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Aren't you simply reinforcing his point, though? There's a deep and fundamentally unsolvable conflict between the need to nurture the existing good versus throw
by krig 15y ago
Aren't you simply reinforcing his point, though? There's a deep and fundamentally unsolvable conflict between the need to nurture the existing good versus throwing it away for what may turn out to be a failure. That companies fail attempting risky projects is not an indictment of risk-taking: Taking risk is the only way to succeed in the long term. At the same time, risk is, well, risky.
Also, you cannot look at a single company in isolation. The barbarians at Borland may have been bearded and fearsome, but that didn't mean that there weren't any other barbarians around, hacking away at other companies at the same time. There's just no fool-proof path to success. There's plenty of fool-proof ways of failing, though, and to stop taking risks and attempting to innovate has to be one.
I don't think it's really all that useful to try to learn lessons from individual mistakes made by companies in the past. They made their mistakes because they attempted things they hadn't tried in the past. With hindsight, they probably shouldn't have. Hindsight is the one thing I can guarantee you'll never have access to before you set out on a project.
- mapgrep 15y agoHindsight won't fix old mistakes, but looking at the past helps avoid new ones. If there are lessons in the success of Borland and Facebook, surely there are lessons in their failures, too. Or maybe we disagree on that.
- krig 15y agoWell, I don't agree with you entirely at least. It is not at all evident to me that looking at the past helps avoid new mistakes. It might help avoiding the exact mistakes that were made before, but it is highly probable that the mistakes that, again, in hindsight, should have been avoided are not the same mistakes as those that others made before. In fact, I think there are plenty of examples throughout history of how it is the desire to avoid certain previous mistakes that directly lead to new mistakes being made. I do agree that the lessons to be learned can be found equally among previous failures as in successes. In the same way that I think it is problematic to focus on individual previous mistakes, I also think it is problematic to focus overly much on individual previous successes. Simply copying the strategies that worked for someone else won't lead to similar success, as hundreds of failed attempts at replicating the Apple iPad can attest to.