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Well, I guess I can’t say I’m surprised that my post got a lot of attention.

In the past few days I’ve gotten a lot of very nice emails from people from Apple, my readers, and people who found the post linked to by some one else.

You know you’ve bought a product that is good when you get emails from folks who work on it asking if they can help with any of the problems you’ve encountered, or just plain say “thanks and we’re hiring” .

The other day I was trying to explain to some one just what makes some gadgets more successful than others. What makes TiVo an amazing DVR but makes the Comcast and DirectTV DVRs suck? What makes the iPod rock, but makes every single other MP3 player mediocre? I think it boils down to Employees that care, Employees that eat their own dogfood (and are end users), Employees empowered to make changes, and selling the entire experience to the customer. I’d also add that you also need some special amount of pixie dust and laser like direction and focus from the top on the customer experience.

I’m a firm believer in “eating your own dogfood”. If you are on a product team and you are not dogfooding the next version of your product I emphatically feel that you do not deserve a place on your team. If you are not dogfooding other products that your company produces you should be ashamed. And if you are not using your competitors products, at least monthly, then you’re never going to win.

Principles for Success

The reason I think the iPod, TiVo, the Treo are best in class devices is because:

1. The employees that work on those products care a great deal about what they are building. It’s not just a job.
2. Other employees in the company also dogfood said product and care a great deal about the product and give plenty of feedback to the product team.
3. The product team is responsive and reacts to the feedback the receive.
4. The product team listens to what their customers say, and create a two way conversation with them.

Where Things Fail

The place where this breaks down is when:

1. You do not own the end to end experience (you make the software but not the hardware in the case where the hardware is > 50% of the experience).
2. Your customer is not the end user, but another company is your customer.

Some Examples

Reasons #1 and #2 are why:

1. XBOX 360 is better than the XBOX and every thing else currently out there.
2. The iPod will always be better than anything we produce the software for, but not the hardware (Portable Media Center is great, but the devices are no match in size and popularity)
3. The Palm Treo 650 is easier to use with one hand than the Treo 700
4. TiVo is better than Comcast or DirectTV’s DVR
5. my k-jam requires a reboot every day (as does my Cingular 2125).
6. The Windows PC is a flea market for pre-installed OEM software you don’t need that degrades your user experience.

Now there are exceptions when you don’t own the end to end experience. Media Center 2005 is great because greater than 50% of the experience is the interaction with the software… so the box I built in my living room is great because the software UX is great. I consider it better than TiVo but I’m also realistic that not everyone will build their own Media Center and that reason #6 from above can screw it all up.

I have yet to coin a phrase for this. But as a general concept, I believe any good technology products follow the basic principles above.