Pulling in big names, capital and media attention to something that is complete snakeoil is hardly worth emulating.
Perhaps those better connected people didn't succeed because they were operating in real environments with real products, where the competition is also more real.
I found it more interesting and productive to provoke discussions around another perspective: "The product is not the business".
It's so common to see people think that just because their product sounds nice and compelling to its intended market/niche, it doesn't mean the same team would be able to sell it and maintain it in an ongoing basis, let alone evolve it.
It amazes me that more don't follow the example of the most successful company in the world, maybe in the history of the world (hard to make comparisons across eras).
There was a pervasive problem of “not invented here” at the company for a long time. I used to laugh at all the “It doesn’t scale!” justifications that were thrown around.
On the other hand, having enough people or money to throw at something were never a problem, so…
There are big opportunities in the blank parts of the map, but we only remember the very few survivors. People rarely know they need the new product (remember the apocryphal Henry Ford quote: "If I asked people what they want they'd say a faster horse").
A friend of mine who is a VC told me years ago, "I only get to meet crazy people: either they have a completely new product, and so will run out of runway before they manage to get the plane airborne, or they are going into an existing market, where the incumbents will crush the aircraft before it gets enough speed to leave the ground." Despite the amusing language it was a useful perspective.
You claimed a hypothetical situation that doesn't exist today and claim that it's due to lack of desire on the part of the product companies. It's highly doubtful that the hypothetical situation is not real only because the industry players don't desire to achieve that level of success. The more likely answer is that they can't figure out how to do it, despite many attempts to try.
Sure, but then we wouldn't have known about it. PR and marketing are way more important than building a good product nowadays, alas.
It's like how implementation trumps ideas. You can have great ideas, but with no implementation, nothing happens. Ditto for building a good product. You can build the world's best product, but if no-one knows about it, it's not getting used.
Whenever I see companies like this with a spectacular demo but no product to show, I always think of the Richard Feynman quote, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
Building a great product should almost never be the goal, people don't buy a product because it is great, people don't use a product because it is great.
People buy a product because they are forced to buy it and people use a product because they love it.
This is the biggest mistake people make in product management, is to forget the customer
> it follows that most startups fail because they don’t ship a great product
this is so wrong
edit : funny that the guy behind the article created only one company (rethinkdb) which failed because they didn't find a business model
Talk is cheap. Executing a complex product like the Switch is difficult.
My guess is that 99% of the people posting here can’t even envision the product that comes after the Switch and makes such a large impact. And they did not envision the Switch either. Even though now it seems obvious because someone more creative already did it.
There’s an easy way to prove me wrong. Create the next Switch and become a billionaire. It’s that easy.
Quite the silly ramble! But I agree that being a product worker at most companies isn't tech, it's factory work. The market will never be done, at least not until we reach an end of a singularity or something.
This is a very fair point. Take Google for example, people may not remember, but they actually were trying to sell a product when they started. They were trying to sell enterprise search. And generally people didn't want to buy it.
But they had technology so compelling that business model fell into their lap.
Maybe they were lucky, but I would say that if you have a technology that no one wants to buy, but everyone wants to use... stick with it. There's something to it.
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