Just Good Enough
Malcolm Gladwell has a new book out: “Outliers“. He’s the author of “The Tipping Point” and “Blink”, both very enjoyable and thought-provoking. The premise of this new book is that the folks we regard as exceptional at sport, or business, or some other endeavour, aren’t really any different from the rest of us, they were just in the right place at the right time, plus they had the opportunity to invest “10,000″ hours in learning a skill. Gladwell claims that it takes this amount of time to fully develop pretty much any skill, be it playing a sport or an instrument, or a business or technical ability.
Initially it’s an appealing and provocative thought that there isn’t really anything very special about Steve Jobs, Dame Kiri te Kanawa or Tiger Woods, but on the other hand those of us who work in a technology are actually already very used to this idea. Which products succeed? Is it the best? We’re all familiar with the story of how Bill Gates got started with MS DOS, and in the battle with DR DOS we know that the weaker product won. Windows versus OS-X? Betamax versus VHS? Blu-ray verus HD DVD? So right time, right place, right connections, and being just “good enough” is what it usually takes in the product world, and many good products don’t make it for want of a horse-shoe nail.
Can you beat the system though? Are there products which do succeed because they genuinely are exceptional? What IT product can you think of which succeeded simply by virtue of being so good, so superior to the alternatives, that nothing could stop it? Ruling out those products which succeeded because of a patent limitation on the competition I find it hard to come up with many so my list is pretty short: Google, Blackberry, Visio, Intel 8080 processor, Nokia Phones (first few generations anyway)
What’s on your list?
About the Author: Paul Moorhead is the Product Manager at Singularity.
Author : Paul O’Neill
Tags: products, Technology