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.
It helps but not as much as you'd think. Lots of great/superior products have failed in the past. Waiting for your competition to fail is a great way to go out of business.
Great point, completely agree. It took me several years to understand that the quality of the technology is only a single component (often a very minor one) to making a successful product (let alone a successful company).
Many companies fail long before they even manage to create a product, never mind figure out how to produce it, distribute it, etc. There's a long list of reasons why, not many have to do with competition.
Agreed. While the "fail-fast/fail-often" method does work, that doesn't mean the older model of carefully planning and considering your market is bad or ineffective. I mean look at Apple. Every product they've got right now has had years of very careful thought given to industrial design, user-interface, and marketing. Apple doesn't release a product unless they're at least 90% certain it can capture the market.
It's the "only" part that keeps tripping me up. Very talented people come out with products that don't fit the market demand properly and therefore don't succeed. That isn't luck. I'm not saying that is the "only" reason for failure but just a quick hole in your logic here so there are probably many more.
Not that I disagree with anything said, but it is really easy to put your head down and build good products that eventually fail because no one knew about them. Just a thought.
New technologies expose new low hanging fruit. The act as what Taleb calls "half-invented" in AntiFragile, a working implementation applied to the wrong problem. The approach of "service first" or concierge or Wizard-of-Oz is still viable and widely used. I agree it does not work for all product types, but it's still a very useful way to defer a lot of implementation expense but still determine product desirability.
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.
I would expect that running a product based company and running a service based company are two different things, where one can be good at one but sucks at the other.
I've been following the Masimo situation and their case seems pretty strong (though IANAL).
But in many cases the "product" is actually just a feature, not enough to sustain a whole company. And I say this by having made that very mistake myself years ago, and having learned from it.
There is what the future could be, what tomorrow will be, and what today is.
Sometimes building a product is about building the future, but not every product is about that. If you don't have the resources to see it through to the future where what you envision is the default, you will fail.
Think about Netflix. Streaming video on the internet is a 20 year old idea right? They had to start with delivering dvd's in the mail, which is kind of an analog version of streaming in some ways right? Similar idea, but also fundamentally different delivery mechanism. Even if their goal was streaming movies directly to houses, that's not what they built first.
If you can see the problems of today, a way to fix it tomorrow, and maybe what that evolves into in 5, 10, 20 years... awesome. But if you just see a good idea that will take 5, 10, 20 years to be viable... run away unless you have billions of dollars you want to light on fire(like Microsoft on tablets, web tv, home automation, etc...)
This is all worth reading, fine and good, but one thing people have difficulty with is risk, what that means at scale, and other strategic considerations.
If 8/10 new companies fail, it should be expected that most new product initiatives fail as well, at least at some phase of the cycle. What's hard to fathom is that for a massive company, the risks can entail quite a bit of spending.
Some things have strategic importance even if few customers are using the service/feature such as having a comparable feature set to competitors (because the customers always ask about that even if they never use the feature, it 'needs' to exist. Sometimes to keep things cooking against an alternative substitute as perennial leverage (like building out natural gas infrastructure in case the Russians decide to cut you off!).
Often things are done because just one, specific 'big' customer asks for it, or there is a regulatory concern. I've worked on projects that existed so there would be no appearance of malfeasance.
Often projects are basically 'know-how R&D' that may or may not pan out. Apple did a couple of iterations with cars and shut them down. Now apparently it's back up ... but could get shut down again.
And finally, though some might argue otherwise, sometimes people are 'doing stuff' because a company will not justify a paycheck for sitting around, and management doesn't want to layoff because it's just socially difficult and / or they want to keep resources. Often we feel that corporations are evil about layoffs and productivity, I feel it's a bit the other way - if we truly wanted to we could cut pretty hard without affecting productivity. Most people, even execs, don't really want to do layoffs, they will avoid it if they can.
To say being good enough doesn't enter is it just being ignorant of the facts. There's nothing lucky about spending years working hard building a product, finding users, building a team, dealing with problems.
> "while the perfect product when nobody is buying will languish in obscurity"
That's not "unlucky" at all. That's not researching the market properly.
I can see two sides to this...
1. Product /Market Fit.
2. Technolgoy hurdles.
If a product is just to visionary, it wont' get that crucial Product / Market fit. Users just aren't educated or understand whats how to get the full value from the product.
Secondly, a lot of technology hurdles as you mentioned in your article just take time to solve or at least make them cheaper to solve.
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.
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