[SiVal]

No, I remember what it meant. Once you put a product on a ship and watch it sail away, you can no longer tinker with it. You might not feel finished, so it takes resolve. Finished or not, when it sails away, you're done.

Back when software was treated as a physical packaged good, it had to physically leave your "factory" by a certain date to qualify as a sale during the quarter, allowing it to be claimed in a quarterly income filing, which would boost the stock price and, thereby, the compensation of execs and employees. So, the sales team would sometimes have to carry an armload of shrinkwrapped boxes out the back door into the parking lot to claim a sale for that quarter. It had legally "shipped". The programmers (former high school nerds) would be desperately hanging on to the code until the last possible minute--there was always more that ought to be done--while the sales team (former high school jocks) would be forcing the programmers to "hand over that disk, now, nerd!"

No courage was required by the sales team to ship. Their job was just to book the sale. In the parking lot by midnight? Hello sales bonus. But real courage (or threat) was required by the programmers, who would be forced to let go of code that could not be fixed "thru the wire" in those days, knowing that they would be blamed for every flaw that they "shipped".

[machinelabo]

Oh I remember when video games used to be shipped in that they had to finish everything. No patches later. It’s going to get burned on the ROM and off it goes sailing to their customers.

Now a days, shipping to me evokes “Fuck it, ship this shitty MVP to customers because ship ship ship” and then they wonder “Gee, why didn’t my app take off?”.

I understand the need to ship, but I never see anyone daring to challenge the frantic broken shitty app philosophy and maybe wondering if they built them with care, maybe... just maybe customers with actually come? Has anyone tried to go against the grain since the SEGA days? It’s high risk.

Thanks for a great perspective.

[paulryanrogers]

As a counterpoint, I've a janky product that I've soft launched. It's definitely a rough beta. But because of churn on the underlying platforms it'd be a constant, full time battle to polish out all bugs. Even then some quirks may never be fixed because web extensions aren't technically meant to allow interrupting all means of browser navigation.

And for me it's all a (sometimes not so) fun little side project. If I had never launched at all then it's possible no one would ever get the benefit of my unique feature.

There are similar competitors which I'd rather just buy and use, yet they don't have the one killer feature I wanted.

[fritzo]

Exactly. I see a beaming and anxious engineer standing at the railing of a wharf, watching a cargo ship slowly and unstoppably glide away to a distant port. As the engineer's scarf flutters in the wind she looks down at her trembling hands, hands detached from their creation, hands with energy and nothing to do, hands that slowly acknowledge the building phase is over. Now it's time to evaluate.

[blacktriangle]

If you change the metaphor a bit "ship" sounds good. Except instead of putting the product on the ship, the product is the ship, and once you've shipped out you now have to maintain that ship with no land in sight, supplies running low, and the crew grumbling mutiny.