The problem of how you organize content in desktop user interfaces is far from solved. Often I have 6 virtual desktops, and maybe 5 Firefox windows and maybe a Chrome and an Edge (testing and the occasional app that doesn’t work with Firefox, a problem made worse by my employer forcing us to use the ESR) and those all have tabs. Not to mention various IDEs and distraction generators like Slack and Outlook that have enough urgent and important content that I can’t just get rid of them.

Adding a new kind of window or tab has the potential of organizing some little bit of this universe at the expense of there being more things to look at globally, I badly want to be able to hit a button and see not just the windows I have open but all the tabs and that counts browser tabs but also IDE tabs and ideally these sort of sub windows inside of browser UIs.

Reminds me of the startup I worked at where somebody got up at each standup meeting and said “we can’t find anything in the N different places (Slack, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Google Docs, …) places stuff could be so we need to add N+1 places.” For a while I pushed back against this obvious fallacy but nobody else did and management would approve another monthly subscription…. Until at some point the investors pushed back in the disorganization and added the distraction of OKRs and people thought “maybe we need a subscription to some service that reminds us to cancel subscriptions we don’t use”. One ring that would rule them all never seriously considered, I guess people didn’t actually expect “enterprise search” to actually work.

Yeah, the design is nice, colors, etc, I used to be fascinated by ExtJS 3.x's Windows-like webapp theme, even though I never really used it, because, like a sibling thread remarked: it's a bad idea to reinvent the desktop. Anyway, right now their product may be a good fit for my team, so I browsed and spend some time watching the video...

1) url history piles up pretty quickly, going back was irritating, closing a "OS" window should unstack that from browser history

2) more than one way to get to things (ie desktop icon + menu) so I visited certain pages ("About") more than once and felt trapped in a maze of deja-vus.

3) no way to scroll down and get the full glimpse, had to proactively click on words + icon, or menu items, to spot if inside there would be something relevant. Then, once the window opens: tabs, lots of tabs...

4) since the information is not really hierarchical, I can't delve into say Pricing. Got click on all the menu items... "Didn't I visit that before?" - and history kept piling up, so where was I before?

5) In Pricing, I read "Free tier - no support" - of course! - then $0.0001 for pay-for-use for the feature flag (every time the user switches the feature on/off? I don't get it, I'm sorry) ... then another free x pay-as-you-go box. Scroll down, then a huge calculator... . How much does it cost for my second app?

6) Cramped: lots of information in a reduced window - hit maximize every time, lots of borders.

7) Product features are really impressive, but the demo video gave the impression that it's really a busy app, overwhelming at times, with lot's of filtering options that look necessary to get the info out of the tool (great for power users, though!). But then the website is also busy and complex. If we add both up, app and website = high cognitive overload! I think I'll go shopping around first then come back later.

A disaster.

I hope they eat their own dog food. I'm pretty sure they will get lots of bad signals from their website.

Disagree. Most people don’t care about blog posts. Most of those are for SEO. It’s the beginning of a pipeline that flows from multiple endpoints.

A person can directly enter in the url that’s one endpoint. Another person can do a Google search and fine the blog that’s another end point.

All of those flows funnel the person in a singular direction with a single purpose: a purchase. Like what else do you want the customer to do? Go off on a tangent?

You can have multiple flows that loop back to a purchase but it’s much less predictable that way. Better to have a singular proven flow all the way to a purchase and that flow has to provide clarity on what the product is.

I come to the posthog website and I’m confused. This is a toy. It’s cool I can meander around and in time discover what the site does. I mean it’s ok.

A better site is one where I just look at the site I know what it’s for and I know the product. As I scroll down I see other tidbits or widgets that are like testimonials or proven examples and other things that convince me to buy. Finally I hit the pricing page.

That’s a better way to sell. Post hog is a cool site but not an efficient one. Not an efficient site for selling a product.

> I have no doubt there is a subset of features here that could be implemented as a single page app.

Is this a joke? Posthog sells an app, sure, but their product site shouldn't be an "app" it all. It's an SEO funnel. No one should spend any amount of time on there except to figure out what the heck Posthog is and how much it costs.

Then why did you go off on your own tangent without responding or refuting his points?