Sam Gentle.com

Eat Your Vegetables

carrot.app

Today the topic of unpopular services being forced on you by popular services came up. Like Apple with iTunes Ping, Facebook with Messenger and, of course, Google+.

Obviously, the temptation to use one of your popular services as a lever to get people interested in an unpopular service makes sense, especially if you think people will come around once they give it a try, but the danger is that you end up suffering from what I call the Eat Your Vegetables problem.

These companies obviously think they're giving people something that will be good for them in the long run, like a delicious plate of greens. Problem is, before you've eaten vegetables you don't know whether you'll like them, so you take your cues from how they're presented. "Eat your vegetables or you won't get dessert!" is a strong signal that vegetables aren't tasty enough to stand on their own.

Sometimes a new service genuinely just isn't very good, in which case it was probably dead, vegetables or not. But sometimes it can make things worse for a decent product. By all accounts, Facebook Messenger is fairly good, but there was still a big backlash when users were forced to install a separate app. Of course, Facebook also owns WhatsApp and Instagram, but nobody's complaining about having to install them. That's the power of not having to Eat Your Vegetables.