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Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce | Malcolm Gladwell

TED · 2M views · 2007-01-16 · 18:16

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Overview

Malcolm Gladwell's TED talk on how Howard Moskowitz found that there is no single perfect spaghetti sauce. He draws a larger point about choice, preference and happiness.

On Hacker News

Cited to argue that people do not know what they want and that markets should be segmented.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2009–2026

Topics

Product, marketing & salesPsychology & human behaviorMicroeconomics & behavioral economics
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malcolm gladwelltedmarketingmarket segmentationpreferences

What people said

jppope · 2026-06 · Joke / meme

I like postgres. I use it for lots of projects. I like other databases too. I think thats okay. Here's Malcom Gladwell discussing spagetti sauce which feels oddly relevant: [VIDEO]

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Eddy_Viscosity2 · 2024-04 · Reference

> different people respond to different approaches Covered well by Malcolm Gladwell's spaghetti story. [VIDEO]

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saulrh · 2016-03 · Reference

Target a well-defined sub-market that Slack currently serves and serve it better by targeting it more precisely [1]. As demonstrated by the comments on this thread, there are a lot of people that all think that Slack needs to go in different directions , which agrees with my own personal observations of Slack's utility to different people on different teams. Slack is a simple, general solution that works well enough for a lot of teams and a lot of people. If you want to disrupt it, I doubt you're going to be able to improve it across the board point-for-point, so in stead you want to target a subgroup that's sort of well serviced by Slack but could stand to have tweaking done to fit it to their needs better. To collect some examples from this thread: * Some engineering teams need default UI that encourages larger message sizes so people aren't writing strings of tiny messages all the time. This _clearly_ isn't something that everybody wants or needs - a lot of brainstorming goes on in my Slack chats, for example, and that means tiny ideas have to go out quickly and easily - but it's a reasonable submarket to target. This would also lead to a larger emphasis on text formatting and composition, better controls on notification and addressing, better searching and filtering and quoting/reply/threading, and other tools that improve the power of an individual message at the expense of usability and speed - move it more toward the email/forum topic side of things. * Some teams feel

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Sources

Video by TED, played through YouTube.

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