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“The thinking that guides us is: what can we do to pleasantly surprise players? It’s not that we’re consciously trying to innovate; we’re trying to find ways to

“The thinking that guides us is: what can we do to pleasantly surprise players? It’s not that we’re consciously trying to innovate; we’re trying to find ways to make people happy. The result is that we come up with things other people have not done.” Love this. Focuses you without restricting what you’re doing. We have a now 10 year old app/social community that we’ve been trying for several years to grow/innovate. In past years, we focused on growing revenue, which we needed to do to pay the bills. It helped some but not as we expected. Recently we decided to double down on our product, innovating our community and app to try help users. I really like the concept of “pleasantly surprising” our users. Will be putting that into play.

tropshop 8y ago
Care to share a link? I’m interested in community software and how the market will evolve to serve these groups.
lazydon 8y ago
Reminds me of the way Bezos writes about Customer Obsession in his letters to shareholders: "There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality. Why? There are many advantages to a customer-centric approach, but here’s the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invention on their behalf. No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns out they wanted it, and I could give you many such examples. Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight. A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen."
- ekianjo 8y ago
  > obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality. It's a nice way to look at it, but then it's hard to explain why they force-feed Amazon Fire TV Sticks as a poor man's alternative to Chromecasts and prevent Chromecasts from being sold on Amazon at the same time. Costumer focus much?
  - dingo_bat 8y ago
    They are focused on their customers, not Google's.
    - BartBoch 8y ago
      I bet a huge chunk of their customers is Google users/customers as well.
  - cassianoleal 8y ago
    Also how they force-feed you Prime Video and make you pay extra for it (compared to Prime prices before they launched this) even though you already have other streaming services or generally not interested in it at all.
  - godzillabrennus 8y ago
    Not to mention how many consoles are sold by third party and are imports. I’ve stopped buying expensive electronics on Amazon. It’s too much of a pain to deal with. I will buy cheap junk because at least I am paying for what I’m getting.
ekianjo 8y ago
> I really like the concept of “pleasantly surprising” our users. Except that when users complained about the WiiU not being fun or remotely interesting, nobody listened at Nintendo and they kept marching to release it as is. It's nice to have narratives, but when facts don't match it, it's just a nice PR story and nothing more.
- rangibaby 8y ago
  Nintendo have released some turds of consoles before (Virtual Boy, N64, Wii U) but they all had some good games. Super Mario 64 was the first 3d platformer and it is still fun and innovative now. The only thing dated about it is the camera control and it’s not that bad.
  - eckza 8y ago
    > N64 In what universe is the N64 a turd? (I am asking objectively, not as a frothing-at-the-mouth fanboy.)
    - khedoros1 8y ago
      I like the N64, but for the sake of argument (from a few different directions, and each one debatable whether it made it a "turd"): - Sony moved over three times as many Playstations, and there were about 2600 PSX games and 400 N64 ones. In contrast to the previous generation, the SNES handily outsold the Genesis, even with somewhat fewer released games. - The cartridge format caused problems with production price and storage potential, which disk-based systems didn't have - It was an overly-complex, difficult-to-program machine - The 4K of texture cache and other weird design choices really hampered the graphics quality.
      - eckza 8y ago
        Aha. That's the answer I was looking for. All fair points, all objectively true. Thank you!
    - orbital-decay 8y ago

tropshop 8y ago

Care to share a link? I’m interested in community software and how the market will evolve to serve these groups.

lazydon 8y ago

Reminds me of the way Bezos writes about Customer Obsession in his letters to shareholders: "There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality. Why? There are many advantages to a customer-centric approach, but here’s the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invention on their behalf. No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns out they wanted it, and I could give you many such examples. Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight. A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen."

ekianjo 8y ago
> obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality. It's a nice way to look at it, but then it's hard to explain why they force-feed Amazon Fire TV Sticks as a poor man's alternative to Chromecasts and prevent Chromecasts from being sold on Amazon at the same time. Costumer focus much?
- dingo_bat 8y ago
  They are focused on their customers, not Google's.
  - BartBoch 8y ago
    I bet a huge chunk of their customers is Google users/customers as well.
- cassianoleal 8y ago
  Also how they force-feed you Prime Video and make you pay extra for it (compared to Prime prices before they launched this) even though you already have other streaming services or generally not interested in it at all.
- godzillabrennus 8y ago
  Not to mention how many consoles are sold by third party and are imports. I’ve stopped buying expensive electronics on Amazon. It’s too much of a pain to deal with. I will buy cheap junk because at least I am paying for what I’m getting.

ekianjo 8y ago

> I really like the concept of “pleasantly surprising” our users. Except that when users complained about the WiiU not being fun or remotely interesting, nobody listened at Nintendo and they kept marching to release it as is. It's nice to have narratives, but when facts don't match it, it's just a nice PR story and nothing more.

rangibaby 8y ago
Nintendo have released some turds of consoles before (Virtual Boy, N64, Wii U) but they all had some good games. Super Mario 64 was the first 3d platformer and it is still fun and innovative now. The only thing dated about it is the camera control and it’s not that bad.
- eckza 8y ago
  > N64 In what universe is the N64 a turd? (I am asking objectively, not as a frothing-at-the-mouth fanboy.)
  - khedoros1 8y ago
    I like the N64, but for the sake of argument (from a few different directions, and each one debatable whether it made it a "turd"): - Sony moved over three times as many Playstations, and there were about 2600 PSX games and 400 N64 ones. In contrast to the previous generation, the SNES handily outsold the Genesis, even with somewhat fewer released games. - The cartridge format caused problems with production price and storage potential, which disk-based systems didn't have - It was an overly-complex, difficult-to-program machine - The 4K of texture cache and other weird design choices really hampered the graphics quality.
    - eckza 8y ago
      Aha. That's the answer I was looking for. All fair points, all objectively true. Thank you!
  - orbital-decay 8y ago