busywaiting

Trains can't change lanes without warning like a Nissan Altima on the Dan Ryan Expressway. The only way a train can move from one track to an adjacent track -- or get on the first track in the first place -- is if switches are set to allow the train onto that track. And on any modern high-speed line, those switches are centrally controlled by dispatch.

Keeping track of which parallel track a train was on automatically was a solved problem a hundred years ago, using relays and lights and hard-wired logic. Adding computers and GPS greatly increases the precision with which dispatch knows position and speed along the track, but knowing which track has not changed in the last century.

Usually, when someone talks about "starting from scratch" they mean "starting over from scratch," meaning throwing out something good enough in the hope of building something perfect.

This article is more about "first mover disadvantage" or "handicap of a head start" where an early implementation is leapfrogged by competitors that don't have legacy baggage.

> a website is even more viable now, it's better for AI scraping

That's not necessarily the endorsement you think it is.

I also love that it's a .io domain. Just to maximize the chance that you'll confuse Thunderbolt dot io with Thunderbolt the I/O standard.

Lotus/IBM took an extremely flexible, encrypted, document-oriented database with a powerful RAD client platform and tried to sell it as a competitor to Outlook-Exchange. And Outlook-Exchange won, because as terrible as it was (and it was much worse then than it is now) it still had a better user experience than Notes Mail.

Notes insisted on a UI paradigm with widgets and controls that didn't work at all like regular OS widgets and controls. Properties boxes were tiny and hard to resize. Selecting from lists or menus required hitting tiny hidden checkmark targets. Keyboard shortcuts were divorced from the host platform. And the error messages -- and you'd get lots of them -- constantly referenced obscure internal Notes object model constructs that had no relationship to the user's mental model.

Everyone uses email. Even top executives who don't bother with the ERP system or the content management system have to use the company email program. And executives hated having to use use Notes-Domino.

Exactly. Their ten-point scales have no obvious relationship to the underlying measurements, where measurements are even provided, and they rescale the points every so often. (They call this their "methodology version.")

I've noticed that, when a new (expensive, high-commission-generating) product comes out, it often has middling scores at first, and then, a few months later, they've revised their methodology to show how much better the pricey new product is.

> The original phrase "The customer is always right" had an important caveat: "... in matters of taste".

This is not true. This is fairly recent Internet revisionism with no historical basis, an attempt to "well ackshually" the phrase into something else to make a point.

"The customer is always right" has always meant, "It's better to appease occasional assholes than to risk ever disappointing a customer with a legitimate grievance." Of course, TCIAR is not a natural imperiative. It's an unproven philosophical proposition that may or may not be appropriate at any given time and in any given industry.

To the extent that there is an "original" formulation, it might be Marshal Field's "Give the lady what she wants," which is (probably intentionally) vague on exactly how it should be applied. (And remember that "lady" in Field's time had some classist connotations that are less present today.")

> The function of the icon is to have distinct shape so you are able to visually distinguish menu items quickly in future (more you use the app).

In theory, yes. But if you look at the examples in the article, the shapes are basically all similarly-sized circles.

In the Apple example, "System Settings" is circle (A gear with barely discernible teeth.) "Recent Items" is a circle (a clock.) "Force Quit" is a circle (a rounded! octagon.) "Sleep" is...a circle with a line through the bottom third. "Log Out" is...a human silhouette in a circle! (Why?)

It doesn't matter what the icon is as long as the icons are distinct, and today's icons aren't.