What is up with car door handles these days?

9 points by edward 3 months ago | 10 comments
  • mystified5016 3 months ago
    This article gives an entire line to the subject of the title. It's mentioned almost in passing.

    The rest of the writing is just generic railing at the general state of things with a side of Musk whinging.

    Not an invalid take, I guess, but I was interested in the door handles.

    • SvenL 3 months ago
      I agree, content is just a rant about failed attempts to improve things.

      There is kind of a meme/general advice to be risky, to try things out, fail and iterate on failure. Everything mentioned in the article sounds like that.

      I mean, why have houses? They are pretty hard and expensive to build…what was wrong with caves?

      Yes, we could say that something’s are „done“/„finished“ and don’t need improvement - or we try and see.

    • marcusb 3 months ago
      Customers frequently want two conflicting things: change and stability.

      In enterprise software sales, a lot of time and energy get wasted arguing about features the customer will never use. Post deployment, those same people will scream bloody murder about how unstable the products are and how the vendors just can’t do anything right.

      Similarly, I think if car makers set out to incrementally improve their product a few percent a year, nobody would buy it. It would be boring. Outdated.

      People - like the author of this article - claim they want stability. But, I’m here to tell you that what they buy is change.

      • smt88 3 months ago
        > People - like the author of this article - claim they want stability. But, I’m here to tell you that what they buy is change.

        You work in enterprise software sales and you think people buy change? That is bizarre and shocking. Enterprise software sales is nearly 100% conversations with people who refuse to make massive improvements in their own QoL (and bottom line) because they loathe change so much.

        In fact, I've built multiple E2E businesses that succeeded in difficult industries because we promised no change (to people's work processes) while still improving their software behind the scenes.

        What an absolutely bizarre conclusion. You seem to be a victim of confirmation bias, where you aren't considering the 99% of corporations who aren't even taking your pitch, let alone buying your product.

        But back to the article...

        Most people hate change, but the ones who do like it don't like changes where things become worse. Car door handles were perfect and have become significantly worse.

        • marcusb 3 months ago
          > You work in enterprise software sales and you think people buy change? That is bizarre and shocking.

          I worked (past tense,) and, yes, they buy change, regardless of how strange you find that to be.

          I cannot count the number of times I listened to a customer complain about a lack of feature velocity (real or perceived) in one meeting, then complain about outages caused by new features in the next.

          > Car door handles were perfect and have become significantly worse.

          Yeah. It’s almost like the car makers know something about what drives buying behavior amongst their customer base.

          • JohnFen 3 months ago
            > I cannot count the number of times I listened to a customer complain about a lack of feature velocity (real or perceived) in one meeting

            Maybe it depends on what part of the enterprise software market you're in. I've been working on enterprise software for decades and I've never once heard a customer complain about a general lack of feature velocity. They have complained about the time it takes to implement some specific feature that they really want, but that's a different thing. In my experience, what enterprises want is stability and as little change as possible while keeping the software useful.

            The only way I can reconcile our two different experiences is that we're addressing different sorts of enterprises.