Marco Arment: How to bring good design to a platform

Marco Arment: How to bring good design to a platform

I would generalise the headline Marco gave to this post like so:

How to bring good design to a product

‘Product’ means anything that a company produces and people want to buy. A ‘platform’ means something more specific, but I think Marco’s list applies to any kind of product.

If I can extend my tortured grocery store analogy just a little bit more: looking at his list, you could apply the same to Wegmans (as he implicitly applies it to Apple).

This led me to realise something else: people don’t go to Wegmans to buy food. You can buy food anywhere. They go to Wegmans to buy the experience of going to Wegmans. Wegmans is the product.

It actually validates the case for selling a product that is ‘merely’ a platform for selling other products, in an industry where you might not have expected to see it.