/p>\n<p>I can\u2019t argue that Microsoft Word or Firefox haven\u2019t been successful, and I won\u2019t argue that they don\u2019t deserve their success. They both try to be everything to everyone, and they\u2019ve largely achieved that, hence their success.<\/p>\n<p>But, like most independent or small developers, I have neither the resources nor the desire to be everything to everyone, and I don\u2019t like the experience of using most products that were designed in that way. Being everything to everyone incurs huge costs in complexity, reliability, and efficiency that I can\u2019t afford, that I can\u2019t tolerate in products I use, and that can\u2019t result in a product I can be proud of.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Later on he explains why he feels <a href=\"http:\/\/37signals.com\/svn\/posts\/2165-instapaper-developer-i-try-to-minimize-ways-for-my-customers-to-shoot-themselves-in-the-foot?14#comment_51921\">comments are a net loss<\/a> for the vast majority of comment-enabled blogs.<\/p>\n<div class=\"feedflare\">\n<a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/37signals\/beMH?a=GFhlxapqMgA:dvQfy9kADYo:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/37signals\/beMH?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"><\/img><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/37signals\/beMH?a=GFhlxapqMgA:dvQfy9kADYo:7Q72WNTAKBA\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/37signals\/beMH?d=7Q72WNTAKBA\" border=\"0\"><\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As long as we&#8217;re doubling up, Marco Ament is chiming in at the comment thread of yesterday&#8217;s &#8220;shoot themselves in the foot&#8221; post with some more great thoughts. Success, as measured by installed base or revenue, doesn\u2019t strongly corrolate to quality. A lot of mediocre products are extremely successful, and a lot of extremely successful [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":784,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4821],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-669926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9NivD-2Ohg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/784"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=669926"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669926\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":771544,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669926\/revisions\/771544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=669926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=669926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=669926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}