[Sigia-l] First to market vs. Right to market

[Chad Fennell]

I am reminded of this Spolsky classic:


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"Fire And Motion"

"I remembered this for a long time. I noticed how almost every kind of
military strategy, from air force dogfights to large scale naval
maneuvers, is based on the idea of Fire and Motion. It took me another
fifteen years to realize that the principle of Fire and Motion is how
you get things done in life. You have to move forward a little bit,
every day. It doesn't matter if your code is lame and buggy and nobody
wants it. If you are moving forward, writing code and fixing bugs
constantly, time is on your side. Watch out when your competition
fires at you. Do they just want to force you to keep busy reacting to
their volleys, so you can't move forward?"

-Joel Spolsky

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html

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Cheers,
-Chad
On 12/20/05, Trenouth, John <John.Trenouth at cardinal.com> wrote:
> I remember posting a question here some months ago about whether its
> better to be first to market, or getting the right product to market.
>
> Ari Paparo who back in 1999 started a social web-based bookmarking tool
> (like del.icio.us) called blink.com, blogs about the failure of getting
> to market first but not right.
>
> http://www.aripaparo.com/archive/001456.html
>
> "We had more money, more users, a five year head start, and some really,
> really smart people working on bookmarking in 1999. The bottom line is
> that we simply didn't get it right."
>
> The point of the article isn't in any particular tactical failing
> (folders suck, folksonomies rule, they had too much money, etc...).
> This point is that they just plain didn't get it right.
>
> This also relates to my previous question of research vs. just-do-it.
> Blink just did it.  And that first stake they put in the ground framed
> the design problem/solution in such a way as to calcify the company's
> thinking preventing it from recognizing simple ideas that would later
> help del.icio.us get bought by Yahoo.
>
> I suspect prudent fuzzy-front-end design research would have helped
> avoid such myopia (my damn bias rears its ugly head again). Perhaps
> that's what Paparo meant when he said "I believe [our failure] all came
> down to product design."
>
> Merry Christmas everyone.
>
> -- john
>
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