Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Tim Ottinger <tottinge@dave-world.net>]

Robert Dewar wrote:

> No you can't win with an inferior product, winning or success with
> products
> is how superiority is measured.

I think this is a sad statement. Is the ability to generate revenue the
only kind of superiority?

For a company banking on a product, that's the "most important thing",
granted.

It leads us to think that only market leaders are of value to us. By
this statement, we should never have left the Z80-CPU CP/M machines. One
time, the PC was just a new idea. Likewise the Mac. Once there was no
UNIX market, so we should have stayed with the mainframes.

It leads us to think that there is nothing valuable about products which
did not win market share because of poor packaging or marketing.  In
fact, it seems to "prove" that all research projects are inferior, and
therefore invalid, because they're not focused on generating revenue,
but on developing technically-superior solutions. But research is very
valuable. It leads to new generations of revenue-producing products.

Technical superiority and market dominance are clearly not the same
thing. They're not even clearly related.  No product has ever failed
because it was built well. Some have succeeded even though they weren't.

Blaming fitness-to-market problems on engineers is often also futile,
because most engineers receive their specifications from marketing
departments, and do not invent them for themselves. Also, engineers tend
not to participate in the success of their products in any way (other
than continuing to draw the same paycheck because the company doesn't go
under). They often have neither a say in the product direction, nor a
stake in the game, nor the opportunity to meet real users.

A business seems to me to have to provide a well-balanced compromise
between concerns. Inappropriate focus on one concern to the exclusion of
the other seems to be a bad idea. But not because the thing you focused
on was unimportant. Rather because you should have doneone, without
forsaking the other.

> [...]
> I saw an interview with one of the guys from the MIT Media lab a few
> yearsago, saying that he thought that HDTV was completely
> mis-directed. His question: "Ask someone on the street what is wrong
> with TV, they will not say 'lack of definition'". I always remember
> this, because I thought it was an excellent lesson in not focussing on
> technical excellence.

Also, Stephen Poplawski (the inventor of the first blender-like device)
was told that there was no market for his device because it didn't help
to capture the soda fountain market. He lost out on millions of
potential dollars when Fred Osius developed and marketed a similar
device with Fred Waring (the Waring Blendor).

Likewise, Elisha Grey was told by the telegraph company that employeed
him that there was no need in the world for voice communications. This
led to his not patenting the device for many months, and Alexander Bell
beating him to the punch.

People don't know what they want. They don't know what they need. Until
a product has hit the market, it's often impossible to tell if it's
really useful and good or not. And useful and good products fail all of
the time due to marketing and management. Superiority is no guarantor of
success, and neither is inferiority. There are too many variables.

After all, a weak, buggy, incomplete, and nearly unusable product I've
heard of is (in a marketing sense) superior to a clean, tight, useful,
complete, and comfortable product I've never heard of. At least by your
definition of marketing success being the definition of success.  This
seems a balancing act.

If superiority is created on full-page, glossy add pages in magazines,
we can all give up design, hack away, and quit testing code now.  ;-)

Tim