Thank you very much for this article.
For me the greatest MS failure is the silly MS Office paperclip Help doo-dad that I would have to squash into oblivion.
āThe only truly failed project is the one where you didnāt learn anything along the way.ā
Oh. Oh God. Oh dear, dear God.
And all this time, I thought I was the expert at dumping on my own pathetic so-called career.
sure does look like iPhone of yesteryear LOL, promises to organize your household.
I was 8 when MS Bob came out, and honestly, itās one of the few things I can remember loving on the computer. I would go to my friendās house and we would do everything from bob. For some reason it had a good feeling to it.
However, I would consider it worthless shit now that Iāve grown up. But was it meant for adults anyways?
Tilt was a pretty good tale. Not quite as entertaining as say King of Kong, but far more informative. I never realized that pinballās hay day was the 90s. And that one company can be responsible for pretty much ending pinball as we know it. Thanks Williams.
1 Like
Hi Jeff,
Look, lets put content to one side for a minute and look at formatting. What do you mean when you put a section of your post in a light blue box - sometimes it seems to be a quote, and someone else is speaking. Sometime it seems to be just for a change of tone, or youāre continuing and might be about to introduce a quote.
With my absurd level of attention to detail, I find it quite the inconsistency quite jarring to a smooth readā¦
@E
I think theyāre alway quotes, but Jeff doesmāt always make it clear who, or what heās quoting. When I saw the line āTake it from someone who lived and breathed the Bob project:ā, my first thought was that Jeff was confessing to have worked on Bob himself.
Have I learned from failed projects? Sure. But given that I wasnāt directly or indirectly responsible for the failure of any of these projects, I WOULD HAVE LEARNED JUST AS MUCH HAD THEY BEEN SUCCESSFUL.
Projects are projects. And Iād rather have successful ones on my resume than failed ones.
I canāt, for the life of me, think of any reasons why anyone would think otherwise.
WTF? I had never heard of Bob. I had to look it up on Wikipedia. It wasnt promoted all that heavily in Australia.
Iām left wondering what would happen if Apple did something similar today?
If the project is scraped due to forces entirely beyond your control, how could that mean you have failed? Itās like saying you can succeed at lottery.
1 Like
Iāve never posted here before, but I saw the Tilt thing. I remembering pre-ordering that moving in January before itād come out and FINALLY I got it in July when itād been finish. I watched all 6-8 hours of footage they had on there in one sitting. It was fantastic, and Iām not even a fan of pinball, haha; heck, I never even play it when Iām in arcades.
1 Like
Iāve been a loyal reader of Coding Horror for about two years now, and while the majority of your posts are dead on, I have to say that this one is the most brilliant piece youāve ever posted. (i may even have it laminated.)Thank you.
Learning from failure is paramount, we all fail at one point or another (youād have to be super lucky not to) and it is the learnings that we can extract from it that really matters.
However, there is a well known Russian saying that Iād like to share:
āSmart people learn from other peoples mistakes, idiots - from their ownā
Pretty self-explanatory, but in essence, it is great to learn from your own failures, but you can learn much from the failures of others that will minimize your chances of having to learn from your own failures in the first place.
I guess this is why we read blogs and books, we just need to make sure we can extract the same lessons from these sources as we would have if the failures were our own.
Jeff,
Good use you today to speak to my soul.
āThe only truly failed project is the one where you didnāt learn anything along the way.ā
This is gist. We need not worry more than that.
The surgeonsā mistakes are technical.
Bob failed for technical reasons or for management or marketing mistakes? Thatās the main question.
What I have learnt from the past experience is:
1 do not lose sleep about bugs left in the code, it is not for them the project could fail
2 apart programming, the biggest technical error will have less consequences than the smallest management error
3 dilbert comics teach you more than every technical manual
āSmart people learn from other peoples mistakes, idiots - from their ownāā¦
āI guess this is why we read blogs and books, we just need to make sure we can extract the same lessons from these sources as we would have if the failures were our own.ā
Well sure, but software development is so rife with opportunities for failure that you can hardly be expect to learn every possible mistake from others. Some failures have to be experienced first hand, and cannot be learned otherwise. Some failures are easy to see in others, but not so easy to see the true cause for the failure.
For instance, the MS Bob was not a programming error, or even really a management error (in my opinion). It was a poorly designed product, and the best marketing, the best management, and the best possible programming could not have saved it.
Unless of course, you work at Microsoft, where management IS largely responsible for the design. Typically a manager is responsible for hiring a designer, and selecting and approving a design. Microsoft management largely abuses these powers, and since they are not designers themselves nor do they at least have āgood tasteā, they abuse them badly. Especially at Microsoft, the management has a track record for rejecting the really good design ideas in favor of the worst possible designs, and overbearingly modifying original designs so that they fail.
See this parody video, āIf microsoft designed the ipodā
that video, it turns out, was created by the trodden upon bitter designers at Microsoft, who want to create a good product, but canāt, because management think theyāre better designers than the designers.
This goes not just for package designers, Iām sure. I wonder if microsoft has any real interface experts that they actually listen to? Or maybe they just pay someoneās salary to have that title, but then proceed to do whatever they feel like?
Donāt forget the part of Microsoft Bob we still live with: the MS Comic Sans typeface: http://www.connare.com/whycomic.htm
Ugh.
Failure is a wonderful teacher. But thereās no need to seek out failure. It will find you. Whatever project youāre working on, consider it an opportunity to learn and practice your craft.
I really like those words, really inspires an intern like me.
Thanks Jeff