>That is because "best" is not just about being feature complete, it's about what is "cool", and "cool" will aways be a moving target.
Exactly. Look at the fashion industry: pants are pants, shirts are shirts, and there hasn't been a major step forward since decades. Still, brands birth and die continuously, without the underlying product being any better or worse, or cheaper, than the one that comes to replace it. Products are overrated, success as a business is far more complex than ticking a feature list and delivering it to the right people.
Pretty refreshing to hear a company leader just say "we want to make the best product". No fluff, no ecosystem, just seemingly straightforward best products and best features. It seems almost bizarre today.
> Look at Slack, Figma, Notion—they are all stagnating.
We should commend companies that resist artificially expanding the scope of their products. Sometimes a product is done. I recall Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's aphorism that "perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away".
All your examples are of single-product companies. They should expand their product portfolio instead.
> Small and medium sized businesses don’t have the economies of scale to do really cool things. They may begin as startups, but to have impact they need to scale to mega-corps. You can’t build an iPhone ad a small or medium sized business.
To veer off-topic, one neat thing is that the standard for "really cool things" is a moving target. Tools for producing things, like free software, CAD software, CNC machines, etc, make it more and more possible for small firms to accomplish great things, while raising the bar for what we consider great things.
I don't disagree. It's just that there is rarely time to revisit and improve the right things that work. Often it's left as is (in this context inefficient) and the business moves to the next 'experiment'.
The end result tend to be a portfolio of sluggish features.
You're forgetting about external factors that have nothing to do with the product itself. Having better marketing team or deeper connection in the industry does not make your actual OS any better.
Survival of the fittest doesn't really apply to human artifacts and especially to art and cutting edge engineering.
Exactly. The "best companies" start out with "passionate people" behind the "product" and the "best products" typically start out as a "feature" that solves a problem or improves another solution.
This is really a weak argument. Just because they're successful doesn't mean everything they do is brilliant. It could easily be that they could be even more successful if they made changes. If that were not the case, we'd quickly run into contradictions where two companies did totally opposite things yet were both successful, and be unable to explain them with our framework.
It's a bit of a trope, but real success often comes giving customers not what they want, but what they need.
As another poster noted, just chasing market fashions is a crap existence, better left to soulless corps that can burn workers in pursuit of the dollar.
The good thing is that those same soulless corps will very seldom invest in something visionary, something that no one has done before. So the field is wide open to the pioneers.
(Caveat: while I believe this strongly for software, I'm not sure how it translates to fiction writing, the OP's domain).
Yeah it's a classic case of projecting one's personal values onto the market. A lot of startups fail in part because they design an enthusiast product that they think will have appeal outside of enthusiasts. Because clearly it's better in every way, right? So how could people not switch to this new thing that they've never seen, take the time to learn how to use it, all for a marginal increase in efficiency, if you use it perfectly, over the incumbent product they already know that currently does the thing?
Outside of enthusiast circles companies are about psychology more than anything. Make the customer feel empowered, even if they aren't, and they'll buy your thing over the technically better option.
If your dream is to kill the competition instead of building a better product, well... you're doing it wrong. Buzzwords and fancy tech don't mean crap to the end user.
> And brands that build long-lived products struggle as they don't have the repeat customers of products that are good
I know of a company that was a national leader in a certain kind of industrial equipment. Now that the industry isn't expanding in this country, the market is saturated and they can't sell anything because what they sold decades ago was designed for excellence and just won't die. Nearly all business now is occasional servicing of their old equipment.
Nobody cares how the pie is made. They simply want pie.
When it comes to new tech and frameworks, those who pay don't care if use React, Angular or Svelte. They only want a working product that provides value for money.
Losing business has little to do with the technology that's being used or sold, it has everything to do with the problem that the business intends to solve or the need it intends to cater. And how well it succeeds in doing that.
You don't become an outdated dinosaur overnight because someone comes up with technology that brings marginal improvements to the customer. You become an outdated dinosaur if your competition figures out a radical new way of doing things.
IKEA didn't roll-up the furniture business because it re-invented chairs, tables, beds or cupboards. It succeeded in doing that because it successfully marketed self-assembly as a convenience to it's customers, eliminating a big part of the production chain. Moreover, that - in turn - opened up the door to disposable furniture by introducing low-cost materials, and a faster design cycle that has come to a point that it defines furnishing fashion trends.
My point is that - as an engineering team - you could decide to switch to the newest framework, stay on edge in tech trends, and still miss the boat completely because business still sticks to an outdated model while customer behavior - wants, needs, trends,... - have already shifted a long way ago.
Put differently, it's still possible to build a Facebook/Reddit/Twitter clone based on the latest and greatest technologies and still fail because you expect to push those out of that market. Whereas it's viable to do the same thing, but only if you differentiate by catering to the needs of a specific market segment. Hence why you see platforms like Mastodon thrive without exponential growth, even though Twitter caters to billions.
A successful or stable product is by definition not tied to temporary trends. It caters to a universal need that people will always have. When the market is saturated and sales plateau, the trick then isn't to fundamentally re-invent your product. It's to use what you've learned and tackle an adjacent segment of the market with a new product or service.
In software the vast majority of companies are one-trick ponies that stick to a single product or service that's too specific, and doesn't allow them to expand to other areas. That's what makes them so vulnerable for either a competitor that brings true business innovation, or fundamental shift in what consumers want next.
Put more succinctly: people tend to rail against corporate, boring, byzantine constructions such as SAP. But that's exactly how they operate. They started out doing payroll and accounting, and they expanded from that by incorporating adjacent parts of business processes in their software such as logistics, material management and production planning. A corporation like SAP doesn't go along in the short-run hype cycle unless a significant game-changer comes along such as affordable cloud solutions.
Now, hiring for experience in specific technologies or frameworks only makes sense if you're going to hire someone for the long haul, whereas if the horizon of your business doesn't extend beyond the next 2 or 3 quarters, well, you're shooting yourself in the foot by rejecting good, well-motivated candidates based on them not having 5 years experience with bleeding edge FancyFramework2020.
It's a shame the market mostly allows for building mediocre products that millions of people want, instead of great products that thousands of people want.
I was about to post this exact sentiment. Great companies in the future will curate products, experiences, processes, providing less choice and convincing the user they don't need more.
> They don't need to think about users, scaling, marketing, etc, just the technology.
While I don't disagree with the sentiment of your post as a whole, this statement seems to state the opposite of what the article describes. All of their greatest hits were a result of thinking about users, scaling, and marketing. A few excerpts from the article show...
...that they're thinking about users: The process starts in a research lab in the church’s basement. Designers, engineers and prototype builders crowd into a small room on one side of a two-way mirror and watch through the glass as consumers use products like, say, a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. They take notes on potential problems, such as how sick people usually take two teaspoons instead of the suggested two tablespoons, underdosing themselves.
...that they're thinking about scaling: Clients walk away with a patent plus a prototype they can send straight to a manufacturer.
...that they're thinking about marketing: GOJO had developed a goo that would clean hands, but it wouldn't sell. Nottingham Spirk added air bubbles and clear packaging, helping turn GOJO's Purell brand into America's hand sanitizer.
In fact, article describes that they got their first big break when they took a company's (Rotodyne) existing manufacturing technology (rotational molding for bedpans), and figured out how that company could use their technology on a large-scale with an entirely new market (Little Tikes).
The introduction even states that they don't just think about technology:
Rather than invent products and then figure out how to sell them, à la Edison, the Nottingham Spirk Innovation Center invites corporate behemoths–from Procter & Gamble PG -1.07% to Mars –to come to it with its product quandaries.
No one understands why they succeeded as a company. They haven't. They created a really popular product. That's completely different from succeeding as a company.
This blog post and Jack's subsequent praise of all the hard work that went into this groundbreaking product decision is exactly why they haven't succeeded yet as a company.
Exactly. Look at the fashion industry: pants are pants, shirts are shirts, and there hasn't been a major step forward since decades. Still, brands birth and die continuously, without the underlying product being any better or worse, or cheaper, than the one that comes to replace it. Products are overrated, success as a business is far more complex than ticking a feature list and delivering it to the right people.
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