Your customers may tell you they want your product now, but don’t listen to them. They want the product to be ready, that means solid, stable, secure enough for them to use it and if your customers are corporate, to provide themselves a competitive advantage, not put them into trouble.

If you release early, but your product is not usable, or has too many bugs, you are very vulnerable to a competitor doing better, and you may just have wasted a lot of time. Google is a very good example. Google was not the first search tool, yet they achieved what they are now by doing it right.

Another example: I don’t see any problem in the delay of Microsoft new file system WinFS. Something as important as a file system better be rock solid before you get it out, because a security vulnerability that would make some user loose their data would have terrible consequences. And as Robert Scoble always points out, it has to work hundreds of existing applications.

So many projects focus too much and too early on schedule, and instead of correctly working out the architecture, the design, they work out the schedule first. So the project starts on weak technical basis, gets quickly late (relatively to a ridiculous schedule, but anyway) and get cancelled.

A nice consequence is that you have many business opportunities where the ideas don’t need to be original, but that are just about doing it better than existing players (for example Oddpost that simply made a better webmail).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 15th, 2004 at 12:51 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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