Other than great food and great software depend on execution, there's very little analogy. As much as I'd like for users to select my piece of software over competitors', because it's 10x smaller and eats less CPU, even if it's more expensive, it's just not going to happen. And even if it would've happened, McDonalds still makes more than French Laundry. I don't like it a bit, but that's life.
McDonalds makes more money for many reasons, and I don't think they are all specific to that industry.
McDonals is cheap. Not everyone lives on a budget that makes it possible for them to eat at French Laundry. For many that it is possible, they can't justify it because the extra expense is better spent on other items that will have a greater impact on their lives.
McDonalds is quick. You are less likely to encounter extended delays that impact your schedule in any way. McDonalds taking four times as long to deliver a hamburger to you probably means you had to wait an extra 5-10 minutes.
McDonals is convenient. There's probably one close by. As we've covered, it's also quick. Getting and eating your food is a very simple, well understood process.
I think you can apply this to many markets. The there are high-end products that work by offering quality, and low-end products that work by offering some combination of convenience, speed and low-cost.
McDonalds is a known quantity. If you're in an unfamiliar area of town, or some other town, or just need to grab lunch without a big production you can do it at McDonalds without reading a menu, considering options, prices, etc. -- and without the risk of getting food that wasn't what you wanted/expected/understood at the outset.
This brings to mind an interview I saw on Top Gear once with an Olympic athlete after the Olympic games in China, and he commented on how he ate McDonalds before competing.
His reasoning was that in a foreign country, the last thing you want to do before competing professionally is to subject yourself to food you are unfamiliar with (or just don't know if the local variety will cause problems).
Similarly, in parts of Mexico where US citizens are advised to be careful of the water, if bottled water isn't available or desired, a bottle of coke or beer works as a stand in, because there's trust in the product and it's uniformity across regions.
Note: Yes, I know Mexican coke is different[1], but I'm lucky enough to live in CA where I can get it at any of the 10 Taquerias within a mile of me.
power/weight ratio: Sausage mcmuffin and other items are 400+ calories for US$1
I have noticed that many suburban McDonalds only care about serving drive-throughs quickly and you could easily wait 6+ minutes for your commodity Indifferent Meal(TM)
No. You cannot taste great software. You cannot even know it's great through your senses (the product may be great but the software could be crap). You cannot take someone out on a date and enjoy great software. You don't occasionally splurge and enjoy an evening of great software that you later remember as a happy time.
I'd go on, but this is one of the most farfetched similes I've seen on this site.
Software doesn't (yet) offer the same aesthetic and emotional experiences of fine dining. But aesthetics and emotions are important to the software experience. I think that's the author's rather modest argument, that those experiences are parts of the puzzle in addition to price point, value-add, etc.
> Three, five or ten people companies where every team member is passionate about software craftsmanship. 37Signals, Balsamiq and Github are the obvious examples.
GitHub has 136 employees listed on LinkedIn. Last time I had checked it was under 100. I wonder if anything's changed since Zach wrote about scaling employees in 2011 -- do all 140 people still sit in a chat room and have zero managers?
I think I get it but this is a weird analogy. Fine dining is an experience; great software provides value in that it enhances workflows, allows you to do your job better, etc.
Agree; very strange. Fine dining is a luxury, great software can pay for itself many times over.
Another way the analogy works, though: people hate paying for either with their own money. It's easier to spend when your company (or client) is paying for it.
You just described the core of the analogy: experience.
There are many cases where I and others choose much more expensive applications to which there are fine inexpensive (or free) alternatives. Just knowing the amount of “unnecessary” design or development work may be enough to increase pleasure of use.
Of course, the extra work may also have directly beneficial effects, functional, esthetic, or otherwise. Fine dining tends to be tasty.
Agreed. Plenty of free programs do the job, but "costs" one way or another (ex.: ads). I'll pay (more) for programs which improve the experience by not distracting me with ads or irritating user interfaces (looking at you SONY). I'm old enough to start realizing life is finite; better to pay more for a good experience on top of getting something done (be it remote data access or topping off my nutrition for the day).
The short answer: it's why Apple is making boatloads of cash. "But you can get an equivalent machine for a fraction of the price!" arguments abound; nonetheless, its that "fine dining" attention to detail which rakes in tens of billions of $$$ profit per quarter.
This analogy works better if you are considering it as paying for software related consulting services rather than buying software "off the shelf". After all some of the worlds best programmers are working on software that is distributed for free.
And Open SOurce software is like cooking at home- endlessly customizable, may (but not always) take more effort, but generally provides a superior experience (with an occasional epic fail).
Eating out is nice occasionally, but I avoid "fine dining" establishments and their exorbitant pricing, because they usually leave me hungry (I have observed portion sizes being inversely proportional to prices at such establishments), and besides, my wife and I can cook up a superior meal using freely available recipes (sometimes of our own making) in about the same amount of time it takes to go out to eat.
Cooking at home saves money, and so does Open Source software :)
I think you've missed the point of fine dining, or maybe it's just not for you. It's not about the utility of refilling your hunger meter. Like the article says, you're paying for the whole experience, and the level of craftsmanship. I also highly doubt you can make a superior meal, that's a little offensive to people who focus their lives and careers on the art of food. It's subjective, of course, but similar to how some companies think they don't need software because their home-grown spreadsheet solution is "superior" (i.e. cheaper).
I mean, if it's just not your thing, that's fine, but your comment is stereotypical of the purely utilitarian and rather smug perspective often taken by nerdy types. No doubt you find fashion equally frivolous and can't fathom why people would pay above Target prices for clothing.
I also highly doubt you can make a superior meal, that's a little offensive to people who focus their lives and careers on the art of food.
Meh. In my experience you reach a point of diminishing returns very quickly, in terms of price / quality ratio at "fine dining" restaurants. Paying $40.00 for a steak gets you a significantly better steak than the $15.00 one, yes. But paying $80.00 for a steak doesn't get you much more, if any more than the $40.00 steak. And I, for one, have no problem believing that a home chef can replicate the $40.00 steak in their own kitchen.
Most of what you're paying for at those upscale, trendy, fine-dining places is service, ambiance, status-signalling,ego gratification, etc. You don't pay 4 times more for a meal because you expect the food to be 4 times better.
You are also paying for superior quality ingredients. That $80 steak might be because the restaurant has an exclusive relationship with a specific organic beef rancher and you can't buy that rancher's meat in regular stores. Those grilled scallops may have been caught that morning, sent fresh to the restaurant, and shucked five minutes prior to you eating them.
If you're only getting grocery store quality ingredients at a fine dining restaurant, you're getting ripped off.
You are also paying for superior quality ingredients.
Agreed, that is part of it. But I will contend that a 4x increase in price does not reflect a 4x increase in the quality of the ingredients. Now, granted, that's all very subjective and hard to measure. And all I have is anecdotal evidence, but on the occasions when I have found myself paying $80.00 or more for a steak, I've never finished it and thought "wow that was 4 times better than the $20.00 steak I had last week".
If you're only getting grocery store quality ingredients at a fine dining restaurant, you're getting ripped off.
Fair enough. I agree that ingredients do matter, just not sure they fully justify the higher price of the nicer restaurants. Having grown up at the coast, near Holden Beach, NC, I got used to eating very fresh seafood. Now, when I have seafood further inland, I can definitely notice a difference based on the ingredients not being as fresh. That actually leads to a bit of a paradox... some restaurants, just due to their location, will never be able to replicate the best possible seafood experience, due to the need to transport ingredients. So the $50.00 seafood meal you eat at a restaurant in, say, St. Louis, probably won't be as good in some regards as a $15.00 meal you could have in Calabash, NC, just due to geography.
I also highly doubt you can make a superior meal, that's a little offensive to people who focus their lives and careers on the art of food.
How offensive; I shouldn't need to pay $100+ a head to get a superior steak, parsnip, and greens; but, like the parent, I've yet to find convenient or suitably priced dining to that of my own cast iron. Granted, there are plenty of styles or meats I don't cook or source as well (eg. sous-vide or braised lamb) and am more than happy to go out for, but it's not hard to imagine amateur home-chefs cooking these dishes. There are entire shows around surfacing non-classical or non-fine-dining chefs.
I think Open Source is hard to map to a physical analogy due to how it exploits communal intelligence and effort with close to zero cost copying and distribution. It really only works for knowledge.
Haute cuisine is evolving from stuffy, pretentious, overly elaborate food to food that is more affordable and more available. Some of the tops chefs in France (and elsewhere) have have already made this shift, and several of them get downright mad at any mention of fine dining.
Food is about food. If you love it you will love serving it to real people and make it accessible to all which is more akin to open source. If on the other hand you think that fine dining of old is the way forward you might find your self sitting alone.
The best food in the world isn't freely available to everyone. The amount you pay for software may not correlate with quality (expensive government contracts vs. a few smart guys making a website) whereas top-priced meals are consistently good. The only cost in software is labor whereas food involves perishable inventory, fluctuations in demand, etc. that works into the cost.
I'm just sayin they're totally different. But yeah they are both hard.
Ridiculous. Poor software is unusable. Poor restaurant food, on the other hand, is mostly just "meh" and only very, very rarely, unedible.
Fine dining is about paying huge sums of money to go from "good" to "really, really good". There's no equivalent in the software world whatsoever (Mac fans: shut up)
Poor software can be as dangerous as poor food. And there is, Professional tools, eg Paint -> Pixelmator -> Photoshop (features more than UI, but you get the point).
"Good cooking takes time. If you are made to wait, it is to serve you better, and to better please you." -- From the menu of Restaurant Antoine, New Orleans, quoted in Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month (1975).
I imagine Mcdonalds actually employs a lot of very skilled "chefs" (for want of a better word) who design food that will appeal to the largest cross section of people possible and can be cooked by people on minimum wage.
You could analogize that to developing software that is easy to use, has mass market appeal and is easy to deploy.
Not saying it's a great analogy, but it seems like SaaS would be the McDonalds (scalable, commoditized) whereas bespoke software is the fancy restaurant meal.
It doesn't really seem to hold up though, or say much either way.
