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> The success of many companies, and probably all of the unicorns, has nothing to do with technology. This is 100% true and unfortunately gets distorted from t

by mbesto 10y ago

> The success of many companies, and probably all of the unicorns, has nothing to do with technology. This is 100% true and unfortunately gets distorted from the financial backers who pump them up for unicorn status. Quite a dichotomy: "Software is eating the world!" "The hard thing isn’t setting up an organizational chart. The hard thing is getting people to communicate within the organization that you just designed."

0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
> The success of many companies, and probably all of the unicorns, has nothing to do with technology. So why not look at failure then?
- dragontamer 10y ago
  Its harder to learn from failures than to learn from successes. Success has the false-positive issue. Failures have the false-negative issue. Cargo-culting false-positives is going to be less harmful than cargo-culting false-negatives. (X Company didn't use stack-ranking and then failed. Clearly stack-ranking is bad for companies)
  - 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
    Maybe. Just to muddy things even more, some successes are failures. Have you ever met a billionaire who said, "I was lucky" and left it at that?
  - richie5um 10y ago
    Yeah. At least with a success you have a data point that it could be successful - with a failure, you don't even know that.
- michaelbuckbee 10y ago
  It's not the technology success/failure axis in question, but how much weight to give it relative to other factors. AKA in predicting overall success would a team with low tech expertise, but high sales expertise be have a better chance?
geofft 10y ago
Of course software is eating the world. Wheels ate the world. Fire ate the world. Written language ate the world. Plumbing ate the world. Electricity ate the world. Radio communications ate the world. Not every project or human endeavor that involved wheels, fire, written language, plumbing, electricity, or radio ate the world, but every project that did not involve them eventually got eaten, for the simple reason that you needed to keep up with technology as a minimum. But beyond that, projects succeed or fail for the same reason they always have: understanding the actual problem you're trying to solve. Uber's success is not due to software. Uber's success is due to its understanding of the transportation market and how to play the regulatory game to its advantage while never getting permanently in trouble. Uber's ability to deliver on the huge market opportunity they saw—i.e., its lack of failure—is due to software. We quite reasonably call this "success" when talking about technology, but if we're talking about companies succeeding or failing, that's not a discussion about technology.

by mbesto 10y ago

0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago

> The success of many companies, and probably all of the unicorns, has nothing to do with technology. So why not look at failure then?

dragontamer 10y ago
Its harder to learn from failures than to learn from successes. Success has the false-positive issue. Failures have the false-negative issue. Cargo-culting false-positives is going to be less harmful than cargo-culting false-negatives. (X Company didn't use stack-ranking and then failed. Clearly stack-ranking is bad for companies)
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
  Maybe. Just to muddy things even more, some successes are failures. Have you ever met a billionaire who said, "I was lucky" and left it at that?
- richie5um 10y ago
  Yeah. At least with a success you have a data point that it could be successful - with a failure, you don't even know that.
michaelbuckbee 10y ago
It's not the technology success/failure axis in question, but how much weight to give it relative to other factors. AKA in predicting overall success would a team with low tech expertise, but high sales expertise be have a better chance?

geofft 10y ago

Of course software is eating the world. Wheels ate the world. Fire ate the world. Written language ate the world. Plumbing ate the world. Electricity ate the world. Radio communications ate the world. Not every project or human endeavor that involved wheels, fire, written language, plumbing, electricity, or radio ate the world, but every project that did not involve them eventually got eaten, for the simple reason that you needed to keep up with technology as a minimum. But beyond that, projects succeed or fail for the same reason they always have: understanding the actual problem you're trying to solve. Uber's success is not due to software. Uber's success is due to its understanding of the transportation market and how to play the regulatory game to its advantage while never getting permanently in trouble. Uber's ability to deliver on the huge market opportunity they saw—i.e., its lack of failure—is due to software. We quite reasonably call this "success" when talking about technology, but if we're talking about companies succeeding or failing, that's not a discussion about technology.