Hi All,
I was just reading this article in the New York Times. I feel the need to rant about it:)
The summary of the article is basically...
''...the acceptance of innovative products is a random process. An innovator cannot predict in advance which products will be accepted and which not."
I think this is ridiculous.
At the end of the article:
"Henry Kressel, a partner at Warburg Pincus and a co-author of "Competing for the Future: How Digital Innovations Are Changing the World," says, "You throw technologies into the market and see what sticks."
See what sticks? What does he mean by "You"? Who is "You"? Is it he? His Friends & Family? The innovators? The hired-gun CEO? Venture capitalists hoping for a win to make up for the last 5 flops?
Statements such as these are tantamount to saying, "The innovators are just as clueless as we are about what will be accepted and what not."
This statement, in some ways, is offensive to countless individuals throughout history who had something good and knew it. Shawn Fanning, of Napster, is a good modern example. I doubt that he spent all those sleepless nights thinking, "Oh well, I hope users like this random idea that I have, which might have some virtue but has a random chance of being accepted. I am particularly worried about the chicken and egg problem, that it is only useful if many people are using it, but many people won't use it if it is not useful." Maybe I should revisit the recyclable toilet paper idea instead, since it does not require collective participation to be successful."
Sometimes innovators know in advance that they have a good idea. Those same innovators also know that some ideas are not as good as others and that the not-as-good one's might flop, but when a product is *really* good, I doubt that the innovator doesn't have a clue.
These books and articles imply that human behavior and desire is a mostly random mysterious phenomenon that is unpredictable.
The article also plays both sides of the fence. First it talks about how the Toyota Prius is successful despite its awkward controls, an example of a product having defects but still being successful. It mentions the AT&T Picture Phone of 1964 (for $90/month), a product having defects, and surprisingly, not being successful. These would be examples where the product was at the mercy of the great Mysteriousness of Human Behavior (MHB). But later in the article, it is written: "To be accepted, innovations must deliver benefits -- enough benefits to make change worthwhile." So now the author is saying that, if the benefits sufficiently outweigh the detriments, then it will be accepted.
So...then...is it a random process or is it not? Does overall merit have any bearing on success?
That's the problem with articles and books like these. They love to claim that acceptance of innovation is a mystery, that merit does not matter, but they are quick to point out, after the fact, why a product was successful. They will even go as far as to make comparisons between the successful product and others within its deployment context to show why the successful product was *destined* to succeed over the supplanet products, while simultaneously claiming that the innovator could not have made the judgements beforehand.
With any rejected innovation, even a feeble, half-hearted analysis will almost always reveal one or more reasons why it was rejected. The AT&T Picture Phone, for example, makes one wonder how cumbersome it was. I must have been a baby hippo in 1964. Any kind of CRT was relatively enormous back then. It was obviously expensive for what it offered. It probably had picture quality problems, given that quadrature techniques for modems were still in development. The installation was probably not trivial and required a specialist to come into your home and spend at least 30 minutes trying to convince you that it was not as poor of a product as it appeared to be. There are probably many more reasons, and these are only the ones I am guessing at.
People who claim that one cannot assess the merit of a product before it is deployed, and then claim, after deployment, that innovator did not actually know but "got lucky", are, IMO, simply excusing themselves for their lack of vision.
-Le Chaud Lapin-