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.
It's also why companies like Google can't effectively develop new products as a rule: they have internal processes, people, and cultures that support keeping a mission-critical money-printing machine running perfectly smoothly at all times with as close to zero defects as they can possibly come. It's really hard to flip all that human and technical infrastructure into a mode where you're cranking out half-busted features as fast as possible just to see what sticks with your customers, code quality be damned, sell-first-fix-later style.
"Worse is better" is something big companies can't do very well, and it's why they usually end up buying their innovations from the small companies that still can (until they're fully swallowed up and lose the ability to innovate, too, at which point there are always more startups to buy!).
You have to constantly reinvent yourself, or someone else will and take all your customers.
I'm not saying you are wrong, but you aren't right. There is a balance. You can't stand still, but quality that comes from improving the current thing is important as well.
I sort of agree with both of you. Yes, you can do it in a small shop, and my company does. A lot, actually. But I wouldn't say we exactly allocate time to innovation. It's more about taking a long view and integrating the long view mentality into projects with tight deadlines and immediate needs.
It takes a lot of work, and it feels quite different than the luxury of overt R&D and an emphasis on creating tools. We still mostly have to keep the development of tools to an as-needed basis and just take those opportunities to put an eye on the future. It's a delicate balance.
So to me the GP is not wrong when saying that these companies like Facebook have a serious luxury. That's the luxury to repeatedly experiment and fail with little relative consequence to the business. The rest of us can't afford to spend nearly as much time or make nearly as many mistakes.
But it's not fast for the people who follow. That's the problem.
If you create a product then there is an external cost borne by the users who need to use it. And then if you replace that product with some other product, those users need to retrain.
It's really easy to create a new product, but it is a commitment for someone else to adopt it. And just because the cost is externalised, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
I think many companies built around one successful product will hit that point in their lifecycle... where putting more work into perfecting and improving the product provides diminishing returns, but there is a solid demand for the current version of the product.
At that point, it is absolutely the best thing to get rid of everyone and just keep selling the product you have. Too often a company tries to hold on to long, adding new features that don't actually improve anything.
I wish more companies were willing to admit when they reached that point.
>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.
This ignores the changing nature of consumer demand and competitive pressure. Often time, implementations should be treated as a product that needs nurturing rather than a one off project where you get to the finish line and you're done.
This feels like fundamentally the same problem as the whole big company inertia/innovator's dilemma situation. There's value in known-entities, but also a lot of value in trying to reinvent the wheel now and again.
Another problem is it doesn't leave as much room for people to learn from mistakes as companies grow larger and larger. You need wiggle room to get dirty for that to happen.
There's a lot of truth in this, but at the same time not every product/service/feature is going to make it, and it's much easier and cheaper to fail early rather than fail after many years. Also sometimes what might be a success in the hands of one person won't be in the hands of another due to their skills.
Separating things that are going to fail and those that might make it is the whole problem, and it's not something to be underestimated.
“The bigger issue here is that - unlike tire manufacturing - the subsequent cycles of innovation are too short for a majority part of the workforce to keep up with changes. Why? First, because the complexity of those solutions creates a prohibitive cost for their employers to easily migrate on short notice and keep up with the cycle. Second, because the vast majority of new tech are just small optimizations in the real world with a limited impact on business making migration a risk and not an opportunity.”
It seems the worst thing that can happen to you is to work on a successful, stable product. Almost by definition you will become an outdated dinosaur. To keep up your own market value you constantly have to insert friction by jumping on new stuff that doesn’t really improve anything.
Definitely. Companies can always change focus, do something else. But I think you can't push an idea to work when it isn't good enough. Perhaps there is bleed across the two concepts.
I don't agree that the only way to make a company is to build something small and iterate. It's just one way, not better nor worse than other ways. Some companies have succeeded doing this, other have not. Which means that the point of the blog post is basically wrong. Don't "build something small and iterate", build the product that you have in mind that you think people will want - that might be big and need lots of functionality or it might be small with minimal functionality.
Just because plenty of companies have done this does not mean it isn't equally valid to build something with a broad set of functionality.
Survivor bias.
It's also painfully true that uncountable companies have built something small that got no bigger. Maybe they would have been better to build out their idea into something more full featured.
Creativity and persistence are great, but the time still needs to be channelled in a constructive way. Otherwise you end up with products no one wants or ruining something with new many scope creep and feature bloat.
There's also more opportunity to invent a whole field in business than there is in NBA basketball. Totally agreed.
Nonetheless, I think my point in the conclusion holds: if a company is not optimizing what you think they should be optimizing, you're more likely expecting the wrong goal than they are failing to optimize for the goal you expect.
There usually is something to be gained from rewriting something from scratch (wouldn't say always): better understanding of the problem domain, what works and what doesn't, etc. I can't help but think though, that if they had made a better choice in the beginning, they wouldn't have had to resort to that.
Beyond that, "fastest to market" doesn't appear to be the case for this particular company. They do surveys and social media analytics. Both of which have been done (many, many times) before. I don't mean to disparage the team or the product when I say this by the way, nothing wrong with trying to build a better mousetrap. It just doesn't appear (on the surface) to be particularly disruptive or groundbreaking.
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