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Interesting article - but I can't help but feel it's written with a big dose of 20:20 hindsight. Obviously Iridium didn't succeed and if you were doing it again
by tobtoh 16y ago
Interesting article - but I can't help but feel it's written with a big dose of 20:20 hindsight. Obviously Iridium didn't succeed and if you were doing it again and knew what you know now, you would do things very differently (as the article explains). However, back in 1990 when Iridium started, I think a lot of their decision were not necessary ignorant.
In 1990, Iridium probably did have a good solution to a problem in 1990. The article mentions that the waterfall model was a bad development model to follow - yes agree - but whilst 'agile' development concepts existed back to the 60s, it really only started becoming more mainstream in mid 1990s (the term 'agile programming' wasn't even used until 2001). So the waterfall model was probably a reasonable model to take back then.
"No Business Plan Survives First Contact With A Customer". Again in the age of release early, release often, this seems to make sense. But when your product is global satellite coverage, how do you break down your product into something that could be released early/often? I guess you could possibly launch one satellite and see if people would subscribe ... but like the Net, a one-node network would be of very limited value and reach.
I agree that the frozen business plan was the critical reason in their failure. Even a regular survey of potential customers would have shown that the price difference was too great for rapidly diminishing benefits.
But I don't agree that their initial solution was necessarily bad or that the waterfall model was inherently bad based on 1990s knowledge.
- edanm 16y agoI don't think he's criticizing them for not following agile methods, considering they didn't exist then. He is criticizing them for not changing their plans based on the developments going on around them. But mostly, he's just using Iridium as an example of what not to do, regardless of whether they could have known better or not.
- tobtoh 16y agoI think he is exactly criticising them for not following agile methods - it's the basis of his criticism for following the waterfall method. His criticizm for not changing their plans is pt 3 (which I agree with) And on your last point, using Iridium as an 'example' is like criticizing Middle Age 'surgeons' for not using antiseptic to ensure the success of their operations. You'd be right, but it's hardly a valuable observation nor provide much insight into how to avoid an equivalent situation today (where you are lacking knowledge/tools/technology).
- radu_floricica 16y agoYou'd be surprised what information was available vs what was actually being done. Lots of stuff we think are modern discoveries have been known for 2000 years.. yet not widely practiced for various reasons. I guess it boils down to what is lately being called "evidence-based medicine". Trial and error would have taken them really far, if they'd practice it properly. Which is something even now we're not doing to the fullest extent.
- metageek 16y ago>I guess you could possibly launch one satellite and see if people would subscribe For that, though, you'd need to put the satellite in geosync (nobody is going to subscribe to a phone service that's usable only every 100 minutes), which costs more to launch and requires the phones to have stronger transmitters. Thuraya uses geosync, but they started out as a regional carrier, so they could cover their region with one satellite. Iridium went with polar LEO--I suspect that was partly because their goal was global coverage. Without a polar orbit, you can't get coverage at the poles. Insert cynical laughter about the profitability of such coverage here.
- wazoox 16y ago> The article mentions that the waterfall model was a bad > development model to follow I'm pretty sure the waterfall model is the only game in town when you're developing satellite systems...