209. Proclaiming Failure for Social Credit
tl;dr Most everything new to market fails, so predicting failure is a winning bet if looking for gains in social status or punditry credit. Bringing something to market are almost impossible odds.
Why are people so quick to proclaim failure for new products? It seems a dumb thing to ask. I mean knowledgable people look at a new product and think it doesn't cut it and will fail. Much more going on. Innovation is nearly impossible to deliver. Harder to predict/analyze. 1/
2/ Regardless of the era, predicting failure has always been easy, always been attention grabbing, and always kind of fun. Some say it's necessary simply to counter the marketing and power of the launch. Silly. A launch still has to battle the market. The market is really brutal.
3/ Predicting failure is a form of social credit, a way of elevating oneself above the company. It is in effect a power grab. It is also a form of grift. A con. These are harsh words but let me explain.
4/ One must start from the perspective of innovation. What is it we are talking about. There are two forces battling every innovation:
Risk: can something be made, will it function, can be measured
Uncertainty: questionable, undecided, defies measurement
5/ New products can be thought of in a 2x2 using these criteria. Any company of scale is made up of products/lines in all quadrants. Startups mostly have one product/tech in one quadrant. Most derivatives succeed by PMF momentum. Most new categories succeed by balance sheet.
6/ All the difficulty is in New Ventures / New Platforms. In any product development effort the goal is to remove as much of the quantifiable risk as possible while hopefully bringing new technologies that are uncertain to market.
7/ So incredibly difficult to bring high risk tech to market b/c even in best of circumstances, R&D costs, demand gen, debugging, schedules, NRE, and the measurable risks are enormously difficult to overcome. Then therre's still a big open question of uncertainty of technology.
8/ Even getting a new technology to launch is fraught with problems. Those problems manifest as tradeoffs, compromises, and postponed dreams. Anyone who has launched a product has a list a mile long of woulda, coulda, shoulda. Ask me about Windows 8…
9/ When a product does launch the group of people who jump to proclaim failure high-five themselves for identifying these obvious shortcomings. Everyone who worked on the product knows about them. But you launch anyway because nothing is perfect.
10/ The punditry is proud to have seen things no one else saw, or so they thought. Seriously, it took exactly no ergs to point out Vision Pro was pricey. More seriously, did anyone think Apple did not spend literally countless hours discussing, modeling, debating price?
11/ Then there are the missing features or the "high risk" features. When iPhone launched it was doomed because it did not have the defined/derivative features of copy/paste or 3G. Also doomed for the "new platform" of touch/type on glass. None were news to Apple.
12/ Like pricing, instant reactions to "missing" features is fodder for hot take failure predictions. When a Co isn't liked, viewed as powerful, complacent, doomed, etc. then misses are viewed as signs of incompetent leaders. When liked, these are brave risks. No one likes tech.
13/ Without getting all "man in the arena" here's the reality that every builder of products knows: nearly every new venture or new platform fails. The market is a brutal place. Even if everything aligns from a technology perspective, the other 3 P's of Marketing Mix can get you.
14/ In other words, predicting failure for a new technology, new platform, or product aimed at uncertain needs is trivially easy. If one makes predictions for a living then predicting a tech product will fail is as close to a sure bet as you can get.
15/ There are almost bonus points for predicting failure from a successful incumbent. Then there is the extra credit that comes from taking down the Big Co. Not surprising, success of organic/new ventures/platforms from BigCo tech are even smaller in number. Or an even surer bet.
16/ Successful predictions raise the social credit, esteem of the punditry class. It makes one look powerful to take down the big company (especially big tech). And when wrong, you just get to point out how big/powerful companies can muster forces for unfair advantage.
17/ Reverse is also true. Predicting success of a new product/platform is viewed as Pollyannaish or cheerleading. It is siding with the the forces of tech. Siding with big companies. But again, technologists have a secret.
18/ Nearly every technology scenario is right, but it is just a matter of timing. But you can never know if the timing is right until you try. Every new platform/new venture depends on a million pieces coming together just the right way and just the right time.
19/ Technologists are optimistic by nature b/c they have to be, otherwise they would never take any risk, try anything new, or recover from inevitable failures. Techno-optimism is a natural state of building simply because bringing things to markt is so failure prone.
20/ Another tech super power is knowing that every new venture/new platform is as much about integration as it is about invention. In other words, everything new arises significantly from a new amalgum of what has come before. This drives predictors/pundits crazy. "It's just a…"
21/ How could something that existed and failed before now show up and be new and succeed? It is a better bet, a winning bet, to say this time it will fail again. But like the engineers who knew that spanning bridges would work, they just kept trying different things.
22/ Engineers by their nature know most everything won't work. But the secret to an engineer's success is knowing "yes, that won't work…but I, and I uniquely, know how to make it work". If you get enough of those people together they can bring something new to market.
23/ Memories are super short in the prediction class. Today, it is like everyone has forgotten or never knew just how many things used every single day were doomed from the start. How what we will use tomorrow will be the result of essentially a miracle of product development.
24/ Predicting failure is easy. It's not worth 280 characters to make such a prediction and certainly not worth writing a whole opinion piece. If you want to do something difficult, then figure out what it takes for something to succeed. That's what the builders must do. //END
This originally appeared here.
Nailed it! The difference between reporting as a business (need regular product, shelf life is generally as long as it takes to read the product) versus thoughtful analysis.
I love the expression, "there was a time in the life of everything that works when it didn't work" - sums up the joys and tears of creating new things.
I think the Arena speech is very appropriate for what you describe!